Congregational Planning for Flu Pandemic

(courtesy of the ELCA web site)

Communication
Worship
Community Outreach
Other helpful links

Communication

In the event of pandemic, it would be important to be able to communicate rapidly with your congregation. It may be that people could be discouraged by public health officials from gathering in groups, such as at church. Many of the usual ways we communicate, i.e. telephone and e-mail, may be over-taxed and unreliable. Therefore the best way to guarantee the fullest communication is to identify and practice as many different ways to communicate as possible. Even though you may develop many different ways of communicating in order to prepare for a pandemic, you will find that these ways can be applied now to enhance your congregational life in many ways. You may wish to identify members of your congregation that have particular expertise in information technology. They could be helpful in preparing your congregation to use many different ways of communicating. Enhanced means of communication should minimally involve telephone, e-mail, Web page, Internet groups, and pod-casting.

Telephone

Discuss with a representative of your phone provider what the available options are in your community for teleconferencing. Conference calls permit large groups of people to communicate at the same time from their homes and businesses. Your local phone provider may offer options you can consider for conference lines and group calls. Additionally, you may make a search of the World Wide Web to identify free conference call facilities. There are also local and national companies that provide conference calling services. Usually you only pay for the services when you actually use them, but if you wish to pursue this option you should arrange for an account with such companies ahead of time because they will be swamped with new requests if a pandemic happens.

Automated calling services are also available. To find some of the options available commercially, just enter “voice broadcasting service” in a Web search engine and you’ll find a number of vendors.

Many congregations have prayer chains over the phone. You can expand this concept to create a congregational calling tree to be of use for inquiring after the well-being of your members and sharing information.

E-mail

While there are still people without an e-mail address, most people today have an e-mail address. E-mail is the most popular form of communication after the telephone. Request that congregational members provide an e-mail address and ask their permission to use it to share important information.

Create e-mail lists of all your members so that you can send messages to everyone simultaneously. Many congregations send a version of their newsletters electronically and save postage costs.

Assure members that you will use their e-mail addresses only according to the ways they agree for them to be used. Remember that the “polite” way of addressing group e-mail is to include the list of recipients in the “Blind Copy” field, so that the list of addresses doesn’t print out to be longer than the content of your message. Your information technology savvy members can assist the congregation in drafting a privacy policy.

Web Page

If your congregation doesn’t already have a Webpage, you really should! People increasingly turn to the Web for information. You can provide up to date information through the Web that people can access from anywhere. You can also update the information from anywhere.

For tips on starting or enhancing your congregation Web presence, check out http://www.elca.org/webministry .  There you’ll find lots of ideas and links to other resources, including sources for free Web hosting (e.g. www.lutheransonline.com) and timely information you can include on your site.

Through Lutherans Online you can create a free Web page. The site also contains elements of another useful communication tool, the Internet Group.

Internet Group

Internet groups are similar to Web pages, but have many more capabilities. An Internet group goes beyond a Web page by not merely sharing information but also permitting a group of people to communicate with each other in important ways including live-time electronic chatting, file sharing, and messaging.

If you have a commercial Web page, your current Internet service provider may offer elements of Internet Groups that could enhance your current Web page to include these functions. Again Lutherans Online Web pages include many of the same functions that Internet Groups can serve.

Congregations should have all of the above communication channels identified and frequently practiced so that in an emergency, you can reach as many people as possible as quickly as possible. Outside of an emergency, it is still a good idea to create the capability to communicate your congregation’s programs in numerous ways.

Pod-casting

Pod-casting is a method of publishing files to the Internet, allowing users to subscribe to a feed and receive new files automatically by subscription, usually at no cost. It first became popular in late 2004, used largely for audio files.

Worship

In the event of a pandemic, some communities may face periods of quarantine. People may be asked to stay in their homes. Public health officials may discourage public gatherings like worship. Your members however will yearn for the solace and comfort that worship provides in times of fear and crisis. Therefore, you may need to identify and practice ways to provide people with an experience of communal worship that can be done remotely and electronically. All of the channels of communication created for the pandemic can be used to communicate an experience of worship.

Perhaps you could plan for people to attend the worship service over a conference call. Perhaps you can videotape a copy and provide it over your Web site. People can gather in live-time Internet chat rooms created for your congregation to provide each other support. Copies of worship bulletins can be e-mailed or downloaded from your Web site or Internet group so people can feel connected to the congregation. You can envision the channels of communication most suited to enable your congregation to have an experience of worship if they couldn’t gather publicly during a period of quarantine.

It will probably not be possible to gather everyone in a congregation in one single electronic format. By using all of the channels of communication available to you, you can reach as many people as possible with the sense of hope and comfort worship can bring.

The ELCA is preparing worship materials that will address the fears and anxieties people would experience in pandemic. These materials will be downloadable from the ELCA home page in time of emergency.

Pastoral Care

Like worship, Pastoral Care provides us with a great sense of hope and comfort when facing a difficult time. A time of pandemic could unfortunately bring significant illness and death into our lives. People would need pastoral care more than ever during this time.

Obviously the best way to provide pastoral care is through quiet and comforting personal presence. However, it is possible to provide pastoral care through the same electronic channels of communication that you would need to use to provide worship. It may be necessary to provide pastoral care through these electronic communication channels both because of the need to stay in quarantine and also because of the greater numbers of people who will need the care at that time. It may be impractical or even impossible to attend to the pastoral care needs of the entire congregation in person.

The ELCA is preparing pastoral care guides that will assist pastoral care givers in caring for people under the specific circumstances of quarantine, mass illness, and death that pandemic could generate.

Leadership

The potential of pandemic requires certain contingencies be considered in leadership issues. Congregations and Synods together should prepare succession plans for leadership on the congregational and synod levels in the event that leaders succumb to flu or are unavailable for lengthy periods of time. This may involve clarifying who is to function in certain roles if the people in those roles cannot do so. Some form of succession should be determined for every rostered leader.

The shape of these succession plans can be different from place to place. They minimally detail:
• The conditions under which succession occurs, or not; e.g. incapacitation of a leader.
• The method of notification
• The level of authority assumed by successors

Succession plans should also be three deep, that is, they should detail not just one person who succeeds another, but someone to succeed that individual as well. On a congregational level, this may include which area pastors assume responsibility for which congregations if a pastor is incapacitated.

Basic decision should be made about which congregational services are essential and should be maintained throughout a time of emergency and which congregational services can be suspended until after the emergency has passed.

On the congregational level, lay leaders should be identified to assume responsibility over various functions in the event that professional staff was unavailable. Office, maintenance, computer, and communication functions should each have lay leaders designated to assume responsibility over them in an emergency setting.

Community Outreach

While pandemic may require that members of the congregation stay in their homes for a period of quarantine, the congregation and its facilities may also be of great benefit to the wider community. Hospitals, clinics, public health agencies, and disaster response organizations may be able to benefit by being able to use your facility to serve the community. Your congregation may be able to serve as an immunization site for your community. Your congregation may be able to serve as a spill over facility for a hospital. Your congregation may be able to serve as a disaster service center.

Prepare a description of your facilities, i.e. a list of rooms, offices, kitchens, bathrooms, and other details of your building. Communicate with local emergency management officials in your community and offer your facility to be of use in a time of emergency.

Links for Pandemic Preparedness Planning
 
www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic
 
The above site contains up to date information on planning for many sectors including government, business, and home. Additionally the sites provides a planning information and checklists for faith-based organizations at: www.pandemicflu.gov/plan/faithcomchecklist.html