Staying Connect with St Stephen's

As we enter more deeply and fully into a time of social distancing and self-isolation and commit to following our Archbishop’s directive to suspend in-person worship and meetings, St Stephen’s is busy making alternative plans for how we will stay connected and engaged with one another.

• Our Pastoral Care team is activating a phone call out system and will be contacting every member of the parish by phone within the next day or two. We hope this will both work to share information about what is happening as well as be a way for us to be connected with you. Our phone-ers will be asking if there’s any information about how you are doing that they can share with me or if you have any prayer requests. 
• For Sunday worship, we are going to circulate information on livestreamed worship. We know a number of our local parishes are already experienced and skilled at making their worship available online. Rather than attempting to re-create the wheel as they say, we’ll use this time as an opportunity to virtually visit some neighbouring parishes. We will update this post and our other communication channels on this on Friday.
• Also on Friday we will post a link to join an “online coffee hour” on Sunday morning. We will be using a tool called, Zoom to host this. An email to the parish sent on the evening of March 17th included some times to try out a participating in a Zoom call in advance. Please contact us for more information by email at info@ststephenburnaby.ca.
• We are working to update the Sermons page on our website with sermons from the past few months. In addition, we will begin posting videos of “Ruth’s Reflections” – these will include the readings for Sunday and some thoughts on those readings. These videos will be posted to our website and social media streams.
• We are also looking at using Zoom calls for some Bible study and to finish off our Lenten book groups. More details will be forthcoming on these tools as we move forward.
• Be sure to sign up for our newsletter (scroll to the bottom of our homepage) and follow us on Facebook or Instagram for regular updates.

Photo of scrabble titles spelling "CONTACT" by Melinda Gimpel on Unsplash