Centralia church offering ‘drive-up’ worship

CENTRALIA, Mo. (KMIZ)

The First Baptist Church in Centralia will hold its second 'drive-up' worship service on Sunday despite the 'Stay Home Missouri' order.

The church's pastor Chris Baker says the church is doing what it can to make it work.

"You know, it's it's vital for us to be together as a church you know, the word we get "church" from for our English language in Greek means assembly," Baker said. "We're going to abide by what the government tells us to do, you know, especially here in the short-term where, you know, we do know there's going to be an end in sight to this thing."

In the first point of Missouri Governor Mike Parson's 'Stay Home Missouri' order, it mentions people may leave their homes for worship.

Baker says this Sunday's service will be broadcasted over a radio station which people may listen to in their cars in the surrounding parking lots. He said last Sunday they had around 50 cars in attendance.

"We emphasize two things when we were announcing this to people -- one, please stay in your car, do everything you can to stay in your car -- two, we don't have anything in our building open," Baker said. "We're not handing anything out, we're trying to do everything that we can to stop the spread of this thing."

Baker said he has been in communication with the Columbia/Boone County Health Department and the city administrator who he said both encouraged the innovative worship methods.

We reached out to the Columbia/Boone County Health Department and the city administrator for a statement but have yet to hear back.

"We're between a rock and a hard place a little bit. As a church, we want to honor our local government. Romans 13 tells us to submit to our authorities goddess but those authorities in place to, to keep us safe and to administer laws like this we want to honor that," Baker said. "At the same time, in Hebrews were told not to forsake gathering together and so we want to balance those two things and we're not you know forsaking gathering forever."

Baker said the church also plans to keep staff under 10 and six feet apart.

"It's a particularly lonely time for some, especially for some of our older folks that live alone, you know, anything that we can do to get them an opportunity just to feel normal in a time that's not and still keep them safe," Baker said.

Stay with ABC 17 News for more information on this developing story as it breaks.