Keep Your Distance: Words of Advice for Churches from the Surgeon General

Jerome Adams, Surgeon General of the United States, offered important medical guidance for faith communities today.

Ed Stetzer:

There is a growing pressure from congregations of all faiths to begin to meet… What medical advice would you like us to communicate to churches from you?

Surgeon General Adams:

I completely get it. That's one of the problems is human nature. You all know this as faith leaders, it is hard to get people to stay the course. It is hard to get people to do something when they don't see a reward for themselves on the back end. It is hard to get people to do something that's hard without a timeline that they're working towards, where they know when it’s going to end…

Arizona was one of the hardest places in the country. Just three weeks ago, the cases were running out of control. We were able to turn that around by doing the simple public health measures…

So my, my message—if I was talking to your congregants—would be number one, we can turn this thing around in three to four weeks, by doing three simple things:

  1. Embracing wearing face masks when we're in public,
  2. Making sure we're washing our hands frequently for 20 seconds or using hand sanitizer, and
  3. Then watching your distance.

The hard one is watching your distance, because there's some details in there that are important, and that includes not having large gatherings and no house parties, no going to bars, and avoiding gatherings of more than 10 people and maintaining six feet of distance from others. It sounds simple—but truly that's what we need to do and the reward that you get on the back end, if we do that, we can turn around our rates in three to four weeks, to be able to open schools, to get back to worship.

We need people to understand that when we get the younger people—especially …

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