Some people have asked what we are doing and why we cancelled the large carol events with singing last Sunday. We hope that the following information is useful.

We are delighted that over 200 cars will be driven into our COVID ‘bubble’ Christmas carol service. We’re offering a 9am short communion service (in person, not online) for the Benefice and live-streamed main morning Christmas Day service at 10am with a limited congregation.

In the New Year we’ll continue to offer our limited congregation access as we offer both Classic and Contemporary worship and also the pre-recorded BCP Heritage; which we are sure will go live with a congregation in the near future when we can resource this.

We weep with those who weep (Rom 12:15)

Tier 4 starts in areas of Godalming. It is about us standing with our brothers and sisters in Christ who worship with us but who now have to be at home as they should not cross a Tier boundary. Going ahead with worship tempts people to cross this boundary or it raises the spectre of ‘them’ and ‘us’ amongst our own people.

We mourn with those who mourn (Rom 12:15)

The wider community is either in a situation where they can see 1 person or 6 people and only outside. It is not possible to have more than 15 people at a funeral and weddings can only be held under exceptional circumstances. Gathering groups of people in our buildings or larger groups in the open air could sound like ‘exceptionalism’ whereas we are called to identify with our neighbours and love them by mourning with them.

We take safety seriously

There is a new highly transmissible strand of the virus. Several of those involved in leading the online live worship are now more aware of social distancing and we must ensure they feel and are safe. If we cannot do this, we will find our ability to provide this form of worship is reduced.

Given the medical information available over the weekend, we felt we should err on the side cautious than become a super-spreading community.

We care for the vulnerable (PS 82:3a)

There may be some who are alone and need to see others in worship and some of those may not be on the internet. We have worked hard over the past six months to identity such people and Penny and the Prime Time team have folded them in with us; Dave, Anto and a team have installed youtube and zoom for people and them on using their computers/ipads.

We are offering spaces to gather primarily with those who are alone or without the internet in mind. We have ways to sign people up even if they are not on the internet.

Daily Hope is on our website so that anyone who knows someone without access to the internet can point them to this excellent free worship resource.

We approach worship in a manner which is God honouring (1 Cor 10:31)

We are committed to continually improving, slowly expanding and developing the worship, teaching and spiritual nourishment which we offer. We are nearly there with tech installation and we will explain more in the New Year.

We can gather people, but, to paraphrase Chris Witty in a Government bulletin, that is not the same as it being right to do so. We urge people to consider being online to allow the alone to gather. To aid Track and Trace and to enable service leaders to plan our hybrid approach to live-worship we will be asking everyone who wishes to attend to sign up. If someone new, alone or without the internet arrives without signing up we will endeavour to accommodate them.

Have a peace-filled and safe Christmas in the comfort of Christ,

Simon