In order to sustain and renew the life of the earth (one of the Five Marks of Mission of the Anglican Church) the Churches Together in Britain and Ireland are raising awareness for climate change.
Climate Sunday is an initiative which is calling on local parishes to hold a climate-focused service ahead of the UN Climate Change Summit which takes place on 31st October 2021.
Drone footage by David Wright
Canon Andrew Orr, recently appointed Honorary Canon at St Fin Barre’s Cathedral, Cork with special responsibility to raise awareness across the Diocese for environmental issues is the Chair of Eco-Congregation Ireland and member of the Church and Society Commission. On behalf of this Commission, he has worked together with many other voices to create the short video below encouraging local parishes to support Climate Sunday.
As a parish, you can register your interest and find information at www.climatesunday.org. These pledges will be presented to the UK Government at a Nations Climate Sunday Service in Glasgow on Sunday, 5th September 2021.
You can read the full article by the Church of Ireland here.
The pupils of the Model School Dunmanway raised over €300 in a sponsored walk for Christian Aid Ireland.
Lisa Fagan, the Christian Aid Ireland Communication Officer, writes:
A sponsored walk by pupils of a historic school in west Cork has raised more than €300 for Christian Aid Ireland and highlighted the impact of climate change on some of the world’s poorest people.
Children at the Model School in Dunmanway walked around the grounds of their school for 5 kms while carrying a basin or bucket, symbolising the long journeys made by women and girls in drought-affected regions, in search of water.
Their walk was inspired by Rose Jonathan (68), a widowed grandmother from the Kitui region of eastern Kenya where severe drought and a changing climate mean that she must spend up to seven hours a day walking to fetch water for her family and livestock. Rose has been the sole carer for her six grandchildren since her husband died and her daughters moved to the city for work.
In the rural areas of many African countries, it falls to women and girls to collect water for their families and farm animals, and in drought-affected regions this can involve long and often dangerous journeys on foot. In Kenya, Christian Aid is responding to the crisis by funding the building of earth dams (low-tech community ponds) which capture and store water when the rains do come.
Pupils of Dunmanway Model School
Andrew Coleman, Christian Aid Ireland’s Bandon-based Church and Community Officer, said:
The Model School in Dunmanway is rightly proud of its most famous past-pupil, Sam Maguire, after whom Gaelic football’s most prestigious trophy is named. But we reckon they should be just as proud of this generation of young people for their compassion for those on the frontline of the climate crisis.
Our thanks go to all the children and their parents as well as their teacher Mrs Buckley. We don’t have a silver cup to give you but in our eyes, you’re champions!
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An open-air service was held at Courtmacsherry Beach on Sunday 4th July at 11am. Around 80 parishioners, visitors, and passers-by joined Rev. Kingsley Sutton from St John the Evangelist Church, Kilgariffe Union.
A service on the beach seemed to be the obvious response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The church holds approximately 16 people with social distancing in place which prevents it from holding services with larger numbers attending.
Morning worshippers at Courtmacsherry Beach
After the service Rev. Kingsley Sutton said:
The feedback has been very good and I think people have been very positive … the wind was a bit of a challenge, but thankfully it didn’t rain and everyone left with big smiles on their faces. There are some children making sandcastles over here … and it’s great to see a mixture of generations gathering again for worship.
I hear people saying that they go for a walk on a Sunday morning and that’s where they spend their time with God and not necessarily in the church building. Part of me is sad because it is important for us to meet together as Christians … but of course people can meet with God outdoors in the beauty of creation. To bring the two together and to have a congregation outside here on the beach is hopefully a way of linking in to people’s spirituality so that they can make the connections themselves … Maybe even next week, someone might walk past and remember that we had a prayer meeting here, and maybe their thoughts will be taken to their faith and God.
Rev. Kingsley Sutton
With people turning up from as far away as Northern Ireland, Rev. Sutton said that seeing so many people worshipping again really affected him.
That says to me that our Christian faith is alive and well even in the midst of this pandemic and that people are still keeping their faith in God going. That’s a great encouragement to everybody.
There will be another open-air beach service on Sunday 25th July and again at the end of August.
Rev. Kingsley Sutton leading worship
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In September 2011, nearly ten years ago, Dr Paul Colton, Bishop of Cork, Cloyne and Ross, on impulse, ‘mainly to explore the available technology’, he says, set up a blog on WordPress. It has since become a place to tell the stories of what goes on in Cork, Cloyne and Ross and it’s on target to reach one million ‘views’ this year. The NewsBlog, as he calls, it was named ‘churchofirelandcork’.
Now that NewsBlog, heading for its tenth birthday, and as Bishop Colton hands it over today to the new Diocesan Media and Information Technology Officer, Denise Brueckl, is heading for a significant milestone of one million ‘views’. ‘Views’ are different from ‘visitors’. A ‘view’ is counted by WordPress when a visitor loads or reloads a page. A ‘visitor’ is counted when WordPress sees a user or browser for the first time in a selected time frame, such as a day or a month or a year.
The banner chosen by Bishop Colton for the NewsBlog was the wise maidens at the west door of St Fin Barre’s Cathedral – vigilant, awake, and on the lookout.
The NewsBlog started very tentatively in September 2011 with just 23 ‘views’ that month, and then 30 ‘views’ the following month. In the third month it went to 1200 ‘views’ and now, depending on the month it could be anything between 9,000 and 21,000 ‘views’ per month. In all there have been 918,363 ‘views’ and 320,294 different ‘visitors’ since 2011. ‘Actually’ said Bishop Paul ‘in the first two months there was an average of just one view per day – probably me myself! Now it can be anything between 250 and 700 a day.’ On one day in 2019 there were 8,521 ‘views’.
The most popular day is Friday – 19% of all ‘views’ are on that day. The most popular time of the day for a ‘view’ is 11.00 a.m. (8% of ‘views’). The NewsBlog connects also with Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp and Email, so that people can, themselves, share the news.
Visitors to the NewsBlog, while mainly from Ireland (about two-thirds) come from almost every part of the world, as seen in this map (the areas in pink show where visitors have come from):
The top ten counties for visitors are listed here:
The Top Ten Nationalities to view the NewsBlog
At the other end of the list there are single or occasional views:
People also find their way to the NewsBlog through referrers such as Facebook, search engines and Twitter, along with dozens of others. It is possible to visit the NewsBlog and, at the bottom left, to put in your email address so that each post is emailed to you. The NewsBlog is HERE
‘I have always been interested in harnessing new technologies for the work of the Church’ says Bishop Colton:
I remember well, in the early 1990s, about two years after I first started using email, a senior clergyman in Dublin Diocese saying to me “I suppose you’ve one of those email things; it won’t really take off, you know, because everyone will have to have one.”
The late Dean Jack Shearer was one of the pioneers in all this and he bought me my first computer in 1987 when I was his curate. In those days you had to insert and remove floppy disks when you wanted to do simple things like change text to italics or bold. He was a man ahead of his time in so many ways.
With a parishioner in the early 1990s – Craig McCauley, now an Archdeacon – we also set up what must have been one of the first, if not the first parish website in Ireland. And so, as the journey rapidly unfolded I found myself – self-taught with the support of like-minded people – on a technological journey that, in the early part of this century, led to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, as well as this NewsBlog.
I see it all, ultimately, as one element supporting the first of the ‘Five Marks of Mission’: ‘To proclaim the good news of the Kingdom’.
The NewsBlog supports that by showing what Christians are doing and responding to where they are. It is a modern way of creating a sense of shared purpose, identity and belonging and also serves a purpose when we have to respond to tragedies or sad news in our midst also.
Now I am delighted to be handing it all over to the new and capable hands of Denise Brueckl who is our new Diocesan Media and Information Technology Officer. I wish her well today as she starts this new post and as I pass on all those ‘logins’ and ‘passwords’ to her.
The Church of Ireland Council for Mission held a webinar using Zoom last month, on the theme of ‘Online Church – Practical Lessons from the Frontline’.
To facilitate anyone who was not able to attend, a video of the webinar is now available on the Council’s public Facebook page (which can be viewed by anyone) at the following link: https://bit.ly/3iggELs
The guest speaker was Dr Nick Shepherd from Church of England Digital Labs, who led us through some practical theology of online church.
Three different Church of Ireland rectors, including our own Cliff Jeffers from Dunmanway County Cork, gave examples of live-streaming from different churches on the island of Ireland, each using different technologies.
There were over 50 participants in the webinar who were representative of most dioceses from around the Church. They had the choice of attending one of the three breakout groups which were led by the rectors from the example parishes. The participants had an opportunity to follow-up on the presentations and ask further questions. Videos of two of the three break-out groups are also available to view and can be found on the Council for Mission Facebook page.
The Very Revd Tim Wright, Chairperson of the Church of Ireland Council for Mission, said:
I hope that this webinar will be useful for anyone who is contemplating their digital outreach potential and is planning an online presence in the future.
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