Saturday 30th. May, 2020

It has been a strange week with my mother in hospital until yesterday afternoon when she was delivered home to us, now recovered from her infection and deemed fit enough to move around with the assistance of her family and carers. We have also had two deaths in our extended family, both elderly and, to a certain extent, expected but still very sad and, with the current necessary lockdown conditions, difficult. I have certainly learned quite quickly how difficult it must be for some folk at the present time. It’s not easy to be in hospital and to have no visitors. It’s not easy to have a loved one in hospital and not to be able to visit. It’s not easy to have a loved one die and not to have been able to be with him to hold his hand nor to plan a funeral the way one might have wished. But, of course, we all understand why it is essential that we all accept the rules and live by them for the benefit of ourselves and of everyone else.

This weekend is Pentecost when we shall celebrate the gift of the Holy Spirit to the Church and, in a very real sense, the birthday of the Church. I think and have always thought that this is one of the most important festivals of the Christian year and for this reason I and my camera recorded our service for this weekend from our Church. Social distancing didn’t come into it. I didn’t see another soul (except for Rachel who visited me briefly to do the reading). It is interesting that the right of a minister to visit his place of worship is specifically allowed under the Scottish covid-19 legislation.

Our service includes Holy Communion really because for me it is inconceivable to celebrate Pentecost without communion and, in these days of lockdown, there is no other way that we can do this. Although I prepare and film the service during the week, it is still quite a worshipful experience for me when I sit down with Rachel to share in the service at 10.30 on a Sunday morning. I really like the idea that although we are all in different places we are worshipping together in our own place.

I was asked how Sunday could still be special for me when I had spent all week preparing and delivering the service on video. I can tell you that it is, and when you think about it, it is no different than before when I would live with a service during the week leading up to Sunday, when everything that had been prepared would be shared. in Church. It was still special, in fact in Fogo Kirk it always was very special, and there were many times that I left Church having felt that God had been very close during our worship together. But it is also really special to see everyone’s faces at our Zoom Coffee and Chat!

I’m grateful to Tom and John who have been advising me on the development of our website and social media. I’ve been looking at what our sister congregations in the Borders provide, and learning from them. I always knew that the Church of Scotland had its own facebook page; what I didn’t realise until a couple of days ago is that there is a special facebook page for the Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. The reason why I am telling you this is that on Pentecost Sunday, through that page and, I suspect, through the webpage of the Church of Scotland, the Moderator is leading a country-wide service for the Festival of Pentecost. I understand that this service is embargoed until tomorrow but I will endeavour to provide a link so that our folk may tune in to it at some time tomorrow. Now there is an advantage of our online worship, one can share in it whenever one wishes. One can even revisit it a second time to see if the minister really said what you thought you heard! And one can share with several different congregations in their worship on the same day without leaving the comfort of your own home.

Of course, there are other wonderful advantages as well, not least that elderly folk who are now housebound can share in worship; and folk who aren’t sure if they are yet ready to visit a church can have a sneak preview of what a church service is really like.

For all of these reasons what we provide online is really important and I would value your feedback and suggestions of how we can improve what we offer. I am so aware that one of the marks of our regular Sunday worship was the huge amount of participation in every service — something which is no longer possible, partly because of lockdown and partly because of our limited experience and resources (which is another reason why it is good to share with the Moderator in a service which will have participation and which will have had a great deal of resource and expertise devoted to its preparation).

I spent this afternoon sitting in the sunshine in the courtyard with my mother enjoying her first full day back home. Rachel brought us afternoon tea, using the silver tea and coffee pots and with tiny, crustless sandwiches. Olive and Digger joined us. It was very pleasant.

Have a good week!

This blog is late in appearing, for which I apologise, but life has been a bit upside down this week. My mother of ninety-seven had a fall which has resulted in her being hospitalised in the Borders General Hospital (although we are hoping that she may be transferred to the Knoll later on today — I think that it depends upon a bed being available). She has suffered from an infection which is now under control, and now has to have some mobility assessment and assistance before, we hope, she is able to come back to be with us as soon as possible.

Life for the rest of us has centred around preparing services (Rachel is in charge of the music and preparing slides for the presentations), and doing some of the work around Mount Pleasant which urgently needs to be done. Everyone else seems to have got so much done but we have been so tied up with Church that we have negelected this opportunity. However, we have now made a start. In the Hen House (next to the Granary) we have completed painting what will be the master-bedroom, have fitted the skirting boards and I have tried, so far without success, to order a carpet so that we can move on to finding our wardrobes in one of the barns and fitting them together so that finally our clothes will have a home! Rachel has also been hard at work painting the woodwork upstairs in the Granary.

We always enjoy our walks around the field opposite Mount Pleasant and it is lovely to see the way that everything has started to grow. The dogs are a joy and Ditto has made himself very much at home and is very much quieter than when he arrived.

In a previous blog I raised the question of our Facebook page. My concern was that it really wasn’t very exciting — certainly compared with other Facebook pages I had seen. I asked for advice and help and I have listened carefully to everything which has been flowing back and forwards in emails. There are clearly conflicting views about Facebook. One group of our folk doesn’t want to have anything to do with it at all, while others think that it is quite important. I certainly have never had very much to do with Facebook until very recently. When I was in Luss one of the folk who looked after our technology created a page for me but it subsided into almost nonexistence through non-use. However, in the present situation it appears that all of our local churches are using Facebook as the prefered means of reaching out to those both in their congregations and to those who are in their communities. I’m told that if we wish to speak to those who are young — the folk we really need to communicate with because their absence from our church communities is so noticeable — then we really need to use Facebook (with all its flaws). So what I have been doing is to try to put up a good news story each day, drawn from the Church of Scotland nationally, or from the pages of other local congregations or from our own situation. I have been careful never to put up anything which I would be embarrassed in any way to have read back to me by anyone in the future. We are also using facebook to draw people to our services and without a doubt some of those who have joined us from around the world have joined us through accessing our Facebook page rather than through our web-site.

This morning, along with another nine-hundred and ninty-nine Church of Scotland workers, I joined a webinar (a seminar on the internet) in which we were told about the plans which the Church of Scotland centrally are developing for the future once the virus has been dealt with. There were good things and bad things. The Church expects that its income will be down by a third this year and this will, of course, have serious implications for the future. It will mean, perhaps, fewer ministers and fewer buildings. It will also mean fewer presbyteries as everyone who spoke to us from the Church administration made it clear that reducing the present number of presbyteries to twelve was almost the number one priority. Thus I anticipate that we in Duns Presbytery will join with Lothian, Melrose and Peebles, and Jedburgh to create a Lothian and Borders Presbytery. It is also clear that the central church sees not only far fewer buildings and but also a future in which congregations will worship in community buildings which do not belong to them. We were told that money will be found to develop the technology which will enable us to interact with society through modern chanels of communication. More people are certainly logging on to worship through web-sites and Facebook pages than ever attend church services in our buildings and the central church believes that this is something for us all to build on. I got the feeling that it was also felt that we had to learn to be more skilled in our use of the technology. It was pointed out that we talk a great deal about outreach to the young and yet few of our worship items offered actually include material for young people. We are not just going to have to learn to master the technology, we are going to have to master how to communicate using that technology. As I have thought about this during the course of this afternoon I have realised that there might be advantages in this. At present we don’t really want to change the way we do things in church because what we do is appreciated and enjoyed by the folk we have. If we are to use more online material we can provide something both for those who enjoy what they are used to and something for those for whom our current practice is less satisfactory. These are going to be interesting times.

For myself, I am looking forward to getting back into our beautiful Fogo Church. I’m determined that we continue to offer to God the best worship we can and I’m equally determined that we stream what we do through our web-site because there are folk who have started to join us who maybe aren’t yet ready to come to our building, and there are some folk who through age and infirmity are unable to come. I’m equally sure that our plan to create services for care homes with the assistance and the insight of young people is definitely a project worth pursuing. So there we are!

In case you have forgotten, this picture was taken the last time we met, when we had our planning discussion after our service and agreed the way forward. Wasn’t it good to be together, to share the mountains of food which everyone brought and to crowd so many people into such a small space!

And finally —

Our last chicken died — she had been here since we arrived almost seven years ago — and we were left with Bertie, the cockerel. Heather, our friend, presented us with two new chickens and now everyone is extremely happy!

Have a very good week.

Saturday 2nd. May, 2020

It’s been a busy week! What has been different is that Tom Nicholson has now retired and I am interim moderator at Gordon, Greenlaw, Legerwood and Westruther. Now you might wonder what that actually means given that we are all in lockdown. What it has meant in practice is that I have prepared services for Gordon, Greenlaw and Legerwood on line. Of course, they are basically the same service with different topping and tailing (you can see them on the new page I have inserted into our web-site – ‘Gordon, Greenlaw, Legerwood and Westruther’ tab at the top of each page of our website).

It would have been simpler if I could just have re-badged our Fogo Service but because we are part way through a series, I didn’t think that would be appropriate. I thought of starting their services at the beginning of our series but two reasons made me think that wouldn’t be appropriate either. First, some of the folk may already have shared in our services and second, there wouldn’t be enough Sundays before we run into Pentecost. So there we are. This week has been spent putting services together.

Now I promise not to talk about technology this week. I’ve done too much of that. But I would like to say a bit about preparing and delivering services on line. The first two or three weeks I found it very satisfying. I was able to strive towards getting something just right. I never quite got there but I felt I was getting nearer each week. In fact I felt that if I carried on doing this for a few more weeks I might get as close as I could to getting it right.

It was then that I realised that there was something missing. What it is, is interaction with real people. When I conduct a service in church I may not ever get it quite right but I am able to see how people are responding. I can pick up vibes. I can gauge how I need to adapt – I can see when I am boring folk rigid. But once something is online I haven’t a clue how appropriate what I have provided is turning out to be. You can’t communicate without feedback. Even a service where one person is basically running the show is a two-way process and that’s what I am missing. Often in Church I come out of the service feeling not only that I have worshipped with friends but that God has been very close to us during our worship. It’s difficult to feel that speaking into a camera, although sharing on a Sunday morning and knowing that others are doing the same at the same moment can feel very special.

I’m also missing the fact that our services used to have so much participation but that just isn’t possible now that we are in lockdown. However, I am being kept going by our daily meditations. I’m really taken by some of the insights which have been shared. I’m also enormously impressed by the way that folk are producing what they do with very little equipment. If it didn’t sound patronising, I would say how much everyone has developed during the time these meditations have been being prepared. It has been good for all of us who have participated. It would be good to welcome some more folk into the team!

It also remains true that our Sunday morning services are shared by many more folk than ever came to church in the days before lockdown. So, we will have to think about what this means when we can eventually return to our beautiful church.

I really enjoy our coffee and chat sessions after church. I’m picking up that some of us are finding it quite difficult to have real conversations on Zoom. It is really great to see everyone, but naturally we seem to say the same things each week. I hope that won’t stop folk from joining us because what is special is to see everyone. I think we have to have a definite close at 12 noon and that we have to say to everyone that it is all right to pop in to the Zoom room for just a few minutes and then to wave good-bye and move on. I also think it might be quite good to have something to talk about for a few minutes; that way we might share our news and then for those who wished we might have a themed discussion – perhaps on what we could be doing as a congregation in these strange times. Someone might have a great idea which would be really helpful for us.

A couple which have been floated with me are first that we might have a short ten-minute evening prayer on zoom once a week (say Wednesday) at (say) 7.30 p.m. The second idea is that we could put together a short news programme with folk giving to me by Zoom a brief statement of what is going on which has caught their imagination, and then I, or someone else who wished to do it, edit it into a magazine programme which we would showcase on our web-site and on FaceBook. After all the BBC regularly uses Zoom and similar platforms in its programmes so why shouldn’t we. Such a programme might reach folk in our parish who don’t as yet join our online worship. What do you think?

It’s now quite late on Saturday night so I’ll upload this to my blog page and look forward to seeing everyone tomorrow.