Church openings during covid

[MarkRohfrietsch]

I've been analyzing the statistical trends for our video feed. We peaked at around 170 viewers in a week. This was because the two UMC churches didn't have anything for their people for an extended period of time so some of the Methodists were watching our video. Our church building could not accommodate 170 people! The rector thought that was great but it has not yielded any visitors to the in person service. But as time has passed our viewership has waned and we are now getting about 80 views a week.

Some of that is no doubt the result of other churches finally getting something going for their people to watch or do. Some is most likely people losing interest. One of the other interesting trends is that most of the viewership does not come at the time the video is first streamed. It seems many people prefer to tune in late on Sunday and close to half of the weekly viewership tunes in sometime during the work week.

This points to a trend I was reading about in a specifically Roman context the other day: people are not coming back to Mass. I suspect it holds true across a broad spectrum of liturgical churches.

We are back in shut down now; but when we reopened after the first shutdown, we figured we could contain those who wanted to come in the sanctuary, while adhering to social distancing guidelines. We were pleased to discover, we underestimated. We went to two Masses, one in the Chapel and one in the Sanctuary.

Another interesting trend is the viewer-ship to our zoom/facebook services has increased, and has been on the odd Sunday 3 x our normal Sunday Attendance.

We have also welcomed a family by transfer from another parish, and that may be attributed to our on line presence.

I think the average age of our congregation speaks to the fact that our membership and attendance remains constant. The young have already discovered sleeping in; the older ones (like me) seem not to be able to sleep in; so we go to Church and Bible Study, and attend our on-line meetings...

 

[East Anglican]

I'm just wondering how covid is impacting Anglicans around the world. In the UK, in the midst of this new strain, Anglican churches are coming under a lot of pressure to close, especially those in the south of the country that are hardest hit. I'm interested in what the situation is like in the rest of the world?

In the UK the house of bishops have been the biggest problem. The government has said churches can open but the bishops have told the clergy to keep them closed. They've furloughed curates and have announced redundancies for ministers while advertising manageriel posts for people to stop the decline and bring growth. The Holy Spirit is the ideal candidate, but they don't want him. They have rejected Christ, parishners are in dispair and feel abandoned, though Christ will never abandon us and is still with them. All this coupled with the Wokus Pocus heresies they keep uttering has persuaded me to turn my back on Canterbury and head for Constantinople.

 

[seeking.IAM]

In the UK the house of bishops have been the biggest problem. The government has said churches can open but the bishops have told the clergy to keep them closed. They've furloughed curates and have announced redundancies for ministers while advertising manageriel posts for people to stop the decline and bring growth...

How sad. We never considered furloughing our Curate or any other church staff. We added a bunch of virtual programming and staff are as busy or busier than ever. May God be with the church in the UK.