The Christian Evangel is the newspaper of the Assemblies of God Pentecostal denomination which began in 1913 and is now known as the Pentecostal Evangel. In 1918, the newspaper printed a news piece on the Spanish Flu that shows some eerie similarities between what churches and Christians had to endure back then and what we’re enduring now.

According to the news-clipping below, churches struggled to balance loving and caring for each other as they had to stay quarantined. Interestingly, back then, the church encouraged their believers to devote themselves to the word and to prayer.

Today, while many churches are suffering the same problem of physical separation, due to social media and the internet, many are not actually devoting themselves to word and prayer, but instead, wasting time filling their heads with nonsense. What we have in the world today is both a blessing and a curse. While the internet is a great resource for staying connected with other people and staying current on the events, it is also a curse because of the valuable time that can also be wasted when we could be studying the Scriptures, praying, and worshiping with our families.

It would be great to see believers heeding the 1918 words and advice from the Church during our current coronavirus pandemic.