Context Matters If You Want to Understand Issues Today

In the summer of 2020, Grace Community Church of San Fernando Valley in Southern California made headline news for suing Los Angeles County over fines they received due to covid regulations.

If you prefer an audio version of this article, you can listen to it here:

This was an interesting situation to observe because I lived within ten minutes of Grace Community Church (GCC). Our own church was under the same guidelines as GCC. The only difference was GCC is a  megachurch. We had roughly fifty people present at a Sunday gathering.

I found this case interesting to follow because while I did not personally attend GCC, I knew a few people who did. I was also privy to the city and county regulations and what they were requiring of religious gatherings in our area. At the same time, however, I observed conversations from people back East on social media about this case. Many of them talked as though LA County was trying to shut down churches and that this was a sign of government control and persecution. 

It was a mixture of intriguing and amusing to hear these folks significantly removed from the situation talk as though they knew exactly what was going on in Southern California. This situation single handedly demonstrates the importance of getting context to help us understand the information we are processing.

This is the second lesson that I reflect on from the last year: context matters. 

As a Bible college student, I hear all the time that “context is king.” If we’re going to interpret a passage rightly, we’ve got to understand the context of the passage. This refers to both the literary context and historical and cultural context. 

This principle is true for any information we receive throughout our day. We live in an age of immeasurable information and all of us can access almost all of it at our fingertips. We can read news articles and search anything that’s ever been put on the web. With the click of a finger, we can access academic journals and gather more information and specific details about almost any event, regardless of location.

But one thing technology has yet to facilitate is the transfer of context. 

It’s difficult to transfer context. While a video taken on one’s smartphone can transfer some of the immediate context, it cannot transfer the context of the backstory. Videos like these cannot help the detached viewer understand the previous conflict that has existed between the two parties and why it’s now boiling over. We have no immediate, electronic way to transfer the context of history in a local community or the individuals involved. Even when hearing from the mouth of eye-whitnesses it can be challenging to grasp all the moving pieces.

Furthermore, when we don’t have the context of something, our brains automatically import context from our own experiences into the situation we’re learning about from a distance.

Context matters when taking in information. 

When we hear that John and Mary leave the church and move to Bethel in Reading, California, there’s a story behind that and it matters before we draw conclusions about them as people.

When Lucy posts on social media an article about the evils of vaccines, there’s a story behind that and it matters before we draw conclusions about her as a person.

Context always matters.

Drawing conclusions about people or events really isn’t our job. Understanding them is.

Some people framed the GCC debacle as Los Angeles County trying to shut down churches. Ironically, LA County wasn’t too concerned about any of the other thousand or so churches. A natural question one might ask is, “Why GCC?” 

Our church had typically met in a park anyway, so moving outside wasn’t difficult for us to do. However, during the summer of 2020, there were frequently two, sometimes three other churches gathered in the same park having their own worship services. We made plenty of commotion for passersby, but never once did city or county officials come by to make sure we were doing everything just right. We worshipped in peace.

And we preached whatever we wanted to.

Our route to church sometimes included driving by a larger church that set up tents and gathered in their parking lot. Every Sunday, their tents were full.

And lest we think that GCC drew attention simply because they were a megachurch, there are roughly eighty megachurches in total throughout LA County and Orange County. A megachurch is one that reports an average weekly attendance between 2,000 and 25,000 people. Grace Community Church reports just over 8,200 in weekly attendance. 

As far as I am aware, and I just did a little research on this to see if anything else had developed, no other megachurch in Southern California faced fines during Covid regulations. There were a couple of churches in the bay area that took a similar route as GCC and large group that attempted to gather on public beaches without first acquiring permits that also faced fines. But the majority of these eighty megachurches were able to accommodate what LA County was asking and continue to gather in peace. 

So what was the deal with GCC?

Were they more vocal about the Gospel and the liberal leaders of LA County didn’t like that?

Did all the other churches compromise some sort of spiritual integrity that GCC wasn’t willing to compromise?

The point of this article is not to determine whether GCC, LA County, or all the other churches did the right thing. Rather, the point is to show how context about a situation helps us better understand it. Context matters, and we often forget that when we absorb media.

One crucial piece of context that helped me better understand why GCC was going through this whole process was learning that they did not believe the State should ever tell the church what to do. It was a matter of first amendment rights, not a matter of particular theological faithfulness. There were no particularly egregious requirements being made of them, they simply disagreed with the idea that government can tell churches what to do.

I am not sure how they reconcile submitting to building regulations before opening their doors for attendance with refusing to submit to healthcare regulations. Nonetheless, in their minds, imposing new requirements on how to gather was an overreach. 

Another piece of important context is that this whole situation developed after LA County residents had just come through three months of being entirely shut down.

Large gatherings of any kind were not allowed from March into July. Now they were opening it up so people could gather.

There were still requirements for gathering, however, and one of them was that those who gathered needed to wear face masks. If more than one hundred people gathered indoors, people needed to wear face masks. LA County also required a written protocol for large events. 

Would there be hand sanitizer easily accessible to all participants? Will the seating be distanced? Are there seating charts? Will people just be coming in and out the same doors, or will they come in one door and go out another door? What happens if a breakout occurs? How will you go about tracing where the breakout may have started? What will happen with those who get  sick from the breakout? How will you make sure it doesn’t spread within your large event  organization? 

Grace Community Church did not do any of this because they did not think that the state should tell the church what to do.

That’s why they were being sued. There was no inherently nefarious desire to shut down churches. 

In fact, it seemed to many of us in California at the time that the state  was making it possible to meet again. After being shut down for four months, we could openly gather again. As a small church, we were able to start doing some things without any anxiety of whether or not we were going to get in trouble because there were little to no regulations for outdoor gatherings. Some confusion remained around the regulations for indoor gatherings, such as how many households could gather at the same time. But since we were small enough and typically gathered in parks anyway, we returned to a fairly normal routine. 

Even churches of larger sizes could gather.

As the summer went on, there were fewer regulations for  religious gatherings than there were for large concerts and sporting events in Southern California. It sure seemed that LA County was trying to make it possible for religious organizations to be able to meet again. However, GCC did not want to be told what to do by the state. So they refused. They got fined, and then their response to the fine was to take it to court as being unconstitutional. In their minds, it was a violation of their first amendment rights.

The idea that the state should not be able to tell religious organizations, such as churches, what to do is not foreign to American politics. You might think back to the seventies when Christian schools were being penalized by the IRS for staying segregated and refusing to integrate. They lost their tax exemption status. Bob Jones and Jerry Falwell both fought against the IRS, claiming their first amendment rights were being violated. 

They lost that fight. 

But it set the stage for claims like GCC would later make in 2020.

All of this context for the GCC situation helps to shape our conclusions. We can debate about whether or not COVID-19 regulations truly were a violation of First Amendment rights. We can debate whether a church should cling to such rights. Interestingly, GCC has won that lawsuit as being a violation of First Amendment rights. So even in liberal LA County, the church won in that “religious freedom” was promoted. So churches in LA certainly are not facing persecution.

But also, within that context, you need to remember that there were thousands of churches that were happily meeting and happily gathering. Thousands of churches found ways to honor the regulations and continue to be the ecclesia Jesus calls us to be. So to frame the GCC debacle as a sign of persecution is to neglect the context of the whole story. 

Grace Community Church held a particular stance about the relationship between the church and state. That’s what they were fighting for. They were in court, but LA County was not inherently trying to take GCC to court. The whole situation created some tension and what, in my opinion, deteriorated into childish arguing back and forth between LA County and GCC. So I guess depending on what period of the lawsuit you look at, it could seem like LA County had a specific gripe with GCC. But GCC initiated the legal action. They knew when they refused to comply that they would be fined.The fines were not The fines were not targeted just at them, but at anyone who refused to comply to the pandemic regulations. 

Such context matters when we’re deciphering information.

Again, I’m not here to determine whether or not GCC acted appropriately. I’m simply pointing out the importance of context for proper understanding of situations.

Another example arises when talking about racial issues. When I first started talking about them, there were certain people who would comment or email me just irate over some of the things that I was saying. They called me deceived, said I have “drunk the Kool-Aid,” and have compromised. One messenger told me I’m blinded by liberal California.

I’ve been called all kinds of things and I didn’t always know how to receive it at times. I knew what I was coming from. It wasn’t the news or the fact that I lived in a seemingly liberal state that shaped my perspective on these issues. 

But then one summer we took an extended trip back East and visited different friends and family. Many of them happened to live in rural areas.

We did not do this for the express purpose of getting context. We just did it because we wanted to connect with some dear people that we hadn’t connected with in a while.

Later God led us to move to what feels like a rural area in a small town in central Colorado. Through these two experiences, I have observed more of the context of the type of people who were messaging me about what I wrote concerning race.

I now better understand why the things I said sounded so crazy to them. I don’t retract anything I said. My perspective remains largely the same. But I understand that the worldview they’re looking from and the context that they have around them make the things I say sound crazy to them.

When you live in a largely monolithic community, it’s difficult to understand the plight of other types of people.

My wife and I witnessed firsthand that Trump rallies tend to turn violent. Folks in rural Idaho or Ohio aren’t going to see that because many people in those areas are Trump supporters. They not going to witness what happens when Trump supporters bump into folks who oppose them.

I was not surprised that January 6, 2021 got violent because leading up to January 6 we had witnessed two different Trump rallies a few blocks away from our house that escalated to the point where police needed to intervene. Our street had been shut down because the rally got out of hand.

The one time I had driven by earlier and noticed people with Trump signs standing in the center of the street. As cars would drive by, they would step towards them waving signs and yelling in support of Trump. Because of the aggressiveness we saw related with Trump rallies, we were not surprised that January 6 got violent.

As we interact with each other, remember that context matters. It matter now more than ever because we can absorb so much information. But we still do always know the backstory to certain events or the situations taking place just outside of the frame of whatever we happen to see online.

If I’m going to understand the folks that message me, I need to understand that they’re working from a particular context and I need to filter the information they’re dumping on me from their context. 

The same is true for all of us.

Engage the discussion in the comments below.

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