There are two main ways that churches can adapt to Covid-19 regulations: changes in service structure and change in service times. Change in service structure can take many forms: Doing church online, having church outside, or having church with people in their cars. Churches alter service times by limiting the number of attendees who can come to a service and encouraging people to attend less popular services.
Churches can generally be divided into two categories: liturgical and non-liturgical. Major liturgical churches include Orthodox, Catholic, High Church Anglican, and some Lutheran denominations. They are characterized by structured services, rituals, and pre-written prayers and creeds. They also typically have an episcopal polity ( not to be confused with the American Epicopal church), which consists of bishops, priests, and deacons. Liturgical churches usually play traditional music. It is common for liturgical churches to have a variety of services throughout the week; some are full services like Divine Liturgies or Masses, and others are shorter vespers (evening prayer) or matins (morning prayer) services. On the other hand, non-liturgical churches will typically have less structured services, spontaneous prayer, and a variety of church governance systems. It is common for non-liturgical churches to only meet on Sunday mornings, although some will also have Sunday night and/or Wednesday night services. Their music is more likely to be contemporary.
Let’s walk through how churches in my life have responded to Covid-19 regulations. The Orthodox church that I attend has done very little to change how the service is conducted, and have mostly adapted by using an online registration system to limit services to 50% capacity and encouraging attendees to go to less popular service times. Attendees who are excluded by capacity limits for Sunday services use other non-Sunday services as substitutes, so demand increases for non-Sunday services. Some alterations to how the services are conducted have been made: icons and the priest’s robe cannot be kissed, people must maintain social distance (4 cubits) while in the church, and people have to bring a health form with them. I learned from talking with friends that local Lutheran and Catholic churches are also doing in person services regulated by online sign-ups. Larger churches like St. Nicholas Orthodox1 in DC and St. Leo the Great Catholic Church2 in Fairfax are also maintaining indoor service and reducing capacity, so it appears that this method of regulatory compliance is quite common and regardless of size, although some churches, like St. Leo the Great Catholic Church2, are not using an online registration system and simply exclude attendees once capacity has been reached.
As for non-liturgical churches, a Southern Baptist church I occasionally visit has moved their service outside in order to comply with Covid-19 regulations without requiring sign-ups or adding services. A non-denominational church in my area has had drive in services. I have also seen some of my non-denominational friends on Facebook posted about taking communion at home.
The differences in the responses between liturgical and non-liturgical churches should be expected given the differences between their values. Liturgical churches’ more structured services and the spiritual value they assign to the structure makes their service structure inelastic to relative to costs incurred by exogenous shocks like Covid-19. On the other hand, since non-liturgical churches generally do not have a rigid style of service and assign relatively lower spiritual significance to their style of service, they should be elastic to changes in service style.
Moreover, because liturgical churches have more than just Sunday morning services, demand for Sunday morning services is relatively elastic given the easy availability of substitutes, where the substitutes for Sunday services are the already existing non-Sunday services. Furthermore, since attendees of liturgical churches are used to attending non-Sunday services, they see new non-Sunday services as less costly. However, given that non-liturgical churches often do not have any other services other than their Sunday morning service, the cost of adding new service times will be high and demand will be inelastic.
The cost of adding new service times will likely be higher for non-liturgical churches because their services typically have higher fixed costs associated with them. The contemporary music commonly played at non-liturgical churches usually requires a multi-person worship team, and A/V team to set up and run sound and powerpoints for the worship and sermon. I believe this is true by and large, but I am unsure of the magnitude of its effect on church leaders.
Non-liturgical attendants are likely to have a more inelastic demand for non-Sunday services. Non-liturgical church attendees very rarely have non-Sunday services, so there is likely a culture that has developed to be resistant to going to church on days other than Sunday. Going to non-Sunday services will feel more foriegn to non-liturgical church attendees; furthermore, they will probably have schedules that do not include free time for church services for days other than Sunday.
The higher fixed costs of non-liturgical church services and the more inelastic demand for non-Sunday services does not mean that it unthinkable for non-liturgical churches to add services to adapt to Covid-19 regulation. This point will become more important as we head into winter. The costs of doing services outdoors will increase as the temperature drops, so if regulations do not change, then some non-liturgical churches who have been conducting outdoor services may transition to conducting services indoors and increase the number of services they offer.
Given that liturgical churches are inelastic to changes in service structure and elastic to expansions in services, we should expect to see liturgical churches conducting their services in a manner similar to how they were running them before the Covid-19 outbreak, and that they will be complying with new government regulation by limiting the number of attendees to maintain social distancing and encouraging people to attend services that are less popular. In the same way, non-liturgical churches are expected to alter their service structure as their primary means of complying with Covid-19 regulation since they are elastic to service structure change and inelastic to modifying or expanding their service time.
Liturgical churches’ values have made them reluctant to alter how their services are conducted, so they typically comply with Covid-19 regulations by limiting service capacity and encouraging attendees to go to less popular services. On the other hand, many non-liturgical churches have not had to limit capacity for their services because their values allow them to innovate with their service structure. Innovation and flexibility are generally seen as positive traits in the commercial world, but that is not necessarily the case for the religious world. Churches claim to profess an ancient faith, so making changes to what churches believe or how they worship should be viewed with suspicion. As we have seen, different values and beliefs held by various churches lead to significant differences to how they respond to changes to the environment they exist in.