Worship in the age of COVID. The coronavirus and the lockdown that followed have created considerable challenges for how religious communities conduct their worship. Several of R&T’s professors moonlight as priests in the Church of England. Here is a brief report on how Prof David Law has coped with the challenges of conducting services in the age of Covid-19: In the first weeks of the lockdown we conducted services solely by zoom, which meant of course that the congregation was unable to receive communion. The way we dealt with this problem was for the priest to receive communion on behalf of the congregation, which entailed modifying the words of distribution to ‘The Body/Blood of Christ keep all of us in eternal life’. Theologically, conducting services via zoom raises interesting questions about the nature of sacred space, or perhaps we should call it sacred cyberspace!
The reopening of the churches presented the problem of how to conduct services while observing social distancing. Because of the danger of infection, we decided to offer communion in only one kind, i.e., offering the congregation bread only, inadvertently thereby reverting to the Roman Catholic practice the Church of England had rejected at the Reformation! The other precaution was for the priest to wear a visor and, after priest and communicant had both disinfected their hands with hand sanitiser, for the priest to pass the consecrated wafer under a Perspex screen specially designed for the purpose.
