Together in Hope Amidst the Pandemic: Exploring Partnership, Mission and Public Theology
In just over ten months, a dangerous microbial has turned and continues to turn the world upside down, killing nearly 1.25 million people and infecting over 50 million in 213 countries. Covid-19 is devastating lives and families, tumbling down economies, and wreaking havoc on all fronts in the lives of all alike – wealthy and impoverished, powerful and disempowered, and privileged and deprived. No one seems to know when all this would end. But when it does, after all the losses and new patterns of life, the post-Covid-19 world is sure to be different from the one slipping away.
When the pandemic struck early this year, many of us thought that the pandemic would compel us, human beings, to introspect, recognize our shared vulnerability, abandon our obsessive pursuits for domination and destruction, and make changes to the way we organize our political and economic life and social dynamics. Nothing of that has happened. If at all it did, it has only been on the fringes. On the other hand, we have only seen and heard certain detrimental trends and habits continue, and in fact, even escalating further.
Rev. Dr. Deenabandhu Manchala is the Area Executive for Southern Asia in the Global Ministries of the United Church of Christ and the Disciples Church (Christian Church), USA, and works from Cleveland, Ohio, USA.