Pastor Bina Agong
MIRI: Borneo Evangelical Mission (BEM) Sarawak welcomes the Sarawak Disaster Management Committee’s (SDMC) decision on the reopening of churches and other non-Muslim places of worship in Sarawak effective June 20.
Unit for Other Religions (Unifor) has also updated the guidelines yesterday by raising the maximum attendance to 250 people from 100 previously, subject to the size of the premises after taking into account social distancing of at least one metre.
BEM Sarawak president, Pastor Bina Agong, said despite the approval and the standard operating procedure (SOP) given, BEM is not rushing to open all its 700 churches starting this Saturday.
“BEM welcomes the decision to allow for the reopening of churches, and all official SOP circulated shall be strictly observed and adhered to.
“For the safety of all the over 100,000 members from 700 BEM churches in Sarawak, we also have additional SOP of our own. What are added are something practical that suit our context, town, locality, strength and limitations, which have been approved by Unifor,” Bina said when contacted yesterday.
He added an online meeting held Thursday afternoon with all 23 BEM Sarawak district superintendents, had also agreed that 10 churches would initially be opened for Sunday service.
“We are applying and upon approval by Unifor we will open the 10 churches this week or next week . The rest have to be opened in stages once all the preparations have been made to comply with the SOP,” he said, adding no extra service would be conducted apart from the one Sunday service.
“At major churches whose members are more than 1,000 they will have to take turn to attend service, like once a month just to be fair to everybody.”
He also reminded churches against rushing to resume services.
“If we cannot meet the required SOPs and church protocols, don’t be down hearted. Our priority is to ensure the safety and wellbeing of all members and minimising the possibility of creating new Covid-19 cluster.”