For Lutherans, the question is what do you do?

What precautions should my church take?

1. Buy large supplies of hand sanitizer and disinfectant wipes. Masks too if you feel like it, but masks are not as essential as disinfectant materials.

2. Establish a single, controlled point of entry to your church which you can use to force congregants to wash their hands and check for disease symptoms.

3. Strongly discourage people with any sickness in their household from coming to church; the pastor or deacons can make a house call later.

4. Eliminate non-essential activities at your church like social groups. Consider suspending church schools or peripheral activities.

5. Communion is your highest-infection-risk element of the service. Avoid passing a communion plate, intinction, or a common cup. The safest way to take communion is in individual cups and pieces of bread, in small groups, at the altar.

6. Other personal-touch service elements like peace-passing, offering, or attendance books should also be restructured or suspended.

7. Put more space between chairs or encourage bigger seating gaps in pews.

8. However, informal interpersonal contact at church and church fellowship time does not need to be cancelled, provided a few basic precautions are taken, like limiting food to individually-packaged snacks.

9. It is especially important for church workers to wash their hands fanatically, wear masks, and maintain good personal hygiene.

For New Calvinists, the question is what this disease means for your walk with God:

Why should Christians be concerned about the coronavirus?

There are several reasons Christians should be concerned about the coronavirus, and for those who are suffering from the disease. But the primary reason, as the apostle Paul tells us, is that we should “weep with those who weep” (Rom. 12:15) and that we “comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God” (2 Cor. 1:4).

As a pastor of a church in Wuhan recently said in an open letter to fellow believers, “If you do not feel a responsibility to pray, ask the Lord for a loving soul, an earnestly prayerful heart; if you are not crying, ask the Lord for tears. Because we surely know that only through the hope of the Lord’s mercy will Wuhan be saved.”

Neither set of advice is wrong. But if you want an index to the way that confessional Protestants and pietists think about life in this world — especially about economics and politics — this is a good measure. Notice too the importance of the church and public worship to the Lutheran outlook. Just saying.