COMMENT / The Rt Revd Libby Lane, Bishop of Stockport on Towards a Safer Church: resources for prayer and reflection in worship

The Coronation Service is, at its heart and in its structure, a celebration of Holy Communion.

Churches offering services from the Book of Common Prayer are seeing unprecedented engagement with hundreds choosing to ‘tune in’ to more traditional offerings. 

A curate has started a local text-a-prayer service for those wanting someone to pray with amid Covid-19 restrictions. 

Since the government announced that public worship in churches could restart after more than three months of lockdown, churches have been taking innovative steps to help keep their congregations as safe as possible:

An online Community of Prayer is to be launched after a cathedral saw digital worship numbers soar after Covid-19 restrictions came into force.

A prayer ahead of Racial Justice Sunday this week written by Revd Dr Anderson Jeremiah, a member of the Archbishops’ Anti-Racism Taskforce.

Residents at Westview House in Totland Bay, on the Isle of Wight might be living with dementia – but they could remember the words to the Lord’s Prayer. 

The churches of St Peter’s and St Philip’s in Highfields and Evington in Leicester began livestreaming services on Facebook and YouTube from the start of the first lockdown last year.

We have become ‘a different sort of church’ in ways we couldn’t have imagined several weeks ago. While worship in our churches is suspended, our joy in the resurrection is not to be silenced.