- Weekly Contributions
- Sunday morning Eucharist
- FaceBook Live Streaming Services:
- Copies of the liturgy for the service:
- Copies of the readings, pew sheet, spiritual reflection and sermon:
- Morning Prayer via Zoom Meetings:
- Spiritual Cafe:
- Bible Study:
- Daily Prayer Resources:
- Pastoral Care:
- Staying Connected with One Another:
- WhatsApp St. Andrew’s Group:
Dear fellow members of the St Andrew’s Church family,
I am writing to you on behalf of the Churchwardens, Parish Councillors and myself, to let you know about the various resources that will be available to you to enable you to stay connected with the parish and your fellow parishioners during the coming weeks as we together live through the challenges imposed on us all by the Coronavirus pandemic.
Weekly Contributions:
To enable us to maintain ministry support during this time, Parish Council would like to ask for your continued support of weekly offering or giving. The majority of our parishioners normally put cash in their personalised giving envelopes and place those envelopes in the offertory collection each week, but obviously we can no longer do that at this moment in time. We would like to encourage you to make your weekly contribution via direct debit into the parish bank account, the details of which are as follows: BSB – 633 000, Account Number – 168 549 467, Account Name – St Andrew’s Aberfeldie Operating Account.
If people are unable to contribute in this way, then an alternative would be to write a cheque for St Andrew’s Anglican Church Aberfeldie and post it to the vicarage at 27 St Kinnord Street, Aberfeldie 3040. If people didn’t want to be writing a cheque every week you could certainly write a cheque for say 4 weeks worth of contributions if you have the means to do that. On behalf of Parish Council I thank you in advance for your ongoing support.
Please find below a list of resources that will be available for you to access, together with a brief explanation of how you can access each.
Sunday morning Eucharist:
Each Sunday morning at 9am, commencing Sunday 29th March, I will be in the church conducting a service of Eucharist.
FaceBook Live Streaming Services:
This will be streamed live on the St Andrew’s Facebook page for those who have a Facebook account to follow along at home.
If you don’t have a Facebook account and would like to have one, but you aren’t sure how to set one up, please let me know. Dan Stachlewski has very kindly offered to provide technical support to those parishioners who need it.
If you have a Facebook account but haven’t yet connected to the Parish Facebook page you can do so by searching on the internet for @standrewsaberfeldie. Once you are on the Parish Facebook page just click on the ‘Like’ button and you will automatically receive notifications from the parish which will include the live stream.
Recording of the live stream of the Sunday service to be added to the parish website for those people who don’t have a Facebook page, but who do have a computer and an internet connection, I will be recording the live stream of the Sunday morning service and will then be posting it on the parish website for people to view. That way you can play the video at your convenience and join in the liturgy as you would if you were in church.
Copies of the liturgy for the service:
Copies of the liturgy for the Sunday morning service in order for people to follow the service, either via the live stream on Facebook, or the recording on the website, or just doing it at home on your own, I will be providing copies of the liturgy for the service. I will email this as a Word document for those people who have access to email, and for those people who don’t have email access I will be dropping a hard copy of the liturgy off in people’s letterboxes.
Here is a link to Prayers, Readings & Devotions for Holy Week at Home – 2020.
Copies of the liturgy for the service:
Copies of the liturgy for the Sunday morning service in order for people to follow the service, either via the live stream on Facebook, or the recording on the website, or just doing it at home on your own, I will be providing copies of the liturgy for the service. I will email this as a Word document for those people who have access to email, and for those people who don’t have email access I will be dropping a hard copy of the liturgy off in people’s letterboxes.
Here is a link to Prayers, Readings & Devotions for Holy Week at Home – 2020.
Copies of the readings, pew sheet, spiritual reflection and sermon:
As with the liturgy mentioned above, I will also be providing people with copies of the weekly readings, pew sheet, spiritual reflection and sermon for each Sunday. Once again this be via email for those with email access and hard copies for those who don’t have email access.
Morning Prayer via Zoom Meetings:
Morning Prayer I will be saying Morning Prayer at 9am on Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday using the Zoom Cloud Meetings app. This is a form of videoconference which allows us to actually see and hear one another. It is the next best thing to being together in person to say Morning Prayer. We have already used the app for a Parish Council meeting and the Tuesday Spiritual Cafe, and it has worked well. If you would like to join me for this please let me know and I can help you get connected to the app. I can also provide you with a copy of a Prayer Book for Australia which we will use to say Morning Prayer.
Spiritual Cafe:
As I mentioned above, we have already used the Zoom Cloud Meetings app to conduct the Tuesday Spiritual Cafe. If you like to take part in this group please let me know and once again I can help you get connected. This group had been meeting at 9.30am on Tuesday but this time will now change to 10am due to Morning Prayer being held at 9am.
Bible Study:
Bible Study will resume after Easter and we will again be using the Zoom app for this group. We will continue to meet every second week on Thursday evenings at 7pm. If you would like to join this group let me know and I will help you get connected. The topic of study will be the Gospel of Matthew and we will look at the set gospel passage for the Eucharist on the coming Sunday of that week. I will also be providing people with a copy of a commentary on the passage by the renowned Australian theologian Brendan Byrne.
Daily Prayer Resources:
If you are looking for ways in which you can do your own daily prayer at home then a couple of resources that are available for you to download from the App Store (for iPhone) and the Google Play Store (for Android) are the Church of England Daily Prayer app and the Anglican Diocese of Melbourne Prayer Diary app. For people who don’t have access to technology, I am currently researching resources that I can provide to you in hard copy. I will let you know more about this shortly.
Pastoral Care:
I will be contacting people over the course of the coming weeks to see if you would like me to visit you at home with the Reserved Sacrament. I realise that some of you (or your children!) may not want to receive such a visit to reduce the risk of the virus being inadvertently transmitted from person to person so I will not be offended if you refuse my offer. Obviously this also might change if the government introduces a ‘full’ lockdown.
Staying Connected with One Another:
The possibility of further restrictions being imposed by the Federal and State governments might see us becoming even more isolated from each other than we currently are. To reduce this feeling of isolation it would be good for us to stay in regular contact with each other. I will be sending you the latest version of the Parish Phone Tree which Jan McLean has graciously updated for us.
Once you receive your copy (either by email or hard copy in your letterbox) could I please ask you to check the ‘tree’ to see who you would normally be responsible for contacting and perhaps you can make a phone call to these people at least once a week to check in and make sure they are okay.
WhatsApp St. Andrew’s Group:
For those people who have access to the WhatsApp app, can you please let me know if you would like to be members of a St Andrew’s Group where we can share with each other updates, events and happenings in our daily lives? If you don’t have access to WhatsApp and would like to, then let me know and I can help arrange that for you?
My apologies for the length of this communication, but I think it is very important during these challenging times that the parish can provide each of you with as much ministry, spiritual and pastoral care and support as possible. There will no doubt be other resources that we think of in the days and weeks to come that can be of assistance to you and I will keep you informed of these as they come to light.
In the meantime, if you, or anybody you know of, needs any assistance with things such as buying groceries, filling medical prescriptions et cetera then please let me know and we can help you. I have already received offers of assistance from people within the local community for just those types of need.
Please know that you are all in my thoughts and prayers.
Every blessing,
Michael.