If the lockdown has banished worshippers from church interiors, it has also spurred them to contrive other gambits for keeping their faith intact and operational. One reaction to lockdown has been to re-invent that much maligned publishing feature, the parish magazine. From the hardy chrysalis of a product which in its day sold millions has emerged a delicate young butterfly at home in the IT age.
Not so in every parish. In Bristol Hazel Trapnell edits a a print magazine that goes into all 3,000 homes in her parish every quarter. It is a lavishly illustrated product that any supermarket would be glad to be associated with. It has featured an interview with the local MP and in its September issue the Bilal family from South Sudan who live in the parish of Stoke Bishop. Joseph Bilal, we learn, is busy attending international conferences and has had a hand in setting up a university with a Christian foundation in his homeland. Editor Hazel has been able to call on the services of a local cartoonist Jean-Baptiste Doucet to add sparkle to a handsome publication. Jema Ball is the vicar of St Mary’s, a church buzzing with life and reflecting that buzz is its magazine.
Oxshott parish church, Surrey has likewise demonstrated that the traditional print magazine still has a future, even if it does require elbow grease and imagination. Brian Cox edits a stylish and colourful 36-page magazine selling at 65p each month. Oxshott has the best of both worlds, making its magazine available on-line.
A church that is feeling its way in the lockdown is Christ Church, Clifton, Bristol. ‘On-line gathering’ is a weekly recording by one of the staff members that makes the Christian Gospel message available to anybody visiting the church website and using his ears as well as his eyes. ’We’re a very diverse group of people who have one thing in common: we’ve met an extravagantly generous God who loves us unconditionally,’ says the Vicar, Paul Langham. The church is well staffed and eyeing contact opportunities. Erica Bebb is one of a number of staff members with specialist ministries. She serves as pastor for the arts.
Keeping in touch via the internet, Bishop Hannington church, Hove, posts frequent items on weekdays for church members. Included in the output are that good old standby ‘thought for the day’, book reviews and news from former members now overseas. St James’s church, Styvechale posts a weekly update on the internet with a thought for the day from the Vicar Josh Maynard and news items such as reports from YWAM (Youth With a Mission) in Arua, South Sudan.
It would be churlish not to mention Emmanuel church, Stoughton, Guildford. It has a modern church and a super-modern church centre. Together with a handsome new website it has no magic formula but it looks like a church that is at home in the digital age and means business. The Vicar Canon Frank Scammell, was, like his curate, born in Surrey – in what used to be known as the gin and jaguar belt.
All in all, these samples of church life in the lockdown suggest that if it is stretching it to say that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church, the Christian faith and its disciples may actually benefit from being adaptable under some kind of pressure.
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