Suspension of In-Person Worship

Hello and welcome to this video update for the Anglican Parish of St Stephen the Martyr. I’m Ruth Monette our community’s priest. Today is Thursday, November 19th. Earlier today you may have heard that our Provincial Health Officer issued new public health orders that are in effect until at least December 7th. Those orders include a ban on all in-person worship. This means that our worship services for Sunday, November 22; Sunday, November 29; and Sunday, December 6th will be held via Zoom. We know this for sure. Because there is a likelihood of the order being extended, we are planning to use Morning Prayer for our worship for the next five Sundays all the way through December 20th. This will allow us to have some consistency for the Sundays in the season of Advent as we prepare for Christmas. For this coming Sunday, November 22, we will be sending out the Zoom link, bulletin, and announcements by email on Friday, November 20th and posting that information to our website. We will be going ahead with the scheduled baptism. A small number of invited guests will gather with me at the church to baptize a member of our community, Salar, and I encourage you to join us by Zoom while he makes this commitment to Christ. We had originally hoped to have Salar’s baptism on Easter so I was especially glad to hear Dr Henry name baptisms as allowable if safety plans are followed and the attendees kept small. This order does not require us to close the building as we did in the spring. So the building remains open and many of our user groups will be able to proceed with 12-step meetings and some exercise classes may be able to re-start. A reminder that the new public health order has made masks mandatory in public spaces and that includes the church. Although the building is not closed, the public health order also encouraged workplaces that could shift to work-from-home to do so. What we have found over the last few months is that our office lay out makes having more than 1 person working at a time somewhat tricky. Lois and I have already been doing some work-from-home days to reduce our risks and that may ramp up even more. Which means that should you need to pick up or drop something off, please make an appointment in advance (even if you just call us in the morning to see if we will be there in the afternoon). Our Thrift Shop will NOT operate on Saturday, November 21st nor will our in-person Christmas Market go ahead. However, next week we hope to launch our virtual shopping platform. We will have some of your favourite craft items, vintage jewellery, and gift baskets available. And in December, there will be a Silent Auction as well. Our annual Christmas Market Raffle is going ahead. A livestream of the draw will happen on December 5th. Tickets are available from the parish office at the amazingly low price of just $1 each or a book of 10 for $10. We can not yet guarantee what orders will be in place for Christmas, but will prepare to offer the best possible celebration of Christmas we can. We know for sure there will be Zoom and livestream offerings on Christmas Eve at 7pm and 10pm and on Christmas Day at 10am. We will confirm, as soon as possible, what if any in-person offerings there will be. Lastly, as I have all through this pandemic, I encourage you to pray for the public health teams, health care workers, and scientific communities who are working very, very hard to keep us all safe, to learn and respond to a new virus, and to balance the need for public health protections with protecting individual freedom and keeping our economy active. We entrust to God all those who have suffered due to this pandemic remembering those who have been or are ill, those who have died, those who have lost jobs, and those who have found these months unbearably difficult.