This afternoon, I was able to send out an email to announce to members of my congregation the details of our last service of the year, an online one that will go live on Boxing Day morning. I also reminded them of the final two live services of the year – midnight communion on Christmas Eve (starting at 11:30pm but it will, technically, be Christmas Day by the time it finishes) and a short service on Christmas morning.

The other thing I noted was that, with the upload of the service for Sunday, we’ve reached 100 items in our ‘Services and Messages‘ playlist. We’ve put out something most weeks since shortly after the start of lockdown and sometimes an extra item or two. The very early ones were just our previous vicar sharing some thoughts from his study. At that point it was quite low key, people were relatively isolated and I don’t think we’d even discovered Zoom, although that soon became part of the language. We then had a season of services cobbled together from what people could film and home and send to me, followed by an increasing number of segments filmed in the church, although often with just me and the speaker present.

For a fair while now, we’ve hit a pattern that works quite well and I suspect viewing numbers will go up again over the next few weeks. I’m still also managing to find a twist or two to put into the intros and outros. Today, I’ve produced and published the last online service for 2021 but I expect we’ll be a good way towards the 200 milestone this time next year.