Planning our safe return to worship
- Details
- Published: Saturday, 04 July 2020 00:24
- Written by James Dean
In case you missed it, here's Pastor James Pope's update following the Government's recent update on places of worship, and on our plans to safely return to worshipping together (a transcript is included below).
Transcript
I’d just like to respond to the announcement that the Prime Minister made at the start of last week that said places of worship could start to open from the 4th July. Now as at this point we’re still waiting for official Government guidelines on that, but the understanding is that we would be able to open the church but that would come with a number of restrictions to start with:
- We would need to keep socially distanced: either 2m apart or 1m+, so maybe with a mask
- We won’t be able to sing together,
- Might well be other measures around the preacher or others taking part in the service,
- At this time we also don’t think we would be able to do other things we do such as children’s work or coffee time.
Also, for our church we don’t meet in our own building so we are at the mercy of others who will rightly at this time have their own safety issues and responsibilities.
So, in light of all this for the time being the elders & deacons agree that we will stay put online for our Sunday morning. We will keep reviewing this and seek the input from those across the church as we seek to move forward together in this.
We are still thinking through if there are other things we can do together in person, maybe life groups or prayer meetings for example, but again these will depend on premises available to us and further understanding of the Government guidelines.
The announcement that two households can meet now and use indoors I think is hugely positive though. It means that you may be able to join with another person or family group to watch the service on a Sunday morning and I think that this may be great fellowship to even join with one other person or family group after being apart for so long. And of course the opportunity is still there to meet up outdoors in groups of up to 6 people, as long as social distancing guidelines are followed.
If you would like to chat any of this further, give me a shout. I know this is tough, and we long to be back together and that’s good. But we want to do that safely and in the right way. So do continue to pray with us that God would lead us, that we would have his wisdom in this as we look to the future.
A further message from the FIEC
We also received a message from FIEC’s National Director, John Stevens, given to all FIEC churches as we begin to think about the journey out of lockdown.
