I’ve deliberately not thought about it until now. I’ve concentrated on preparing worship to post on Church Facebook pages and email out to digitally connected members. I’ve started recording services accessible through YouTube with links to suggested hymn videos. I’ve phoned members to check they are ok, as I’m keeping myself and my household isolated due to various medical conditions within our family.
What I haven’t done is thought about how it feels not to be gathering in church with my sisters and brothers in Christ to lead worship. In this Holy Week, when
I would normally be taking, or taking part in, some form of service with others I haven’t allowed myself to dwell on how that actually feels. As we approach Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter Day I’m trying to avoid thinking about not physically being with others in corporate worship to share those very special Holy days.
I know, I know the church isn’t the building, it’s the people who gather there. I know. And yet, deep down I want to gather again with my congregations in our church buildings, to stand behind the lecterns and join in live corporate singing to the tune of a well played organ (or, occasionally, Singing the Faith CDs).
On Good Friday I will miss the fish and chips we always share after the service at one of the churches I have pastoral charge of.
On Easter Day I will miss getting up at 5:30am to join others in our local park for our ecumenical sunrise service (Ok, I might enjoy the extra couple of hours in bed). I will miss the Holy Communion breakfast and then the decorating of the Easter cross with daffodils for our main service. I will miss singing the glorious Easter hymns with other people and, perhaps most of all, sharing in Holy Communion.
True we are finding new ways of being church. I’ve mentioned some of them above. And I like the suggestion that the church isn’t closed, it has been deployed; in the sense that we are all praying and living as disciples in our local community: but there is definitely something about gathering corporately for worship and fellowship that is an indispensable part of our spiritual DNA.
Christianity is focussed on God incarnate in man, the divine becoming enfleshed; the Word living amongst us full of grace and truth. There is something about physical presence, about meeting together as sisters and brothers in Christ which I find myself increasingly missing and which I wiill grieve for until we are able to gather again.
I deliberately used the phrase “until we are able to gather again” rather than “until things get back to normal” because the latter phrase implies that when the Coronavirus crisis has passed things will be the same as they were before, in society and in our churches and they just won’t be.
I can’t predict what those changes will be, none of us can. Our society and world could look very different in just a few months time.
So too could our churches.
Sadly there may be congregations that must face their end because the finances they need to keep going have been exhausted and they will have to find new churches with which to worship.
But even those who gather together with familiar people in familiar buildings will be different, because we will all have been changed by our experiences of the next few weeks, perhaps months. Some will have experienced new forms of worship, new music and songs, new ways of praying and will not want to go back to the way we did things before. Others will be clinging through these weeks and months to the traditions they miss so much and will welcome the chance to take up familiar routines on a Sinday morning, yet even they may be open to doing something different , something new because they too may well have experienced new ways of worshipping they have enjoyed.
Sadly, may not return at all, having discovered they haven’t missed corporate church worship at all.
Church, when we return, will be different and should be different because we will not be the same people as we were in the middle or March. God is ever with us and is leading us as disciples through these turbulent times and God will go on leading us as things settle down into what might be called a new normal.
I miss us physically gathering together for worship and fellowship and I miss the opportunities for mission and service. I’m looking forward to starting to worship together in church again, but hopefully in a new transformed way: transformed because we have been changed by our experience of the changes in our society, transformed because we are following the lead of God’s Holy Spirit in worship, fellowship, mission and service.
Right now some of us are mourning what we have lost, albeit temporarily, but we can also be looking forward to all that is to be under the care, guidance and leading of our God who is infinite love.
No comments:
Post a Comment