Plan for Sunday services
The leadership team and pastoral staff have been prayerfully considering our Sunday gatherings under the traffic light system.
As you will understand, this is a challenging time to navigate amidst a range of different health needs and personal perspectives within our church.
We are seeking to include and care for all, and to offer safe settings to everyone in our church community, within the government guidelines.
At Red
Online services remain the primary focus. We continue to encourage small gatherings in homes for the online service, to connect, discuss, and pray together.
As we don’t know how long we will be at red we will review this every 2 weeks, looking to introduce some people back into auditorium in controlled numbers, in line with allowed gathering limits. This won’t look like a usual service because our congregation will be primarily online. Sunday morning Children’s ministry remains online only at Red, with the resource links available.
Alongside this, we would like to offer worship settings like “The Well”, to cater for a range of specific ministry needs, including some settings which require a vaccine pass and some which don’t.
At Orange
We plan to introduce a dual service format with vaccination pass service followed by an open service. We will continue to livestream, but the main focus will be on those in auditorium because our congregation will be primarily onsite. Health guidelines will be used, such as monitoring attendance levels as there may be restrictions on numbers. We are still working on what a children’s programme will look like under orange.
General church buildings and group gatherings onsite
At Red, the church office is open with reduced hours 9:30 to 2:30pm Monday to Friday. Staff are usually working from home.
The building is still open to groups, within guidelines provided by the management team. All booking requests are to be directed to Den, our church administrator. He will provide this information and room use requirements. Some groups have decided not to continue during Red stage. We encourage group leaders and volunteer teams to assess their own unique situation, as they make their decision. Our default setting is that the church buildings do not require a vaccine pass. However for various reasons some groups have requested the use of a vaccine pass, which we are willing to accommodate. All bookings need to be carefully managed to ensure that we remain within the number restrictions and health guidelines, with separate access ways at times, especially when used by multiple groups at the same time.
We see the use of vaccine passes as a temporary health tool, only used when necessary to enable the church to gather. At this stage the government has indicated that a green setting would enable us to relax these measures, and we are hopeful that other tools may be available too (such as rapid antigen testing).
We have appreciated your patience and prayer for our church at this time. And we are more than happy to answer any questions arising from this communication.
Grace and peace
Franklin Baptist Leadership team
