COLLEGE CHAPLAIN

Livestreaming in Lockdown

Chapel had already moved online at the beginning of this term, but now we’re all watching from home and I have been very encouraged by student and family engagement. We’ve been covering the most pressing questions that students asked last term. 

Students have volunteered to record Bible readings for the service, as well as participated in our ‘Should Nothing of Our Efforts Stand Challenge’, where two mystery staff members sing a line from our College Hymn and students race to guess the singers. We were all very impressed in particular by Mrs Shaw!

Students have also asked questions, offered feedback on the service, uploaded Chapel selfies and even auto-tuned my sermon via our feedback page: bit.ly/chapelfeedback 

My thanks to families who have sent in words of encouragement and told me of the enjoyment they have had participating online as a family. 

You can tune in at bit.ly/livechapel on YouTube, or catch up on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. 

As we continue to pray during this time of lockdown here is a prayer I shared with staff that may bring you some comfort in our isolation:

Heavenly Father, we find ourselves here once again and the uncertainty that had been niggling is now chomping away at us. So Father, we ask that we might truly understand what it means to trust in you in uncertain times. 

We could try to put things in relative perspective. We know that a week or perhaps more of disruption to our face to face learning is relatively nothing compared to the streets of Kabul or the devastation in Haiti. That might bring us some temporary relief, but surely that makes us ask even more anxious questions about the suffering that roars on apace in this world? 

We could take a laissez faire approach and engage little with the unpleasantries and feign some sort of self preservation through abstention this week. 

But that's not what you call us to as your servants. You call us to cry out to you in the face of our own pain and the myriad scores of pained peoples throughout time and place, because your Son cried out for all of them at the cross. 

Then you call us to dig in, weeping with those who weep and binding up the brokenhearted, because Christ wept for us and was then broken on that cross that we might be bound to you forever, safe in the knowledge that whatever befalls us, our life is now hidden with the risen Christ, ultimately delivered from the snares of sin and death. 

So it is in your Son's name that we trust and pray in our suffering, 

Amen.

Gareth Tyndall | College Chaplain