CANTON, S.D. – The Nativity stable at Canton Lutheran Church will be silent this year, breaking from a community tradition of gathering for a live Christmas performance.
Instead, churches in this rural corner of South Dakota are grappling with how to approach an Advent filled with quiet mourning after the coronavirus tore through the region.Church announcements are marked not with parties and performances, but with deaths.
South Dakota and North Dakota, states largely spared from the worst of the pandemic during the spring and summer, have seen a frightening pace of death since October.
The states’ per capita death over the fall was almost double that of even the next worst-off state.Even as congregations mourn, they are finding new.