Remote Access

Pastoral Assistant and local councillor Paula and her husband Pete are on holiday in Jamaica at the moment, and sent me this snap of their laptop and screen set up to join in with Compline over Zoom yesterday evening, while the blue sea ripples outside the window. It was a bit odd, for them, to be celebrating the Night Office of Prayer at 1.30 in the afternoon, but still.

This was really how I intended the online Compline to work, building on the experience of the pandemic and other, more sophisticated churches than ours, and of our former curate Marion’s son who became part of an online community of Christian teenagers that worked very well. But it hasn’t really achieved that. It’s rare that anyone, like Paula and Pete, joins in who hasn’t been in church already that day (sometimes more than once), so it is less outreach, or an alternative for people who can’t get to church physically, than yet another addition to the liturgical diet for those who already have plenty going on. My only attempt to use Facebook Live for Compline during the lockdown, as several colleagues were, was a bit rough, but had a lot of people joining in: I migrated to Zoom as everyone with a computer can access that, and Facebook is more limited, but the online Compline isn’t doing what I wanted it to. It’s been suggested that a weekday evening might be better. Certainly what I didn’t expect was to get down to the church at 7pm and find verger Rick there. I haven’t asked him yet whether he specifically came in order to take part in the service, which is completely the opposite of the point of it!