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.