At a small-town NC church, Easter Sunday goes on — with car horns sounding ‘amen’
About 30 minutes before the start of the 11 a.m. Easter Sunday service at the First Baptist Church in Micro, population 520, Tim Stevens checked the outdoor microphones and adjusted an iPhone atop a tripod, placed there for live streaming. He has been the pastor here for 41 years, and he didn’t know what to expect before leading a service unlike any he’d ever done.
“I have no idea, I really don’t,” he said with a nervous laugh while vehicles slowly turned off of U.S. 301 and into the parking lot, backing into spaces so they could face the makeshift altar that Stevens and his colleagues had arranged on one side of the chapel. “I mean, we’ve already got more than I thought it might be.”
By then about a dozen vehicles, most of them pick-up trucks and SUVs, with some minivans sprinkled in, had arrived for a drive-in Easter service. By the time it began, the parking lot was nearly full — a congregation of about 30 automobiles, some with only an older couple, several others with children wearing their Easter finest.
Behind the steering wheels, some of the men wore collared shirts and ties, and some of the women light-colored dresses. One rolled down the passenger side window and held a pink heart next to the word “you” while the car slowly drove past Stevens and others, offering a kind message: “love you.”
“There’s something special about a small country church,” Stevens said.
Something different for Easter
For the past three weeks, amid the statewide lockdown and stay-at-home order designed to slow the spread of the coronavirus, Stevens had streamed his services online. On Easter Sunday he wanted to do something different, and North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper had left it up to local officials to decide whether to permit the kind of drive-up church service Stevens had in mind.
In some of the state’s more populated areas, like Wake County, leaders didn’t allow churches to hold drive-in services on Sunday. In Johnston County, though, Stevens said he received permission from the county sheriff. He was sure to thank the sheriff, more than once, for the opportunity for the congregation to come together — if only parked side-by-side.
“I appreciate him doing that,” Stevens said of Cooper’s decision that allowed a version of some services, like the one in Micro, to go on in parking lots. “Some governors have said no, no — nothing.”
Across the country and around the world, Christians were left to figure out how to celebrate Easter in a time of social distancing and stay-at-home orders that have left public spaces, like cathedrals and chapels, largely empty. For weeks now, many churches have streamed their services online. Some, where the law has allowed, have offered drive-in services.
This was the first such service at First Baptist in Micro. Stevens could remember one early-morning Easter service that he held outdoors, in the front yard, nine years ago. That was when the community was in the early stages of assessing damages and recovering from a tornado that ripped through the area in 2011.
Now, on Sunday, members of his congregation arrived in their cars and abided by the rules that made the gathering possible: the vehicles had to be parked at least six feet apart, and people were not permitted to leave them and greet others in other cars. The windows were supposed to remain rolled up, too, but on a sunny, 70-degree morning that proved difficult to enforce.
While the parking lot filled, Stevens strummed away on a guitar while his musical director sat at a keyboard, playing. Stevens’ son, Shane, a deacon, stood behind the microphone and delivered some early remarks before a woman in the back row of cars poked her head out of the passenger window: “I can barely hear you,” she said, yelling.
“Turn the radio on,” Tim Stevens said. He’d set it up so that the service was simulcast, loud and clear, on 95.9 FM.
Inside the chapel, a small rectangular brick building, there is room for a little more than 100 parishioners. Most Sundays, Stevens said, it might be three-quarters full, but he figured every pew would have been filled on Easter.
Yet it sat empty, with a bouquet of pink, white and purple flowers in front of the altar and no one there to admire it.
Overcoming the quarantine
Outside, Shane Stevens acknowledged the obvious:
“This is very, very different,” he said.
He noted that if people were moved enough by the music, the gospel or the sermon, they could express themselves by honking their horns. Several cars began beeping.
In one of them, a young married couple sat in their truck with their two young daughters, both in pretty white dresses. Melissa Gilsinger said that quarantining hadn’t been too difficult on her and her family, but that “the girls definitely miss coming to church every week.”
“It’s definitely a blessing,” she said, after she’d backed the truck up into a space in the corner of the parking lot. “I’m glad we were able to overcome the quarantine and still find a way to get together” as a congregation.
At the start of his sermon, Tim Stevens opened with a joke: He knew they were all Baptists, he said, because even outside, in a parking lot, the back row was full. Then he delivered a message about Easter, and rebirth.
He’d grown up in a family of pastors. His father had been a pastor, and his grandfather, too, and also one of his uncles. His grandfather and his uncle had been pastors here on these very grounds, where First Baptist Church of Micro has stood since 1903. Never in its history had there been a service quite like the one on Sunday, when Stevens’ daughter greeted arriving cars with coloring sheets and crayons so that children might not become bored while they remained inside.
“Most of us have been very careful about social distancing,” Stevens said after the service ended and the parking lot had cleared. “Of course, I told somebody the other day, when you live out in the country, you social distance just about all the time. That’s just the way we live.”
And yet it’d been difficult here, too, not being able to gather like usual. In a normal time, the congregation would have lingered outside, in the yard bordering the main road, at the end of church.
“We’re going to make it through this thing,” Stevens said. “I don’t know how quick it’ll be. Most of us are praying that pretty quickly, we can start moving toward normal, but normal is going to be a different kind of normal.”
For now, at least, he and his church community had a chance to come together on Easter, after all.
Members of the congregation waved to each other from their cars. They rolled down windows and traded small talk. Many of them wore their Sunday best, even if no one else could really see it. Near the end of the service, Stevens asked the congregation if they wanted to come do it again next week.
The sound of car horns echoed around the parking lot.
This story was originally published April 12, 2020 at 4:35 PM with the headline "At a small-town NC church, Easter Sunday goes on — with car horns sounding ‘amen’."
