Rev’d Will Pearson-Gee: “I am not going to close our services”

Dec 31, 2021 by Jill

by Archbishop Cranmer:

As 2021 draws to a close, with Covid mutations multiplying, millions isolating, thousands dying, gas prices soaring, inflation pressing, poverty increasing, Putin and Xi agitating, and the Church of England still closing its services, it is heartening to hear a voice in the wilderness; a humble parish priest saying what bishops and archbishops ought to have been saying all year and throughout the pandemic.

“We are not a cinema. We are not the O2 Arena. We are not a football match,” proclaimed the Rev’d Will Pearson-Gee, Rector of Buckingham Parish Church. “We are a family of brothers and sisters in Christ who come together on a Sunday to worship the living Jesus Christ. Not a football match, not a film; nothing like that. I am not going to close our services until I am ordered by law to do so, and even if that happens it will be screaming and kicking, because we are not an entertainment venue. We are here to worship the God who is sovereign over all of this mess, over all the ineptitude that the Government can throw at us, and it is all the more important that we gather together as brothers and sisters in Christ to worship God.”

He grasps the essence of Christianity, which is so rarely articulated or heard at the moment. Our task is to love and worship God first and foremost: loving one’s neighbour comes second. And yet we hear so much about the second from bishops and archbishops that we sometimes lose sight of the first. Getting jabbed against the latest Covid mutation is important as an expression of community solidarity, but worshipping God is the imperative witness of our faith.

Read here

See also:
The threat of closing churches for Covid: The case for the resistance.
Tom Harwood, Gavin Ashenden and Will Pearson-Gee on GBNews.

The Church cannot indefinitely sidestep its self-inflicted Covid damage,
by Archbishop Cranmer