Dear Brothers and Sisters,

Last week all the church leaders in Leeds received a letter from the Archdeacon and the head of the Health Authority warning us of the dangers of the new COVID mutation and of how quickly it was sweeping north.
Sue and I met last Sunday with the wardens and one or two others and there was a very strong feeling that closing church services down over the next few weeks was the right thing to do. PCC have also endorsed this decision.
As we made this difficult decision there were two things uppermost in our minds:

First was the need for personal protection for everyone.
If this new version of COVID attacks 1 in 50 and if fifty people come to church... well, that is an easy piece of maths.

Second, we wanted to be part of the whole city of Leeds and the community of Calverley as together we stand against the pandemic. There is a ‘spirit’ of us all being together in this time and we felt it important to be part of this ‘togetherness’.

So from this coming Sunday (17th) we shall be premiering our services at 9am on our YouTube channel here. We will be pre-recording initially, but hopefully services will soon be coming live from church each week.
We will also resume our after-church Online Coffee Morning via Zoom, so that we can meet for a time of fellowship after the service.
If you’d like to join us, please click here at 11am on Sunday.

Lockdown is often defined as all the things we can’t do so, I want to offer a positive picture to you all. Last Sunday we celebrated the baptism of Jesus which is followed by Jesus going into the wilderness for forty days.
It seems natural then to suggest that we all see this Lockdown as our wilderness experience. So here is the positive suggestion, that we make our next forty days (or however long it lasts) into a retreat. For many of us life will be slower and quieter giving it a bit of a retreat feel. Parents, of course, will find the opposite as you live and work daily with your children, so you might like to talk about this retreat idea as a family.

As a first step on the retreat, we offer Daily Morning Prayer services, at 8am each weekday on our YouTube channel here.
Step two is provided by online Sunday worship.
The third step comes in the form of...

Jesus 100

This is something that I wrote last year. A hundred gospel readings ranging across Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. It's subtitled '100 days to find him, 100 days to follow him, 100 days to become like him.'
Each reading comes with a comment, a question, and a prayer.
We will send these out as a block of five readings each week (which gives you a couple days off every week). We will also be using this material for our Sunday sermons and home groups. We'll be sending out an introduction to Jesus 100 on Friday, and the first five daily readings on Sunday evening.
If it is not your cup of tea then don’t worry, just bin it. However, I do hope most of you will find it helpful.

Finally, although our church is closed for services, we would like to be there for the community to offer comfort, spiritual support, and to be a sign of stability in difficult times. So we've decided to open church for one hour each day for private prayer, 10am-11am Monday to Friday, starting next Monday 18th.
We will also be collecting food donations for The Bradford North Food Bank every Wednesday, 10am-11am.

God bless,
Robin