Dear Church Family,

Several weeks ago, the Preston Road leadership announced the formation of a special task force to help us discern both when and how to safely reopen our public worship gatherings, as well as other ministries, groups, and classes that meet at our facility. We’re blessed to have Doctors Katrina Bradford and Vivian Jones serving on this team and helping us sort through the often complicated, and sometimes confusing, scientific data and governmental guidelines and recommendations.

Since its formation, our team has wrestled with identifying the most important factors for discerning when to reopen. The weightiest factors we’re considering are guidance from state and local public health professionals, the number of PRCC members who are comfortable attending a regulated, socially-distanced gathering, and how other churches in our neighborhood and network are proceeding.

From our perspective one of the most important factors to consider is local guidance based on local data. While not relying exclusively on the color-coded chart recently released by Dallas County, we do appreciate its simplicity in identifying when current recommendations for churches and other large groups can be relaxed. Here is a snapshot of our current status in Dallas County, along with specific recommendations for each level. (You can find more information about the color-coded chart here.)

Our current recommendation to the elders is to consider reopening our public worship gatherings once we enter the yellow zone for a sustained period of time. We’re monitoring this local guidance for adjustments and changes and will alter our recommendations accordingly. While we are seeing some encouraging trends in our local data, we also have no way of knowing how long it will be before we enter the yellow zone.

In the meantime, we’ll continue to use technology to our advantage and offer online resources, teachings, and connection points. Based on the tremendously positive feedback we received from the youth and Mother’s Day drive-through experiences, we’ll also continue to experiment with creating additional safe in-person connection points. As we begin to move toward the yellow zone, we’ll be sending out a congregational survey seeking your input for how we can make reopening as encouraging as possible for as many as possible. Until then, we welcome your individual feedback.

As always, thanks for your support, flexibility, patience, and most of all, your prayers.

Blessings,
The Preston Road Public Gathering Reopening Task Force

Wade Hodges
Dan Branch
Stan Shipley
Julie Clark
Stacey Losher
Dr. Katrina Bradford
Dr. Vivian Jones