Pastoral Letter July 11 - nearly there, or not

Dear Friend from Bridport United Church, Uploders Chapel, Hope URC or Radipole URC,

Well the lockdown has lessened and the sky hasn’t fallen in … well not yet anyway?  

So, first and foremost a huge thank you to those who kindly offered to fund Bible gifts to the Year 6 Leavers from St. Mary’s Primary School.  Brilliant and most generous!

Secondly, returning to the lessening of lockdown, as I wrote last week, we are in the process of carrying out the necessary Risk Assessments to make it possible to re-open the church for services.  Since we are still awaiting the allocation of Leaders of Worship (the equivalent of a Preaching Plan) it seems increasingly unlikely that we will be having physical services in the church until September, though August is an outside possibility?  Nevertheless, even then, numbers will need to be limited, social distancing continuing and, probably, still no hymn-singing.

However, for those who are impatient to gather even to an even more limited level, we do have a cunning plan:  Hopefully for at least two Sundays in August we are planning to open the church and broadcast either the recorded Video Service or the live Circuit Service on Zoom, which is the video-conferencing system over 100 of us have been accessing and taking part in for some months now.  The idea is that, by streaming it in the church itself, we can a) enable those who have no access to the internet to share in it and b) have some semblance of gathering physically together?

There are some technical challenges that I am working on but hopefully this provides us with the next step forwards to some more of us sharing worship together?  In the meantime, keep well and keep strong,