Mass prayers online: Assam church shows the way amid coronavirus fears

When several states are struggling to contain the spread of coronavirus following the religious congregation at West Delhi’s Nizamuddin, a 176-year-old Baptist church in Assam’s capital Guwahati, on Saturday, proved that mass prayers are possible even from a distance.

Many members of the Guwahati Baptist Church downloaded the Zoom cloud meeting app on their smartphones and joined the 30-minute-long daily prayers online from their homes or workstations. As the church members joined the prayers online at 4 pm, the prayers to get rid of the coronavirus havoc took the centrestage.

“Since we can’t put our lives at stake and also can’t stop the daily mass prayers, we decided to work out something. Initially, soon after the lockdown was clamped, we prepared small videos of our hymns and the Bible messages and shared them through WhatsApp.