A Wee Update

A Wee Update

Dear Friends,

The Services

Many of you have been asking if the Daily Devotion services will continue now that dates have been set, in England at least, for when churches may offer public worship again.  We are conscious that not every congregation will wish to resume public worship straight away given our demographic, the style of worship that can be offered (no singing and socially distanced) and the sheer hard work that the extra cleaning and admin will require.  Two of my four churches have decided to wait until social distancing isn’t necessary and the other two are making decisions this week.  We realise these are a good resource for the housebound and we are also conscious that many churches use lay preachers and retired ministers who are older and who may wish not to resume this aspect of their ministry until it is safe to do so.  All this means many congregations will be looking for worship resources regardless of whether they return to worship soon or if they wait until restrictions are no longer in place.

For all these reasons the Daily Devotion services have been planned to run, at least, until the end of November.  We have people booked to take the services until then; we hope this is a resource that you continue to find useful in your own churches and individual lives.  We don’t yet know what will happen from December onwards.

I’ve been asked if previous services could be burnt to CD and used locally in a gathered service – yes of course!  I intend to make the “back catalogue” easily available for this to happen in the next few weeks; and of course we send out services around a month in advance for people if they distribute locally.  If you aren’t on the early bird list you can sign up for it here.

Email Problems

Every week people email me to say they’ve not had a Devotion or Service.  In 90% of cases the email has gone into the Spam or Junk folder.  Please do add this email address to your contacts and, if your email programme has one, a Safe Senders’ list.  That really helps!  Please do check your junk folder before emailing.  You can always catch up via devotions.urc.org.uk

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And Finally

A couple of weeks ago I sent out a new hymn by John Bell from the Iona Community.  The Rev’d Ray Fraser has also written a hymn reflecting on the context that we find ourselves in and is pleased to share it with any who find it useful.  You can hear it here.

with every good wish

Andy