May I tell you how we happened to obtain secret footage of the altar guild last fall?
It went like this:
Late in the summer, the St. Matthew’s churchwardens noticed something odd. Each night at dusk the outside spotlights were coming on.
The outside spotlights hadn’t been set to automatically come on at dusk in years. The switch was checked, the electrical panel was checked, and it shouldn’t be happening. But it was.
Were vandals sneaking in to hit the switch each night in a fiendish plot to raise our electricity bills? Were churchmice up to no good?
One of us has a trailcam, so we decided to use it to see exactly what was happening at the switch. We secured it to a beam high in the chancel.
And forgot about it.
You see, in the meantime, we found the answer to the problem lay in the switch itself. Our local technician, Chris, fixed it. Then the church continued to sit empty. We were mostly closed for the pandemic. When open, we were using the parish hall, as it was easier to follow the protocols there.
The day came, though, when we needed to be in the church. It was All Souls and time to hold a pandemic-postponed cemetery decoration day. We did the usual cleaning and the unusual protocol-setting and laying of wires for mics and equipment for the Zoom component of the service.
We held the service. It was wonderful.
Then I, for the trailcam was mine, remembered what was still on a beam high in the chancel…
It’s kind of fun to see a sort of stop-motion of what happens at an altar in the leadup to a service.
We’ve decided to leak a selection of the photos.
And now you know our secret: that the altar guild really cleans up.
It went like this:
Late in the summer, the St. Matthew’s churchwardens noticed something odd. Each night at dusk the outside spotlights were coming on.
The outside spotlights hadn’t been set to automatically come on at dusk in years. The switch was checked, the electrical panel was checked, and it shouldn’t be happening. But it was.
Were vandals sneaking in to hit the switch each night in a fiendish plot to raise our electricity bills? Were churchmice up to no good?
One of us has a trailcam, so we decided to use it to see exactly what was happening at the switch. We secured it to a beam high in the chancel.
And forgot about it.
You see, in the meantime, we found the answer to the problem lay in the switch itself. Our local technician, Chris, fixed it. Then the church continued to sit empty. We were mostly closed for the pandemic. When open, we were using the parish hall, as it was easier to follow the protocols there.
The day came, though, when we needed to be in the church. It was All Souls and time to hold a pandemic-postponed cemetery decoration day. We did the usual cleaning and the unusual protocol-setting and laying of wires for mics and equipment for the Zoom component of the service.
We held the service. It was wonderful.
Then I, for the trailcam was mine, remembered what was still on a beam high in the chancel…
It’s kind of fun to see a sort of stop-motion of what happens at an altar in the leadup to a service.
We’ve decided to leak a selection of the photos.
And now you know our secret: that the altar guild really cleans up.
Photos inadvertently taken by Lawrene. Last one is entitled "Realization"...
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