As we prepare to hold worship inside our church this Sunday at 9am we have begun to transform our worship space in order to accommodate the different comfort levels people are at in the midst of this global pandemic. When you walk into the sanctuary there will be two tables set-up for you to sign-in at for contact tracing purposes. The table will also have bulletins, and masks, and other items. Before each table is a hand sanitizing post and we ask that we all sanitize. The greeters will help direct you and will make sure you have a mask and that you are wearing your mask. We have extra chairs set-up to help spread out from one another. We have not crossed out pews because if we did ,following 6 feet guidelines, there would only be about 8 pews available. If this makes you feel uncomfortable or you are high risk we ask you to consider one of the many other options we will provide that we cover in this blog. You are allowed to seat yourself but please be respectful of those around you and make sure they are comfortable with how close you have chosen to sit next to them. We as the church should be able to do this and this will allow us to show that we as brothers and sisters in Christ can work together.
In the sanctuary the pulpit has been moved back farther so that there is more distance between myself and the congregation since I will be the one doing most of the talking(:
We have transformed Fellowship Hall and have a beautiful altar downstairs along with a new 65' television that will broadcast the service live. The chair groupings are spaced out 6 ft apart all the way around (a picture of it is attached). This will provide a place for people that want to be in the church to worship that are high risk, and especially for those that are high risk and do not have good internet service at their homes. We have created this as a special place and while it is not the same as being in the sanctuary it will allow a very safe gathered community to assemble! If you wish to use this as your worship space please walk in from the downstairs doors. There is sign-in station down there with bulletins and everything else that is available on the upstairs sign-in table. And yes just like upstairs masks are required to be worn and worn properly.
For all of you who are staying in the safety of your home, we love you deeply and want to help you feel as connected as possible with your church family. We have worked hard to develop all we need to have a great online worship experience. Your church has invested in a new computer that can handle live-streaming, purchased a new videocamera that will allow us to have a great quality picture, we have paid to increase our internet speed at the church, we have purchased programs that allow us to livestream on both Facebook and YouTube at the same time, we have added the livestream to our church website that was just upgraded during the pandemic. This is just a short list of how we have invested to try to have a great on-line worship experience for those in our church community who are needing to stay at home. There will be problems along the way because technology does fail but we will endeavor to keep improving this as we find issues and problems along the way.
We will continue to offer a number that people can call into worship on using there phone. Unfortunately, we have not figured out a way to get the sound as perfect as we would like on this feature. As we move into the church for worship we know when we have attempted in the past the sound quality was not the greatest. If you attempt this because you do not have internet connectivity please let me know and I can burn a CD that has the service, but that would require you to have a CD player(:
Tomorrow, I will post the bulletin and provide another blog with more details. I did not want to put all the details in one blog because it would be overwhelming. Friends, this global pandemic has tried to break us and break our church and we have not allowed it to. At the end of this we will be a stronger church that has a greater reach than we did before COVID. We will continue to transform to meet the need of creating a community of Jesus followers and to share the Good News with the world!!!
Peace,
PH
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