Even before the recent announcement of the government ‘roadmap’ to open things up, St Peter’s PCC had made the decision to return to in-church worship at the 10am Palm Sunday service on 28th March. 

This will be the first service that the congregation has able to  attend since the beginning of January.  Places of worship have been allowed to stay open the whole time, but the PCC took the decision to minimise the risk to everyone by staying shut.  When we open, there will still be many restrictions in place: we will still have to wear masks, keep our distance from each other, numbers will be limited and we won’t be allowed to sing.  But we truly hope that this is the beginning of things getting back to normal.

The next significant date for the church will be 12th April, after which community centres are allowed to reopen.  This means that some of our social activities will be allowed to restart, beginning with the return of some of our children’s activity providers such as Mini-Maestros and the majorettes.

We hope that at that point we will be able to restart the Community Choir, the Tuesday senior citizens lunch club and Knit & Natter.  However, these will all be dependent on the rules about socialising and permitted activities, which may of course change again over the next few weeks.  However, most people who attend these groups will hopefully have had both of their vaccines by that point, so it will be wonderful to be able to meet together again with much less fear about the virus spreading.

It is far too early to make decisions about all of the other things that we used to enjoy doing at the church such as coffee mornings, fund-raising events and the pantomime.  All we can do is stay hopeful that as a nation we make steady progress towards the future, and give thanks for those rolling out the amazing vaccination programme.