Church leaders reflect on past year and look on with new hope

       The year 2020 has seen immense changes at churches, with buildings forced to close, then reopen with restrictions on worship and prayer due to the coronavirus pandemic.

        It has seen churches embrace technology to keep in touch with their congregations and provide a service to them outside of the physical building. Rev David Wright has been one of the leading figures in the region for online services, running regular broadcasts of services from St Peters Church in Wolverhampton. He said the year had been very testing, but had also helped people to re-examine what was important in their church life. He said: “This year has given us a chance to pause and look at what is most important to us and what we do, and I believe our faith has strengthened in such times of difficulty.

          “When we had to close down, we very quickly set up worship online in ways we have never really thought about, as worship had always been in person. “We have really upped our game in terms of what we can offer online, but we’ve also continued to deliver paper copies to those people who can’t access the internet.” Rev Nick Ross from Holy Trinity Church in Smethwick said it had been important to continue with serving the congregation and the wider community. “We never fully closed the church through the lockdown as we needed to keep our foodbank going and we have been right on top of putting our services online to help our congregation see each other at least once a week,” he said.

         “There’s no way of pretending that this hasn’t had an impact as we have had to deal with a lot of extra pastoral issues, but we have been able to make it work and help people along the way.