COVID-19 Updates
With hospitality, compassion, and data centered planning APC, is moving at the speed of trust with our re-entry to each other.
Click here for APC’s latest COVID protocols and how we are keeping each other as safe as possible during our Sunday morning, 11am indoor worship.
To help facilitate this process and provide resource and depth to the transition, APC’s Transition Team pulled from trauma informed practices, National Capital Presbytery, congregational experiences et large, and available science and recommendations.
APC’s Transition Team took these factors into consideration in this re-entry plan:
Our faith: We trust in God. We trust in the ways Jesus fed, healed, and raised the dead. We trust those ways are in us now and will be alive in this transition. We trust in the power of the Holy Spirit. We trust the Biblical stories will be a roadmap for us in the days ahead, just as they’ve been throughout the life of APC.
Our Garden: What a gift! We can gently be welcomed back to each other by the fresh air, trees, leaves, grass, flowers, bugs, and random chairs.
Trauma: The simple definition of trauma is a deeply disturbing or disruptive experience. The pandemic has taken on many levels of trauma from individual, family, to the collective. We need to assume that each one of us has experienced some level of trauma during the past 18 months.
Isolation: We’ve all been used to being isolated from each other for the past 18 months. The amount of energy it will take to be back in the world will feel different, even if we are around people we already know and are happy to see.
Parenting: Throughout the pandemic, parents have juggled work, parenting, and virtual schooling all while watching our kids navigate multiple loses. As parents, we’ve had no control over those loses. Parenting in the pandemic has been brutal.
#blacklivesmatter and January 6th: Throughout the pandemic, we experienced the aftershocks of the murder of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and many other Black people by police violence. Daily, we also lived with the failed, reckless leadership of the previous White House Administration. We had already been living with all this trauma by the time January 6th occurred. January 6th was another awakening of the trauma we’d been living under.
Trauma Informed Care: To aid us in our healing of this trauma, we’ve considered trauma informed principles in our transition back.
- Ensuring physical and emotional safety: APC is a welcoming space that allows us to show up with our full selves.
- Choice: Expectations and responsibilities are made clear.
- Collaboration: Various levels of communal and individual participation in the re-entry have been offered in the planning of the transition back.
- Trustworthiness: Boundaries are explained and maintained.
- Empowerment: People feel validated and affirmed with whatever they are bringing with them to this beginning of APC.
- Community: This transition isn’t just about the members of APC. Our community has expanded in the past 18 months to include Gilliam Place and South Arlington. How does APC re-create itself in this transition moment? How do we welcome each other back and those in Gilliam Place and beyond?
Liturgy: We welcome each other back through the transformational power of our ancient liturgy. We will use the boundaries and structure of our liturgy to create a welcoming and safe-as-possible environment. Our liturgy will hold and carry us through this time.
With hospitality, compassion, and data centered planning APC, is moving at the speed of trust with our re-entry to each other.
To help facilitate this process and provide resource and depth to the transition, APC’s Transition Team pulled from trauma informed practices, National Capital Presbytery, congregational experiences et large, and available science and recommendations.
Click here for APC’s latest COVID protocols and how we are keeping each other as safe as possible during our Sunday morning, 11am indoor worship.
We have this fun video that playfully explains our transition back:
For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me. I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.’ ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.’
-Matthew 25