Saturday 18th. July, 2020

I am heartily ashamed to have taken so long to get around to writing this blog entry. Here we are in lockdown, unable to go out and spend time with other people and yet every moment of every day has been taken up with activities which have prevented me from sitting down at my computer and writing a few words.

Now, let me spend the next few paragraphs explaining why this has been. First of all, presbytery agreed to have its end of June meeting by Zoom and at this meeting I was elected as Moderator for this next year. I wouldn’t expect that this will be especially onerous but it will involve time spent on presbytery matters which in the past I have been happy to leave to others!

At the same time, Tom Nicholson has retired from his charge of Gordon, Greenlaw, Legerwood and Westruther and I have taken over as interim moderator. Obviously there has not been a great which I can do physically during these strange times. But I have been providing an online service and I have been available on the telephone to try to help the congregations as they move forward. There isn’t going to be a vacancy because it has already been agreed (I think) that these congregations will not get another minister but will receive ministerial assistance and will be encouraged to learn to provide for themselves in the years ahead — that’s not to be hard on them, it is the way that the world — or at least the Church of Scotland — is going.

Risk assessments regarding church re-opening at these churches have been completed (Tom has supervised this), plans have been made, and it seems likely that Legerwood Parish Church will reopen on Sunday 2nd. August and Greenlaw on Sunday 30th. August. The congregation at Gordon hasn’t as yet made definite plans, nor have they applied for Presbytery permission to reopen, but I think that they are working towards the date of 6th. September as their reopening day.

You will know that the Scottish government gave permission for churches to reopen first for private prayer and then for communal worship subject to a whole range of conditions from this Sunday onwards. When the matter was raised at our Zoom Coffee and Chat meeting last Sunday everyone present thought that we should reopen the church this Sunday. I was quite taken by surprise at this as I thought that several of our folk would find it difficult to come back to church at this time. However, that was what was the clear feeling of our Zoom group so that is what we are doing. (I need to stress that those for whom it will be difficult should not come to church until they are ready to do so — our online worship is not to be seen as second best (certainly not by me, at any rate).

I will continue to provide an online service each Sunday both for adults and for children — I’ll just have to reconcile myself to the fact that there will be less folk sharing in it.

An enormous amount of work has gone into making the church ready to reopen for worship. It’s one thing to draw up a risk assessment and a plan of what should be done, it’s quite another to get it all done. And yet here we are on the day before our reopening with everything done, and done really thoroughly. Even our orders of service have been printed and placed in envelopes without being touched by hand, and the envelopes placed on seats without being touched by hand, and left on seats for three days to ensure tht they are absolutely risk free.

I won’t repeat all that has been done because it is all on the front page of this web-site; I will repeat my thanks to Tom and Tom and others who have made it all possible.

I should also tell you that Tom T has now taken on the task of being Presbytery Webmaster (the position really should come with a pointed hat) and he has been reinvigorating both the presbytery’s website and facebook page. He worked on the website so hard that at one stage it blew up and sat dormant for several days until it had got its breath back. There is still a lot to do but Tom is making real progress.

On the subject of facebook, about which I know several people have reservations, I should tell you that in the last twenty-eight days no less than 2,556 different people have accessed our page. That’s nothing compared to the facebook pages of the Church of Scotland or of the Moderator of the General Assembly, but for a small village church it’s not at all bad — and there have been some very supportive messages about both our worship and our daily prayers. So, well done team!

On the non-church front, Rachel decided that we were going to empty a barn and find a set of wardrobes which we used in our home in Luss. It was a very major exercise, but we managed and, even more remarkably, we succeeded in re-erecting the wardrobes — and they look great.

Other than that, there is little to report. Well, with all of the church preparations there has been little time for anything else. I look enviously at other folks’ nice shorn lawns and think, ‘If I didn’t have a service to prepare …’ But truth to tell, I have enjoyed the challenge of doing things differently, even if it has been such a steep learning curve.

Most of all I have enjoyed preparing something for the children — enjoyed and found challenging — as with everything new, it has taken me a little while to find my feet, but I’ve hit on the idea of being present with children in the early church as they meet with the disciples and ask them their questions. I’m finding that great fun. It will also take a while to find our feet, or at least for me to find my feet, in the new way of worshipping without singing in church but you are all kind and will allow me, I know, a few weeks to hit on an appropriate formula.

The one thing that I am really sorry about is that with the reopening of the church we can’t manage to have a Zoom Coffee and Chat at 11.15 a.m. We could if the church had broad band but unfortunately at present it doesn’t. I can’t tell you how much our Zoom meetings have encouraged me over these last months. I can’t tell you how much I have missed all of our church folk and how much I am looking forward to seeing you all again in the flesh quite soon.

Saturday 20th. June, 2020

Well, here we are already in the middle of summer. We all from Mount Pleasant sat out in the courtyard in the sunshine this afternoon with Scott (my brother) and Sue and their daughter Katie. Mum really enjoyed seeing real people who weren’t carers. It was such a novel experience that I forgot to take a photograph!

This week has been busy by lockdown standards. I attended a Zoom Business Committee meeting about Presbyery, a Ministers’ meeting about Presbytery and a Kirk Session Meeting as well and, I understand, on Tuesday there will be a Presbytery meeting on Zoom.

The meeting which affects us in Fogo was our Kirk Session meeting which had been called by Tom (our Session Clerk to distinguish him from Tom our Presbytery Elder) to seek the Kirk Session’s approval to our seeking permission from Presbytery to reopen our Church for private prayer as well as, for example, small funeral gatherings.

To get to this stage Tom had completed a twelve-page risk assessment and both Toms will be at church on Moday ensuring that everything is implemented. It’s not so much about social distancing in church (that is quite straightforard in our situation), so much as getting folk in and out. I suppose we’ll have to have someone on duty at the church gate to ensure that folk walk down the path in isolation, and then someone outside the church only admitting folk one at a time or in their small family groups, and then another inside the church to direct those who have come in to sanitise their hands and to go to a particular seat or pew. And then, at the end of the service the whole thing can be done in reverse. It maybe that after even a small service we shall have to close the church for seventy-two hours to enable any virus to die out: at least that is one of the suggestions which has been made to us.

Of course, having permission to open the church is not the same as saying that we will open it on all occasions. There are certainly no plans at present to open the church for morning worship. It is not yet permitted and in any case, even if it were, we might have reservations about opening because so many of our folk might not be able to come because of health conditions. I think that we shall be online for quite a while yet, and probably there will be a time in the future when we are both on line and in church.

Which leads me on to thinking about what we do online. I’ve been looking at what different churches do on line at the moment — there is a huge variety of offerings. Some, Norman at Ayton and Andrew at Duns, offer a Zoom service on Sunday morning. Andy at Eyemouth streams a service from his home. This is recorded and offered later on in the day on Facebook. Adam at Berwick and Mike at Chirnside offer shorter meditative services using lots of pictures and often quite modern singing and music. Norman also offers a written thought for Sunday while David at Coldstream presents a written service with the hymns and short talk on video in their appropriate place within the script. All work well and are, I know, generally appreciated and I have tried where I can to share their services on our FaceBook page so that we can all enjoy and be encouraged by what other local congregations are sharing. (I haven’t told you about what Gordon, Greenlaw and Legerwood are doing because, since Tom retired, they are sharing with us.)

I’ve adopted a slightly different approach in attempting to present a complete and fairly traditional service from my Mount Pleasant lockdown headquarters! The reason I’ve adopted this approach is because I know that folk need something of the traditional to hold on to while we are out of our churches and what I offer is certainly more traditional than what I offer in church, not least because in church I normally would share the service with at least seven or eight other people, a luxury which is denied me while operating in lockdown.

I’ve also tried to concentrate on the educational side of the preaching spectrum because I think that while we have time to think in our isolated situations it is good to try to remind people of some of the important stories from Scripture and to try to build up all of our Biblical knowledge and understanding. That’s why I have started working my way through the Book of the Acts of the Apostles, an adventure in which the apostles always seem to be up against it (as we seem to be just now) but come sailing through and with the guidance of the Holy Spirit achieve the most remarkable results.

When it came to mission they knew what they were doing — if they hadn’t, I don’t suppose that we would be here worshipping together today — and whether many future generations will be doing the same in years to come will depend upon how we act, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, today.

Saturday 6th. June

It’s been a good week. Sunny for the most part, and earlier in the week we were able to eat outside in the courtyard which was an incentive for us to try to do some tidying up. We also got into one of the barns and started emptying boxes which had remained untouched since we came here from Loch Lomond-side nearly seven years ago.

It was lovely to eat out in the open air with never a midge to be seen and I have watched all of the pictures of my former home being overrun with visitors and thought how fortunate we are to be here in the Borders.

Pentecost was special for me. It was grand to be back in Church even if just to film the service and it was really kind of so many people to contact me afterwards and tell me how much they had enjoyed our service and not just from our congregation but from other local congregations as well. Having said that, I need to tell you that folk have also been in touch with me to say how much they are enjoying the daily prayers and meditations prepared by our members. So thank you to everyone involved!

There is still no news on when we shall be able to get back into our church for regular worship and we may be continuing to share online for some time to come although, I understand, having the church officially open for private prayer will be allowed quite soon.

I’ve enjoyed putting together a service for Trinity Sunday tomorrow (Trinity Sunday really is quite unique in the Christian calendar) and I’m swithering about what to concentrate on in coming weeks. The lectionary will continue to provide us with Gospel and Old Testament passages but I’m finding myself drawn to the Book of the Acts of the Apostles, I think because these are such strange times and I feel an affinity with those first Christians as we endure lockdown and a threatening world around us. On the other hand, Matthew has a great deal to teach us as well. I’d love to hear what other folk think.

Now it is time for me to join the others in the farmhouse for our evening meal, after which Rachel and I are taking the dogs for an evening stroll to celebrate the fact that Clare’s former dog Ditto, now staying with us, is three today and Rachel says that even dogs have to be indulged on their birthdays!

I hope you have a very happy week.

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.

Saturday 25th. April, 2020

It has been a busy week and a great deal of it has been experimenting with technology (and not getting it right). A big example of that is our service for tomorow morning, I wanted to do my talk outside, but that just didn’t work, in part because the sun was too bright! So I took it inside the summer house and I’m really not happy with the lighting and the finished product. But, as we keep on saying, we are on a learning curve and won’t make the same mistake again. (I’m sure there is a parable about life in there somewhere.)

We were asked last Sunday in our after-church coffee and chat session to think about having worship on Zoom. It might be more homely, I think was the word used. I’m happy to try that but I have a few reservations which have becomne stronger as I have spoken with colleagues over the course of this week. Let me explain.

The value of Zoom is that we are all there together, we can see each other and we can communicate. But the main parts of the service in which we participate are the singing and responsive prayers and, I’m told, that neither of these work very well on Zoom. It’s because everyone’s bandwidths are different and, as a result, singing gets all out of sync, and it’s the same with responsive prayers. One minister told me that he had initially prepared online services (similar, I suppose, to what I am doing) but he gave that up because he discovered that people weren’t watching. So he adopted Zoom and is continuing with that inspite of the difficulties I have outlined above. The solution he has adopted is to keep most of the folk’s microphones muted so that they can’t speak, but that almost seems to defeat the idea of participation.

Many congregations seem to be using Zoom for coffee and chat meetings and for formal business meetings of their congregations. Another minister told me that after church (he has two congregations) he can get twenty or thirty folk joining for the zoom chat and he uses a facility to divide folk into smaller ‘rooms’ so that everyone gets a chance to participate. We’re not at that stage!

Of course, what most congregations appear to be doing is to live stream their service and then, after the service, make it available on their website. I would like to have a conversation with my folk about whether a live stream would be better than a prerecorded service which we all share in at the same time. I’ve had a lot of experience of this as my service in Luss was streamed live for most of the fifteen years I was minister there. If we were all in our church then I would definitely want to stream our worship live but as it is coming from a room in my house, I don’t see the advantage in streaming it live rather than recording it and all sharing in it at the same time. Prerecording it means that most of the technical hitches are avoided because the service is sitting there on line; it means that the service is tighter and more compact because it has been edited — an analogy which keeps coming into my head, but which I’m not sure is totally relevant, is the difference between the minister or elder praying and making up the words as he or she goes along, compared with having prepared everything and written it down before coming to the service. I’m happy to try both ways.

One thing which you will have noticed is that we are having less of our very modern songs in worship. It isn’t that I have reverted to a previous age, rather that I am trying to be careful of copyright issues. We have bought a streaming licence which augments our existing music licence, but the most modern of songs don’t appear to be covered by that licence.

The other thing to be put into the mix is that up until now our service has been a service for us from Fogo. Later this afternoon I shall be writing to everyone in Greenlaw, Gordon, Legerwood and Westruther, offering to make our service a service for all of our congregations as they will be without their minister. I’m not sure quite what difference this makes — and I’d value advice. Should I just re-label what we do at present and make our service one which is for all of our congregations? Should I prepare a special short introduction for each congregation and make five different versions of our services? (Or one Fogo version and one for the four linked congregations?) I haven’t a clue!

One suggestion made to me is that we shouldn’t try to move our service to Zoom but that we consider an evening prayer (a reading and prayer, no longer than ten minutes ) on say, a Wednesday, at 7 or 7.30 pm. Would this be a good thing? And what time, or even day, would be best? I would conduct this myself but would invite different folk to read the Bible passage. This might enable us to work out just how much Zoom can do for us.

So I’m needing feedback. I look forward to not blogging anymore about technology, but I think we are going to discover that technology becomes increasingly important in church life. But it is strange. It’s strange not to see friends. I miss the hugs and the smiles, and the chat and just being with people who are important to me. I hope those days will return soon.

Saturday 18th. April, 2020

I hope that this last week has been a good one for everyone who is reading this blog. It is certainly beginning to dawn on me that it is quite some time since I have seen any of my friends face to face. Thank goodness for technology — well, almost ‘thank goodness’. My reservation is only that I am not so adept at using it as younger folk and most of my week has been spent trying to find ways of making things work.

I am so grateful to those who have agreed to prepare thoughts and prayers for our web-site. It keeps us in touch and it is better, even although we are only learning the technology, to hear someone speaking and to see their faces rather than be presented with the written word alone.

Everyone who is contributing sends me their contributions in different ways — some come as zoom messages through Drop Box; others come as messages attached to emails; still more are generated by autocue programmes for ipads, and still others are recorded by me as the speaker reads his words into a zoom conference. Actually, all of these work quite well and we shall get better as we go on. Better, I’m sure, in every way; so please do stick with us.

My problems start when the file arrives and I prepare it to put on our web-site, Much of my problem is caused by the fct that the technology I am using is older than the technology that everyone else is using. Modern ‘phones and ipads and computers send me the material in High Definition Video but I have been making my programmes using an old video camera which I bought way back when I was a minister in Glasgow and I left there in 1998! I also have an editing programme which dates from around the same time. So I have been using what is called Digital Video which is a precursor to HDV. The difference is that my pictures are in the ratio of four by three (as television used to be) and everyone elses’ pictures are sixteen by nine (as television is now). Naturally my software won’t cope with modrn pictures as their format hadn’t been invented when it was written.

None of this matters — at least that’s what I thought until John and Kirsten very kindly volunteered to conduct our service for tomorrow. I would do the music and the topping and tailing and they would provide the meat. Of course that meant I had to try to put two different technologies together and mix long pictures with almost square pictures. The result is not as bad as I had feared — and it is saved certainly by the quality of the content of the service. But my big exercise now is trying to move into the 2020s. Just before this moment I have finally managed to complete a programme in sixteen by nine ratio. It’s the song for our children’s worship tomorrow and I am rather pleased with it because the pictures (of our Holy Land pilgrims and folk at Fogo Church) match the words beautifully and speak of our mission priorities. I’m not going to say more than that so that you will have to visit our children’s page! But perhaps after the children have seen it tomorrow I may add the song to the front page for everyone to see when they join our web-site.

Our service last Sunday, Easter, was conducted entirely on old technology. I am so grateful for all of the messages which we have received about how much the service was appreciated. We have deliberately restricted access to our services to those who access them through the church web-site so that we can know how many people visit who already have some connection with us, rather than those who browse the web and constantly explore youtube (on which the servcie is not available). Many more people than attend our services week by week are joining our Sunday services on line and that will inevitably raise questions for us in the future.

I was very grateful also for the comments which I have received about our Easter Communion. There is a debate going on within the Church about whether it is appropriate to provide communion on-line. I understand the worries that some people have: communion is something we do together with our Lord among us. In the normal course of events I would probably not have been so keen to provide commuion in this way. But these are exceptional circumstances and the difference is, it seems to me, that people cannot be together in one place, so we have to be together at the same time each in our own place. So it seemed to me to be the most natural thing to do, although I hoped that most of us would actually be sharing in the service at the same time on Sunday morning.

In the event, I got lots of messages from folk who had really enjoyed the experience and one message from someone (a friend) who didn’t think that it was appropriate. I’d love to hear other peoples’ views.

During the week Tom T, John B, Tom S and Dorothy, Chris, and Kirsten and John A all signed up, volunteered, were press-ganged into agreeing to provide a short worship slot each once a week for the immediate future. I’d love to have other volunteers as we have such a breadth of worship traditions and a great pool of talent and experience within our church family. Do let me know if you can join our team!

Also during this week, John B has agreed to have a serious look at our web-site. He really is a volunteer. He tells me that it’s not just my video technology which is outdated but also my web-site theory! Folk nowadays don’t want to scroll down endless pages. I am absolutely sure that he is correct and I’m grateful that he is loooking into things for us. I would love it if we could have smaller thumbnails of our videos rather than full size pictures (the best that I can do) and if instead of having complete texts below each one, we could have a sentence or two and the a ‘read more’ to click on to get the full story. This is all quite important as more and more folk are now keeping in touch through web-sites and FaceBook. If you have any views and any expertise, John and I would love to hear from you. (We’ve bought a new web-domain which John will be experimenting with over coming weeks.)

So there we are, the sun is shining and, thanks to Kirsten and John, the service for tomorrow is already prepared. I am going to have lunch in the garden. Stay safe and keep well.