Post-lockdown in Malvern Link with Cowleigh

Phillip Johnson is Vicar of Malvern Link with Cowleigh. During lockdown, the parish’s two main services moved online, together with other initiatives to keep in touch with the congregation and wider community. Phillip and his team are now exploring what might be possible to continue as lockdown eases.  He said:

“Our 9.45am service is a traditional sung communion – we’ve been pre-recording this service before posting online so that we can involve as many people as possible. Different people have been recording readings and the choir have been recording hymns all in their own homes – we’ve been fortunate to have a 17-year-old in our parish with his own organ at home to help with music! We’ve found that we’ve had around double the number of people watching for the whole service than we would normally get in church – although not everyone watches on Sunday morning!

“We then host a 11.15am live contemporary service on Facebook, which is normally just me and my guitar. This service only started about four weeks before lockdown in St Peter’s Church, which hadn’t had Sunday worship for around 12 years, so we were a bit worried whether this congregation would stick with the service. However, the number of people getting involved has also doubled, although again not everyone watches live.

“I think we’ve got at least 15 – 20 people across both services who have never come inside our buildings. They’re now saying that they’re looking forward to meeting up in person and some even messaged me to find out how to contribute financially and have joined our planned giving scheme!

“During the week I’ve also been recording three short videos posing questions around the previous Sunday’s sermon to post on Facebook. That’s helped increase levels of engagement with our page and starts a conversation between people. We definitely find engagement on Facebook increases if we use video rather than just text and the shorter the video, the better!

“Alongside our online offering, we received funding to buy some recording equipment and have been putting together a ‘Local Places, Local Faces’ magazine-style show where we interview different people from the community. We burn these to DVDs (and in some cases CDs and even a couple of cassette tapes!) and deliver them to those in our congregation who don’t have access to the internet.

“We’re currently planning that both of our services will be back in church from 6 September. Due to the logistics of the building, we won’t be able to record the 9.45 communion immediately, although we hope to do that at some point in the future. However, the 11.15 service will still be live streamed on Facebook. At this stage, we’re also looking to start a completely new service on Zoom on Sundays at 4pm, which seems to be a popular time for people to watch our current online offerings. This new service will be a collaborative effort with different people getting involved from their homes, including individual musicians leading different elements of the worship.

“Malvern Link with Cowleigh has always been one parish with three buildings where congregation’s identity is not necessarily linked to a particular church. Creating an online-first space seemed to be a natural extension to this. We want to reverse the way that we traditionally think about Church and become a digital organisation with some physical spaces. Coronavirus has definitely pushed that process forward – going into lockdown we had 32 people following our Facebook page – now we have 150!

“We have also been working hard to continue to connect with our local schools. Due to the recording equipment we now have, we can pre-record collective worship and Open the Book’ and put it onto a DVD for schools to show in individual classrooms. We’re looking to record the whole Autumn term’s worth in a couple of days. This idea has been really popular with the schools who are now unable to do assemblies for the whole school together. Even our non-church schools have taken us up on this opportunity!”