Quite a few of the folk from our church have opted for the Sunday live streamed
service from Westminster Central Hall. Carole and I preferred to go for
something more local, and at the start of the first lockdown joined the live
streamed service from the nearby URC, where we already knew the minister and
other church leaders. It's good to see familiar faces each Sunday. I've more
recently been doing quite a few Zoom services in our Circuit and have often
joined the "congregation" with them, so I don't just appear when I happen to be
preaching, but Carole has stuck with the URC.
When our church reopened for a time after the first lockdown Carole and I
continued "attending" the Zoom and livestreamed services. We didn't feel happy
about the risk of spreading infection among our mostly Senior Citizen
congregation, and neither were we very enthusiastic about a service with,
social distancing, no singing and no chatting afterwards. Carole did join a
socially-distanced weekly outdoor coffee group of six in a local park which
continued to brave the elements into the autumn until new Covid restrictions
put a stop to it.
We also take part in a Zoom coffee morning each Friday, at the time when we
would have gone to the church for one. It's an opportunity to share news and
chat, and to stop it getting into a rut we have sometimes had a quiz, or
brought an object to show the others that had some special meaning for us, or
something we had made. We had a Christmas Jumper Day in December. There's
usually about a dozen of us, including a few couples, which is enough.
I was apprehensive at first about what would happen to the church once it was
not able to meet physically, but now I feel that the churches we have stayed
involved with have managed to maintain their fellowship and mutual support. I'm
concerned about those members who haven't been able to cope with Zoom or live
streaming, but our minister has done a good job of keeping in touch with
housebound folk, and Carole as a pastoral visitor has phoned the people on her
list weekly. Someone is also posting out church news to those who don't use
computers. What we hear about other churches suggests that many are coping
pretty well with the current strange situation, and some are experiencing
growth.
I find it hard to imagine what churches will be like once we get back to the
"new normal", whatever that is, but I hope we will be able to build on the
positive things we have experienced and learned during lockdown and other
restrictions. We've been declaring for long enough that the church isn't a
building, it's people, and now we've experienced that for real.
John Barnett
