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.