Good news – Sunday morning worship is back on! Bad news – lots of people are still shielding and locked down at home. So…
From Sunday 5 July at 9am there will be a communion service in Box, and then at 10am there will be a communion service in Minchinhampton. On-line, Sandy will be hosting Zoom coffee and chat at 10.45am, and there will be Zoom, online Evening Prayer at 5.30pm. However, there will be no 8am communion service (at least for the moment).
We are anticipating that we shall be live-streaming our worship from Minchinhampton at 10am (this replaces our morning video worship), but if that fails there is at least a video of the gospel and sermon posted already for those at home. At the moment, the lack of good Wi-Fi signal in church means that the sound quality of our live-stream feed will not be great, but we hope you will still be able to follow what is going on. We expect to remedy the sound quality in the next week or two.
So, reentering the church building means we have lots of advice we need to adhere to, all of which should make sense in the context of the rules we now live our lives by; but the most important advice to consider for now, is working out whether you will be coming back to church at the moment. On which note, this is the advice the church has received from the government:
- Certain groups of people may be at increased risk of severe disease from COVID-19, including people who are aged 70 or older, regardless of medical conditions. Individuals who fall within this group are advised to stay at home as much as possible, and meet as few people as possible face to face, and take care to minimise contact with others outside of their household.
- Those who are considered to be extremely clinically vulnerable to COVID-19 will have been advised to shield and are currently advised not to meet more than one person from outside of their own household, and are therefore not currently advised to attend places of worship. Those shielding may choose to gather in groups of up to 6 people outdoors and form a support bubble with another household, they are therefore still advised not to attend places of worship indoors.
- Both the above groups of people are advised that there are increased risks to you if you attend public worship. The final decision about whether you attend worship or not is yours and yours alone. The church will not be policing government advice, however we are counting on a significant number of our usual congregation not being with us, as we can only fit half the usual congregation in church and still socially distance.
We are doing our best to make our buildings as safe as possible for all who are visiting us, be that during the week or on a Sunday morning. On Sunday mornings, we will be able to offer communion, but you will only be offered wafers. Just as the decision to attend worship or not is yours, you might also choose not receive communion if you don't wish to take that additional risk, even though you have come to church.
There will be no Sunday School possible, but there are Sunday School resource sheets ready in the children's corner and see links below.
