THE return of communion services to St Mary’s Parish Church, in Barnard Castle, may make it seem like normality is returning after the Covid-19 lockdown but a step inside shows it is anything but.
Gone are the pews which have been piled up against the sides of the church – instead 14 carefully spaced chairs fill the void.
They form part of a solution to allow people to enjoy private prayer at any time of the day.
The system works by people picking up a leaflet as they enter the church. They then take a seat on one of the empty chairs and follow the prayers that are displayed across a large screen.
They place the leaflet on the chair they occupied when they leave – this lets volunteers know the chair has been used and it is placed into quarantine for 72 hours with other chairs that had been used that day.
Curate Revd Sarah Cliff said: “Alec [Revd Canon Alec Harding] came up with rotating the chairs and we refined the system.”
The big screen has proved to be a godsend – the church waited two years to get permission to install it in the Grade-I listed building and it was put up at the end of last year. Ms Cliff said: “It was unbelievably timely. It means we don’t have to use the service books and the hymn books.”
With more than 100 people attending services each week, church officers have had to come up with a scheme to divide the congregation into eight groups – each group aptly named for a saint associated with St Mary’s.
Two groups enjoy service in the church at 9am, and with another two attending service in the parish hall at the same time. Each of the services is led by the vicar or the curate.
The same system happens at 11.15am when the remaining four groups attend services.
A fifth Sunday service is held at 10.15am on Zoom to accommodate those who remain in self isolation.
Ms Cliff said: “We rotate the groups so they will be in the hall some weeks and in the church other weeks.”
All the groups will hear the same sermon on the same Sunday.
Ms Cliff said: “Whichever one of us writes it, the other will read it.”
A sixth service on Sunday afternoons takes place at Whorlton. More ingenuity was required to organise music and hymns at the service. When services began remotely via Zoom as lockdown started, the clergy used recorded music.
But director of music Annette Butters would have none of it. She arranged a system in which she records herself playing the organ or piano and then posts it onto a remote computer. Members of the church and community choirs download the music and record themselves singing along to it.
All the of the individual recorded voices are combined to create a single recording.
Ms Butters said: “I am blowed if I am going to let anything get in the way of what we want to do. During the service, the voices are coming out of through stereo speakers while I go live with the organ. It is not perfect, but we are hearing local voices rather than a recording that means nothing to us. Music is so important and this is the best we can do at the moment. All this stuff we had to learn as we went, but we knew it was do-able.”
Meanwhile, people attending the parish hall service listen to a combined recording of the organ playing and voices singing.
Another handy coincidence means the music is played out over a new sound system that was installed just weeks before services were allowed to resume. A third “unbelievably timely” coincidence was the lockdown itself. Ms Cliff said: “The building works took place during lockdown – it was good timing as it meant the workers could crack on and they didn’t have to work around us, or us around them.”
The £400,000 Lottery funded project included repairing a large crack down the west wall. Services at St Mary’s and the parish hall resumed on Sunday, August 16.
