Healthy Faith and the Coronavirus Crisis

By Andy Bannister, NT Wright, Krish Kandiah and 16 more

COVID-19 has transformed our everyday lives. It’s as if another world has arrived in the blink of an eye. Yet life is not on pause. We still need to live. The pandemic, like any other time, is a moment both of opportunity as well as challenge.

Healthy Faith in the Coronavirus Crisis is a briefing on how to thrive in a world of restrictions. Twenty leading Christian thinkers have come together to help you begin to navigate this strange reality.

Each contributor writes on their area of expertise, and topics covered include prayer, loneliness, work, singleness, marriage, parenting, grief, death, imagination, conversations, humour, and much more. They offer practical advice as well as helpful perspective from Scripture.

This is an essential resource for anyone looking to cultivate a healthy faith which infuses all areas of life during this disorienting time.

Early Reviews

This really is an excellent book... informative and useful, and I would not hesitate to recommend it widely to believers and unbelievers alike. - Eddie Arthur, Kouyanet

“Healthy Faith is essential reading for any Christian.” - Terry Wright, Spurgeon’s College

“beautiful and arresting” - Johan De Young, Before Leaving Earth blog, Oak Hill student

CONTENTS

Section One: (re)orientation
1. Orienting to the New Reality (Luke Cawley)
2. Homecoming: The Art of Being Human (Kristi Mair)

Section Two: fragile life
1. Viruses and God’s Good Creation: How Do They Fit? (Paul Copan)
2. The Art of Dying Well: Reflections of a Christian Medic (John Wyatt)
3. Dancing with Uncertainty: Lessons from the Persecuted Church (Eddie Lyle)
4. Grief and Comfort: Understanding and Responding to the Experience of Loss (Richard Winter)
5. Navigating Loneliness: Why It Hurts and How We Can Respond (Ed Shaw)
6. Healthy Fear: Keeping Calm and Considering Christ (Dan Strange)

Section Three: connected life
1. Stable Disruptions: Furlough, Unemployment, Front Line, and Our Constant Call (Ed Creedy)
2. Working in God’s World: A Time for Recalibration (Cal Bailey)
3. Connected Singleness: Distance Without Isolation (Kate Wharton)
4. The Shape of Marriage: Scriptural Principles (Dianne & Derek Tidball)
5. Communicating With Your Other Half: Tips from the Marriage Coaches (Julie & Keith Johnson)
6. Parenting: The Opportunities of Being Trapped With Your Kids (Rachel Turner)

Section Four: growing life
1. Church, Crisis and Creativity: A Chance for Revitalization (Krish Kandiah)
2. Prayer in Confinement: Postures and Practices for a Flourishing Faith (Jill Weber)
3. Encountering Scripture: Turning to the Psalms in Times of Trial (Matt Searles)
4. Viral Conversations: Extending the Hope of Jesus to Friends (Andy Bannister)
5. The Liberated Imagination: Realities Beyond Restrictions (Mark Meynell)
6. Infectious Laughter: Humour in an Age of Tragedy (Andy Kind)

Afterword
God With Us: A Paradigm for Life During the Pandemic (Tom Wright)

Appendices
1. A Psalm in the Epidemic: Trust Triumphs Over Fear (Pablo Martinez)
2. How Hope & Patience Embrace Each Other: A Reflection (Pablo Martinez)
3. Advice for Carers & Relatives: Practical, Medical, & Pastoral issues (John Wyatt)
4. Current legal framework for end-of-life decisions (John Wyatt)
5. Sample Statement of Wishes and Values for a Christian Believer (John Wyatt)
6. Safeguarding tips for churches (Thirtyone:Eight)
7. Guidance for working and communication safely online (Thirtyone:Eight)
8. Ten Tips for Working From Home (Luke Cawley)

• Language: English
• Publisher: IVP
• Release date: May 5, 2020
• ISBN: 9781789742596

Andy Bannister

Dr Andy Bannister is the Canadian Director of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries. Andy speaks frequently across Canada, America and Europe to audiences of all faiths and none, in settings ranging from universities to business forums and churches. Before joining RZIM, he had a background in youthwork before moving into academia for a few years, where he gained a PhD in Qur'anic Studies.

Book preview

Section One: (re)orientiation

1

Orienting ourselves to the new reality

Luke Cawley

Luke Cawley is the Director of Chrysolis, an organization that encourages and facilitates engagement with Jesus through public events which draw in people who normally wouldn’t consider him an option for their lives. Luke is the author of two books: Campus Lights: Students Living and Speaking for Jesus Around the World (Muddy Pearl, 2019) and The Myth of the Non-Christian: Engaging Atheists, Nominal Christians and the Spiritual But Not Religious (IVP USA, 2016).

We awoke and found ourselves in a different world. No touching, no standing within two metres, everyone around us with their faces suddenly covered. At the supermarket, some wore surgical masks, emanating the air of off-duty anaesthetists who’d neglected to remove their work clothes, while others simply repurposed old scarves and bandanas into makeshift air filters. The bold – or, some might say, the reckless – were glimpsed with naked lips and chins, as if nothing had changed.

The rest of us took an extra step away. We knew that things had changed. Life now had the faint ambience of a zombie film. We were first asked, then ordered, to remain home, to seal ourselves off from the contagion outside, only leaving for occasional forays into the empty streets to raid the stores for whatever food we could find.

It had come, of all places, from a bat. At least, that’s the best explanation we currently have. Furry-winged mammals had likely entered the human food chain, perhaps after being eaten by pangolins – scaly nocturnal beasts, similar in size to domestic cats, famously capable of tucking themselves into armoured spheres when under threat. Maybe the bat or pangolin ended up at an open market. Nobody can yet say for sure.

But, however it began, the virus passed first from animal to human. Then it leapt between people. Rapidly. Few, if any, of us have any natural immunity and it spread with little resistance – like a fire ripping through a dried-out forest. The number of infections grew speedily out of hand and deaths mounted fast.

At first the fired raged in lands which, for most of the world, were distant and ignorable. We felt for them and watched their tragedy unfold on television and the internet. But that was there and we were here. Let’s pray for them and then carry on as normal. If we didn’t have friends or family in those places, then it hardly played on our minds.

Silently, though, it padded its way towards us. Isolated cases in nearby nations. One or two in our own. But rising so rapidly. Multiplication rather than addition. Places we’d visited on city breaks became engulfed and we found ourselves staring at line graphs more than at any moment since GCSE Mathematics. ‘Exponential’ became part of the media’s daily vocabulary. Very swiftly the whole situation migrated from the World News section into a local event of which we were now a part.

I was out of town, in Transylvania, when my wife, Whitney, phoned me to tell me that my children’s school, along with all others nationwide, was about to close for at least a few weeks. Our little team was speaking at a series of events in the university’s science and art faculties. Our four previous visits had seen rooms packed with students vigorously engaging with the big questions of life. Now the lecture halls, like the hallways around, were sparsely occupied and the atmosphere was nervous and edgy.

One student, with whom I normally grab a coffee every time I’m in town, cancelled on me, citing fear of infection. It was a novel sensation to be deemed a health threat. We had all become dangerous. I could give a lethal illness to another person without even knowing I had it. Or someone could fell me simply by breathing too close. Safety meant avoidance.

The nation’s universities were closed the next day. We headed home, our events week cancelled, along with most of our activities for the next few weeks. Within days things had spiralled further. Restaurants, cafes, bars, bookshops and many parks were closed. Public spaces shrank and disappeared until all we had left were grocery stores and pharmacies.

Statistically, my odds of surviving the pandemic are good. Whitney and I are youngish and relatively healthy. But our mental list grew of those in heightened danger. Friends, yes, but also my parents – my dad being over seventy and my mother having a rare blood cancer. They were advised not even to go shopping other than online. Then my grandparents in their nineties, and my seven-year-old son with his asthmatic tendencies. Our awareness of their mortality ballooned.

Alongside this were all the people in our lives who couldn’t cocoon themselves away: doctors, pharmacists and nurses; shopworkers and couriers. We found them constantly on our minds and discussed their well-being. Then we heard of people in our circles falling ill: a contributor to this book; a long-time ministry connection of Whitney. It moved closer still. Before long, our nightly prayers had swelled to encompass a whole range of new people.

Everything had changed. Life looked like this now and there was nothing we could do to change it. Perhaps the lockdown will soon be relaxed. Maybe treatments, first therapeutic then vaccinal, will emerge from a laboratory somewhere. But this weird new world seems set to endure in some form for many months, maybe even for a year or more.

Strangely ordinary

Familiarity accompanied the newness. Yes, things had taken an odd turn, but much of our time was consumed with the same old tasks. Friendship, work or (even sudden) unemployment, eating, maybe parenting, marriage or singleness, checking in on parents, indulging in entertainment, trying to stay mentally and physically healthy, perhaps praying or reading Scripture, laughing, crying, thinking, talking, dreaming and so on down a very long list. It was the regular play being performed on a disorienting new stage.

Even the threats we face now are hardly novel. More people are dying – that is unarguable – and both we and our susceptible loved ones now have an increased probability of expiring soon. But death wasn’t first introduced to Europe in January 2020. It’s not some exotic import previously only available from speciality retailers. Nor did the tight interconnectedness of the human race become a reality only once everyone morphed into a potential carrier of a deadly pathogen.

The truth is that we’ve always been fragile. The health and well-being of those around us has always been in our interest as well as theirs. That’s not to say things are not stranger these days. More tragic, even. What we are experiencing may be the ordinary human condition. But our awareness of its more distressing aspects has been intensified. We feel the reality of death; we question the sustainability of our society and of all our safety nets, economic or relational.

Our current situation reminds me of the time I first moved overseas. Someone picked me up from the airport and dropped me off at what would be my accommodation for the next eighteen months. Then they walked me round to the local minimarket to buy supplies for breakfast the next morning. Hardly advanced astrophysics – I’d been spending money on edibles for as long as I could remember, gripping a coin tightly in my hand as I picked out a chocolate bar from the local corner shop. But when I walked into this Bucharest shop, I noticed that all the food was behind the counter. Items needed to be named before they could be purchased. But I didn’t yet know how to say anything other than ‘hello’ and ‘thank you’, so only an extended mime, full of pointing, enabled me to obtain the desired objects.

When I got back to the flat I closed my bedroom door, sat on the edge of my bed and felt hot tears pour down my cheeks. Miming to storekeepers would be a hilarious anecdote during a brief foreign holiday. Unfortunately, I wasn’t a tourist. This was where I now lived, and I couldn’t even do something as mundane as say, ‘Milk, please.’ Jumping cultures hadn’t eliminated the ordinary stuff of life. It had only made it harder.

The arrival of COVID-19 has done the same thing. It’s transported us all to a new culture and we didn’t even need to leave our houses. Like me crying over my ignorance of the Romanian word for ‘milk’ (it’s lapte, by the way), we know we are stuck here for a while and are now wondering how to navigate our way through it all. We urgently need some cultural orientation. Amid all the drama and mundanity, we still have to ‘get busy living’.[1]

The myth of normality

In this strange new setting, there are unnoticed dangers. One of them was highlighted to me the weekend before the lockdown when I found myself chatting to a friend I hadn’t seen for a while. When I asked him how he was doing, he explained to me that his and his wife’s health issues kept disrupting the flow of their lives. She would soon, again, have surgery on a troublesome shoulder, and they hoped that this time it would resolve the problem. Then he added something that trailed me around during the weeks afterwards.

‘What I find myself having to resist,’ he said, ‘is the myth of normality. It’s so hard to shake the idea that there’s this kind of steady, calm norm, and that all I have to do is wait for things to return to that.’

Over the next few weeks, as we all had our ‘normal’ shattered, I found myself confronted with just how tightly the tendrils of this myth are wrapped around mine and others’ imaginations. Online I read repeated posts describing life as being ‘on pause’. Several people, when we entered daylight saving time in March, joked about whether we could just ‘put the clocks ahead to November’ instead, and jump past this messy, disruptive time.

We were longing to become like Michael Newman, the main character in the Adam Sandler film Click, who is gifted an enchanted remote control that enables him to fast-forward through the mundane, painful or unwanted scenes of his life.[2] He begins by jumping small moments like marital arguments. Then he speeds through a financially constrained period until he is offered that big promotion at work. Soon he’s skipping everything, from his children’s moody teenage years to an awkward period in his architectural career. In the end, he finds he’s missed out on most of his life. As he lies on his deathbed, Morty – the mysterious figure who first gifted him the magical device – tells him, ‘You were fast-forwarding through your life long before you ever met me.’

Like most people, I am fairly loath to draw my guiding principles from the works of Adam Sandler. Yet Click does vividly highlight the danger that we can spend our whole existence waiting for an idealized version of life rather than attending to the one we are actually given. It’s a risk that only increases during the current pandemic. As the daily news becomes increasingly horrific, we all find ourselves falling back on the myth of normality and wishing these days away.

Henri Nouwen, the theologian and writer, famously recalled a conversation he had on the campus of the University of Notre Dame, where he had once taught. He wrote:

I met an older experienced professor who had spent most of his life there. And while we strolled over the beautiful campus, he said with a certain melancholy in his voice, ‘You know … my whole life I have been complaining that my work was constantly interrupted, until I discovered that my interruptions were my work.’ [3]

It’s a timely insight. Not only are the interruptions our work; they are our life. These, and not any others, are the times and situations we must navigate. We may well feel as though we are in what the Superman comics call ‘Bizarro World’ – a planet where all commonplace things have been rewritten in a joltingly peculiar fashion – yet the solution is not to wish it away or to treat the pandemic (or its effects) as a distraction from the real business of life. We may grieve it, as Richard Winter discusses in chapter 6, and we will certainly hope that aspects of the situation are temporary in duration and minimal in terms of personal loss, but let’s not treat as it anything than other than part of our brief storylines.

Painfully beautiful

Even as I was writing the last line of the previous paragraph there was a knock at the door of the room where I was working at my desk. My two boys, William and Jackson, aged seven and ten respectively, were standing outside with tears in their eyes and wanted to talk about their great-grandmother, whose health has been wobbly in recent days.

We sat and spoke together for a while about death, healing and hope, as well as our memories of visiting her and my grandfather, and how the boys and their sister, Amélie, had played in the grounds of the care home while the adults sat and watched them from around a nearby table. We recalled my grandfather sitting and listening to them expound on each football card in their album, before sending them home with some Cadbury chocolate to enjoy.

Despite the dark nature of the conversation, which revolved around the possible passing of a loved one and a detailed discussion of what it means to ‘die well’, it was not horror or dreadfulness that most fuelled our sadness. Instead, it was beauty. My grandmother is someone we love and regard as wonderful. She’s also a living witness to almost a century of family history. We cried because something sorrowful might happen. But that potential event is itself only painful because it endangers a valued person.

I’m sure it’s the same for you. Any pain you have in your current situation is, at root, a result of someone (or something) beautiful being threatened or taken. If we were surrounded only by ugliness, then we would experience little distress at its passing. But instead we find ourselves sitting among wonders. Fragile, breakable things, certainly, but nevertheless dazzling and wonderful.

C. S. Lewis’ final novel, Till We Have Faces, which reimagines an ancient myth, deals compellingly with the question of beauty. The story is told from the perspective of Orual, one of two daughters of the King of Glome, whose sister Psyche becomes exiled and is presumed dead. Orual undertakes a dangerous quest and finally locates Psyche, who tells her that all is well and that she is now married and enjoys a wonderful life in a beautiful castle in the mountains, albeit one that is invisible to Orual’s eyes. Orual, believing her sister to be delusional or deceived, unsuccessfully attempts to prise Psyche away from her new husband and bring her home. One misty twilight, as the sun fades, though, sceptical Orual has the most fleeting of visions:

I lifted my head and looked once more into the mist across the water, I saw that which brought my heart into my throat. There stood the palace, grey – as all things were grey in that hour and place – but solid and motionless, wall within wall, pillar and arch and architrave, acres of it, a labyrinthine beauty. As she had said, it was like no house ever seen in our land or age. Pinnacles and buttresses leaped up – no memories of mine, you would think, could help me to imagine them – unbelievably tall and slender, pointed and prickly as if stone were shooting out into branch and flower.[4]

She had seen the castle. And so have we. Today we are all Orual: our losses, potential and actual, bring into focus the beauty that surrounds us. We come to appreciate more than ever the wonder inherent in simple things like friendship, walks in the park, holidays, hugging or even just going to the pub. We have caught a glimpse of the castle that was always there but which, for whatever reason – perhaps simply the busyness of life – is usually hidden from our eyes.

We have two paths we can take in response to this vision. One is to drink in a sense of life’s glory – to become a more grateful and appreciative person, moaning less and enjoying more. Never again, we tell ourselves, will we take anything for granted. Hopefully, all of us take that choice, at least in as much as we can ever consistently do so.

But the second path, while including all the elements of heightened gratitude included in the first, is to use this moment as an opportunity to explore even greater questions. Psyche, long before she finds her way to the castle, tells Orual that ‘the sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing – to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from’.[5] We can, if we are willing, use this moment to explore the question not simply of whether the world is full of pinpricks of light, but also of whether they are not hints of something greater.

C. S. Lewis compares this possibility to his experience of working in a ‘dark toolshed’ on a sunny day. A solitary sunbeam pierced the gloom and illuminated the dust in its path. Lewis writes that in that moment, ‘I was seeing the beam, not seeing things by it.’ But then, as he repositioned himself, ‘the beam fell on my eyes’, and the image before his eyes transformed. He writes:

I saw no toolshed, and (above all) no beam. Instead I saw, framed in the irregular cranny at the top of the door, green leaves moving on the branches of a tree outside and beyond that, 90 odd million miles away, the sun. Looking along the beam, and looking at the beam are very different experiences.[6]

Perhaps the COVID-19 crisis, while painful and unwelcome, is also a moment for you to look ‘along the beam’ and to ‘find the place where all the beauty came from’. One of my favourite writers, Tomáš Halík, says of God that ‘He is not unknown because He is too far away, but because He is too close’.[7] Halík comments that we often assume God would only show himself to us in the spectacular or unusual. But what if he is constantly at work in and around us? What if, as the New Testament tells us, he is ‘not far from any one of us’ – so close, in fact, that we could say that ‘in him we live and move and have our being’ (Acts 17:27–28)? What if he is the source of all beauty, all goodness, and each time you sense how much you value something (or fear its loss) – whether in this crisis or other times – you are catching a reflected glimpse of God? Multiple beams of light breaking into the ‘dark toolshed’ of your current situation and inviting you to incline your gaze towards the source.

Along the beam

Perhaps, as we do look ‘along the beam’, we can allow the story of Jesus to guide us. In some ways Jesus is one of those ‘too close’ things of which Halík writes. He’s so familiar a name for most of us – the statue in the local parish church, the drawing in the Religious Education textbook, the vacant-eyed actor in the cheesy Eastertime film – that we easily dismiss his potential relevance.

Yet his central claim, that ‘anyone who has seen me has seen [God] the Father’, remains intriguing (John 14:9). The affirmation here is not that we must go on a quest to ‘find the place where all the beauty came from’, but rather that the source of all beauty – God himself – has come to us in the life of a figure in human history. Beauty has found us.

It’s a very concrete idea. John, a close personal friend of Jesus, begins his famous letter on the art of life with God by describing Jesus as someone ‘we have heard … we have seen with our eyes … we have looked at and our hands have touched’ (1 John 1:1). It’s a tale of physical encounter in a very earthy, relatable setting. Open the stories of Jesus in the New Testament, in fact, and you’ll keep bumping up against tales of horrendous illness, unwanted confinements, untrustworthy governments, corrupt religious leaders, economic exploitation and interpersonal betrayal. The source of all beauty has come to us, to our fragile and broken reality, and met us here.

And this is still where he meets us. In the midst of a global pandemic, as all the wonderful things around us reveal their fragility, he remains as available to us now as he was to those who first encountered him. Many readers of this book will, like me, already be persuaded by the claims of Jesus. Not in a fanatical way – true faith in God is on a trajectory towards resilient confidence, not blinkered certainty – but still convinced. We followers of Jesus can, as much as anyone else, take this moment as an opportunity to recalibrate, maybe to use it to reconsider some of the ruts we’ve entered into over recent years. John Wimber used to say that ‘the way in is the way on’, meaning that how we begin a connection with God is the same way we renew it – through returning to Jesus, and in him finding God.[8]

The means of connection with God, though available to us in Jesus, always comes to us as a gift. Jesus consistently describes himself as achieving reconciliation with God on our behalf. He said that he was going to give his life ‘as a ransom for many’, a ransom being money paid for the release of a slave (Mark 10:45). Elsewhere he told his followers to drink bread and wine in memory of his ‘body given for you’ and his ‘blood, which is poured out for you’ (Luke 22:19–20). In all these phrases, the key idea is that his life and death are ‘for’ others.

This is unlike any other love. Consider the song ‘Broken’, by lovelytheband, as an example.[9] It tells of two people drawn to one another after meeting at a party. Through it runs a catchy chorus affirming that it is a recognition of mutual brokenness that draws them to one another. Lead vocalist Mitchy Collins told an interviewer, ‘It’s about finding someone whose problems complement yours. Perfectly imperfect. Everyone is a little broken inside, trying to find their band aid.’ [10]

The death of Jesus shows us something quite different. He was not just another fragile thing like us. Yet he became part of our fractured reality and, on the cross, broke himself in the very act of embracing us.

When you think about it, there’s a certain reasonableness to the idea that a simple human cannot secure access to the source of all beauty. After all, we didn’t make ourselves, and God – by definition – is not in need of anything we can offer. We remain delicate, limited, contingent creatures, at the mercy of what the New Testament calls ‘grace’. Essayist Frederick Buechner writes:

The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn’t have been complete without you. Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid. I am with you. Nothing can ever separate us. It’s for you I created the universe. I love you. There’s only one catch. Like any other gift, the gift of grace can be yours only if you’ll reach out and take it. Maybe being able to reach out and take it is a gift too.[11]

Those moments when we think to reach out in response to the ‘grace of God’ are gifts. Amid the messiness of now, perhaps God has your ear – maybe for the first time, or simply the latest in a series of such occasions. Don’t allow a misplaced assumption that life is on pause to obscure the possibility that this could be among the pivotal periods of your entire existence.

Disruption of the ‘normal’ opens us to reconsider everything. But then, very soon, unless we act, we will fall back into a new version of our old routine and push such things from our mind. Orual, in Till We Have Faces, experiences precisely this the moment her vision of the castle begins to fade:

Perhaps it was not real. I looked and looked to see if it would not fade or change. Then as I rose (for all this time I was still kneeling where I had drunk), almost before I stood on my feet, the whole thing was vanished. There was a tiny space of time in which I thought I could see how some swirlings of the mist had looked, for the moment, like towers and walls. But very soon, no likeness at all. I was staring simply into fog, and my eyes smarting with it.[12]

She pushes the experience to one side for a while, files it as an illusion and assumes her sister Psyche deceased. As a result, it is to be years before they meet again. It’s a powerful echo of the ancient words, ‘Seek the Lord while he may be found; call on him while he is near’ (Isa. 55:6). Sometimes, perhaps, he comes near in the strangest of moments, and ‘may be found’ when all else appears lost or slipping away.

Healthy faith

In a time of fragility, then, we gain increased awareness of our need for an unbreakable locus of hope. This was true when I first moved overseas. I met God in a new way during one of the darkest and loneliest times of my life. It has, unexpectedly, become an experience that helps me to relate to others in their struggles and to help them find hope in their darker moments.

But I also had other resources besides direct encounter with God and my personal reading of the Scriptures that told of Jesus. People helped me through this time. My Romanian teacher, with her lethargic, ageing bulldog watching on during our lessons, helped me grasp the grammar of the language. Economics student Răzvan, with whom I shared a flat, took me shopping until I was able to go by myself. Americans Mike and Kris, my team leaders, taught me about all the aspects of local culture newcomers often find unsettling, along with their thoughts on how to navigate living overseas. Cornel, another of my flatmates, took me on the metro, tram and bus, teaching me the essential routes I would need to get around the city, and also helped me buy my first tram pass. Loredana, my teammate, walked me around the city centre, and especially the university area, explaining what we were seeing, so that I understood more of the local culture.

Many more people could be added to this list. None of them was inventing their advice on the spot. They were using their existing knowledge to help me first survive, then thrive, in my new home. Unfamiliar realities require reorientation, and they provided it for me.

This book is designed, in a similar way, to help orient you to the new reality that has burst in on us like the tiger who came to tea.[13] It was conceived early in the pandemic, just as the lockdown began, when Kristi Mair and I got talking about the conversations we were having with people via Zoom and Skype. Kristi and I have been good friends for almost ten years now and are in the habit of bouncing ideas off each other, especially when it comes to our speaking and writing. A throwaway question – ‘What would most help people right now?’ – led to us to list the areas of life those around us were finding challenging. We then began identifying who – like my friends and colleagues in Romania – already had sufficient experience and depth of reflection in each area to craft something helpful, informed and engaging.

We asked each contributor to do three things: to orient readers to their topic as it plays out during the COVID-19 pandemic, to shed the light of Jesus and the Christian Scriptures on the subject and to offer some practical advice. They were asked to write in a way that is intelligible to those unfamiliar with the Christian faith, though – aside from the first three chapters – without feeling the need to argue for its core tenets. There are plenty of good books out there already which do that brilliantly.[14] If you’re already a follower of Jesus, then this book is designed to help you follow him more creatively and faithfully throughout the current crisis. And if you’re looking in on the faith from the outside, or the fringes, then – alongside practical titbits – Healthy Faith will hopefully provide you with a glimpse of what following Jesus looks like from the inside.

You’ll notice that we’re covering a fairly wide range of themes. Following Jesus isn’t something that tacks on an extra category for life (‘God’) and a few additional practices (such as ‘prayer’ and ‘church’). It is instead – at its best, at least – transformative of everything, including how we parent, befriend, work, imagine, laugh, love, grieve and die.

Healthy Faith has four main sections covering a few key areas:

(re)orientation, the section you’re in now, where we help orient you to the moment we’re in and where God fits with it all. Kristi’s chapter, which follows this one, is the second part of this.

fragile life looks at some of the more unsettling issues that have come into focus during the pandemic: disease, death, grief, loneliness, fear and uncertainty.

connected life explores the everyday tasks and relationships that tend to consume most hours in a week: work, marriage, singleness and parenting.

growing life focuses on some of the practices that help us flourish during this time and beyond: prayer, encountering Scripture, church, humour, the imagination and conversations.

After each chapter we include a list of books or websites suggested by the author or the editors. These are designed to help you explore further. We conclude with an afterword from Tom Wright, based on some material he recently shared on his Premier Christian Radio podcast.

The appendices are unusually rich and include two shorter reflections from psychiatrist Pablo Martinez and a number of helpfully detailed briefings on end-of-life issues, including for carers, by John Wyatt, a medical doctor who also writes the chapter ‘On dying well’. Our friends at thirtyone:eight have also provided us with an outline of how churches can stay on top of safeguarding issues during this period, as well as another on guidance for working and communicating safely online, both of which can be found in the appendices.

It’s possible, as you scan the contents, that you’ll ask yourself why we didn’t cover certain other topics. We’re sympathetic and probably would agree with you. It would be great, for example, to have included some more substantial engagement on the ecological dimension of the current crisis, or to feature chapters on domestic abuse or pornography use, both of which have risen since movement restrictions began. Perhaps to have looked at international justice issues arising during this time, or local economic ones. This is an initial and incomplete orientation, rather than a final and comprehensive word on the rapidly-changing situation.[15]

I often find that multi-author books can be very mixed in their quality, but I have been amazed, and thankful, for the consistent quality of the submissions received for this book. We are also thankful that people from such a wide range of church backgrounds have come together for Healthy Faith.[16] Our appreciation goes out to everyone involved for their thorough and swift work. Kristi and I have joked several times that one day this book will appear as laughably outdated as a 1970s paperback on What Does the Bible Say About the USSR? It’s the first time either of us has wished for our work to become irrelevant before it’s published.

Sadly, though, not only is the COVID-19 pandemic set to significantly affect life for some time, but it also may not be the last such epidemic. Virologists have been warning for years that one of humanity’s greatest threats is viral outbreaks.[17] Last year, in his prescient book Rings of Fire, theologian and futurist Leonard Sweet wrote that ‘viral infections that come from animals’ loom ‘on the horizon’ and that Christians would need to be prepared for such ‘wild cards’ upending our world.[18] Learning from this outbreak may give us the skills we need to thrive during the next.

Even if we don’t see anything like COVID-19 again in our lifetimes, many of the conditions it forces on us – restricted movement, extended time confined with the same people or alone, and higher risk of death for us or others – could strike any of us in the future, pandemic