Church Family Matters

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Welcome to this edition of Church Family Matters. I trust that you are staying alert and keeping safe.

I am sure many of you are aware that the Government has now given permission for churches to be open for private prayer and for funerals subject to strict safety measures being put in place to ensure that the spread of the Corona virus is kept to an absolute minimum.

Following lengthy discussions the standing committee in Peasedown and the PCC in Wellow have decided to open their respective churches for private prayer. St Julian’s Wellow will be open every Thursday from the 18th June between 10am and 12 noon and St John’s in Peasedown will be open every Sunday from the 21st June between 2 and 4pm. The churches in Foxcote and Shoscombe will remain closed. We are currently working on the Risk Assessments necessary to open the churches for funerals.

We are aware that the government may, as part of its easing of lockdown restrictions, allow churches to gather once again from Monday 6th July. We will, as we have for opening our churches for private prayer and funerals, have to put together a lengthy risk assessment in order to start our Sunday services once again. With social distancing of two metres being mandatory, we are aware that the capacity of our church buildings for Sunday services is vastly reduced. Given that households can sit together, we are estimating in St John’s Peasedown for example, that we could possibly accommodate safely around 20 to 25 members of the church family. Singing vastly increases the possibility of spreading the corona virus and if we wanted to sing then we would need to introduce five metre social distancing in the church building which would mean that our capacity for church members would be reduced to a bare minimum of say 5 people. Given our limited capacity even without singing we would, albeit regrettably, need to introduce a booking system to ensure that we could maximise the number of people who could attend. Like boarding an aircraft we would need to allocate people specific seats and insist that they stay in these from the beginning of the service until they leave at the end. In order to maintain the social distancing within the building during the service and to prevent the spread of the virus we certainly could not entertain people milling around and talking to each other at the end of the service and likewise would be unable to offer refreshments.

Feedback from countries who are already further along the lockdown easing than ourselves and who have one metre social distancing in place is that church services without singing are certainly very strange.

To help us in our planning, should restrictions be eased in early July, we sent out a single question questionnaire to try and gauge who might want to return to church given the current restrictions. A good number of you have responded. If you haven’t could I please encourage you to do so.

Last week saw our 12th Sunday Supplement programme and we do plan to continue with this for the foreseeable future. If you have any comments to make about the Sunday Supplement or how we might run our Sunday Services within the current restrictions please do not hesitate to be in contact with me.

In our next edition of Church Family Matters I will hopefully be sharing with you in more detail exactly how we plan to re-open our churches for Sunday Worship. Until then may God bless you and keep you safe in these strange lockdown times.

Rev. Matthew Street

17th June 2020