Sad decision made to close St Mary’s this Christmas

Midnight Mass and the Christmas Day service won’t happen this year as the church acts to protect worshippers and volunteers

There won’t be any services at St Mary’s Church in Banbury this Christmas.   The church says it has suspended communal worship and closed the building to private prayer in the face of rising COVID-19 cases locally.

The decision by the church’s leadership team came before Wednesday afternoon’s announcement by the government that Banbury would move to COVID-19 tier 4 – the highest alert level.

The Reverend Serena Tajima told Banbury FM it was a sad decision to have to make. She said: “We were really concerned about the growing number of COVID cases.

“So we’ve taken this really sad decision to not have our Midnight Mass service or Christmas Day Service.

“We also decided we wouldn’t even live stream from inside the building.   We felt it wasn’t fair putting our wonderful volunteers at risk.

“There’s a lot of stress at the moment trying to work out how to spend time with your family – being able to see people that you love.   To make people come into church when they didn’t need to, as there’s lots of fantastic services out there that people can watch on line, we felt we would just alleviate that stress and not open”.

St Mary’s will still stream Compline (Night Prayer) this evening at 8pm and morning prayer at 10.30am tomorrow.   Reverend Serena is also planning on giving a Christmas Eve address with details to be announced on the church’s website and facebook page.

Throughout the Christmas period the Diocese of Oxford will have a number of services available which people can join in with online.   St Mary’s will give details of these over the coming days.

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Published: 23/12/2020 04:56pm by Banbury FM Newsteam

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