Last Sunday we had our first service back in the church since 14 March 2020 – marking the end of a period of nearly 18 months of pre-recorded services. The words of our opening psalm set the tone for the service:

When the Lord brought back the exiles to Zion, we were like those in a dream. Our mouths were filled with laughter and our tongues with songs of joy (Psalm 126)

Numbers of people said to me on Sunday how surprised they were by the strength of their emotional reaction to being back inside the building. It’s understandable though – our hearts and minds do connect very powerfully with places, especially thin places where we have a history of encountering God.

I was also acutely aware on Sunday that the online experience of worship was not ideal – I’m sorry about that! We had no Internet in the church (and my cellphone was roped in to valiantly try and stream the service instead – with mixed results) and you may have noticed that for much of the service there were song words or liturgy up on the screen obscuring the person speaking.

Both of those issues have been resolved during this last week – hopefully we will have a fully functional 6Mbps connection for this morning (and this speed can be further increased if necessary). Likewise, the streaming software has been tweaked to hopefully prevent the text issues from last week. One area where there may still be issues relates to the audio setup during singing – we will work on this week by week and hopefully get it right pretty soon.

I will have a look at what is streamed this morning and see how else we can improve it, but would value your feedback too! We have a large group of people who are joining us online and we really want that experience of worship to be as meaningful and helpful for you too.

Wherever you are this morning – whether in the building or joining us online (or even sharing in the service at a later time in the day or week) I hope that you will come away with a sense of having met with the living God and heard him speak words of encouragement and challenge into the specific details of your life.