The Scottish Episcopal Church published this earlier today (i.e. well before the Church of England announcement): Coronavirus – Cessation of Church Services
The Church in Wales published this at 5.00 pm: Pastoral Declaration of the Bench of Bishops of the Church in Wales – COVID-19. it includes guidance about baptism, weddings, funerals and confirmations.
The Church of Ireland guidance page remains dated 28 February. However it links to the Irish Health Protection Surveillance Centre page dated 5 March, Coronavirus (COVID-19) guidance for religious services.
But there is also a link to Advice to Clergy (Northern Province) dated 17 March, which says ( my summary, but read the whole page for more detail):
1. Until further notice, all parish organisations and activities should cease.
2. Until further notice, all Sunday and midweek services (gatherings for worship) should be suspended.
3. Until further notice, steps should be taken to ensure that numbers attending funeral services and weddings are kept as low as possible.
TEC seems to be doing this on diocesan level. Los Angeles (my diocese) let each church determine what it wanted to do last Sunday. Most did not have services. Today, the bishop ordered all in-person worship suspended through Easter, including Holy Week. Other guidelines include: If possible, churches should be open on Sunday mornings so people (no more than 10 at the same time) can visit for socially distanced prayer, meditation, and pastoral conversation. For scheduled weddings, the couple has option of postponing the ceremony or bringing their witnesses for a private ceremony comprising no more than five people, including… Read more »
These are excellent guidelines; thanks for posting.
And from down under, Sydney closes its churches. https://www.eternitynews.com.au/australia/all-sydney-anglican-churches-to-close-decrees-archbishop/
I posted above the guidelines that our diocese has given concerning services and so forth. I wanted to pass on some things that our parish has decided to do to try to keep our Christian community together during this time. We are a small parish that doesn’t have the ability to video-stream services from the church, as a number of large parishes are doing. We have posted audios of the Sunday sermons on our website for a long time. We will expand this to post a service of ante-communion followed by the sermon. Watching services from big churches is fine… Read more »
One more thing. Our parish buys toilet paper and paper towels in bulk. We have a lot that we’re not going to be using in the near future. We will be distributing the excess for as long as we can to seniors that cannot buy these paper goods because the hoarders swooped into the markets and bought 100-year supplies.
In addition to the audio recording of the service and sermon this morning, we also video recorded the Gospel and the sermon, which was uploaded to our parish Facebook page. We followed somebody’s suggestion somewhere on this site and simply propped up a mobile phone on the pulpit to record it. The quality of the video and the audio was really quite good. We will probably continue to do this, in addition to our audio recording, after this crisis ends. Thanks so much to whoever suggested it. And I recommend this to any other small parish without a big technology… Read more »