Life & Work Magazine
Life & Work Magazine


1 mins

NEWS

MINISTER OFFERING ONLINE MEMORIAL SERVICES

A minister in Perthshire is offering online memorial services in place of public funerals due to the Coronavirus pandemic.

The services are recorded by the Rev Dr Marjory MacLean alone in a church after consultation with bereaved families, then posted to the congregation’s YouTube channel for a few hours on the same day as the committal service.

The memorials enable people who would ordinarily attend services to pay their respects in the safety of their own homes. Dr MacLean, minister of Abernyte, linked with Inchture and Kinnaird and linked with Longforgan, decided to act after restrictions on traditional funerals were put in place by the Church of Scotland due to the Covid-19 crisis.

She said: “Often a funeral in our tradition consists of what is essentially a memorial service and a separate very short committal service, often attended only by the family.

“While committal services are very constrained at the moment, this idea allows the memorial service to be attended by anyone.”

The Church of Scotland has decided that no funeral service can take place in church buildings, which have been closed for practically all activities.

Attendance at services held elsewhere must be limited to immediate close family – parents or the spouse and the couple’s adult children, but not their partners.

This article appears in the June 2020 Issue of Life and Work

Click here to view the article in the magazine.
To view other articles in this issue Click here.
If you would like to view other issues of Life and Work, you can see the full archive here.

  COPIED
This article appears in the June 2020 Issue of Life and Work