Southwark Report 2020_NEW final -Single pages

Marriage and Family Life
How did we manage to live through
the pandemic, meet 400 plus couples
online for Marriage preparation and
remain cheerful?
Facing the reality of not meeting in venues for
our Marriage Preparation courses throughout
the Diocese, we contacted the diocesan IT
team in March 2020 and asked them what
the possibilities were to deliver Marriage
Preparation and Building a Better Marriage
(BABM) marriage enrichment courses online.
The patient and inspirational Aaron Dennis set
up MS Teams for us so that we could at least
have our initial team meeting.
Despite all couples intending to get married
in the Catholic Church having to attend a
Marriage Preparation course, the opportunity
is so much more to us as a team. This faith
encounter is crucial to form the expectations of
what the future could hold for these individual
domestic churches. The very experience of
meeting other couples who are going through
the same process gives encouragement –
nourishing all who come at wherever they may
be in their journey of faith to those who have
little or no faith at all.
Overcoming our own hesitancy to ‘perform’
online – and we fully acknowledge the grace
of the Holy Spirit – the MFL teams in each
of the 3 Pastoral Areas re-worked the kernel
of our message for marriage and then ran
our Marriage Preparation (which included
married couples as well as priest / deacon copresenters
and newly recruited lay presenters)
and BABM courses online.
We missed not meeting the couples face to
face but we have realised by experiencing the
online course that we can develop our future
courses by running hybrid courses which will
save both the team and couples costs. In our
team meetings we discussed strategies for post
Marriage Preparation course evangelisation
and were encouraged to attend the online
courses we would publicise to the couples.
Of note in particular was the online Lenten
2020 retreat at Walsingham led by Mgr John
Armitage, the online SycamOre videos made by
Fr Stephen Wang, the online Alpha course
led by Stephen Walsh and the team at Holy
Innocents, Orpington. We attended the online
SycamOre course run by Deacon Neil Philipson
and the team at St Thomas of Canterbury,
Sevenoaks. Viewing Bishop Barron’s various
talks, resources from our own diocesan
Agency for Evangelisation including talks from
Archbishop John Wilson and reading Sherry
Weddell’s ‘Forming Intentional Disciples’ and
‘Walking with God’ –
A journey through the Bible by Gray and Cavins
which accompanied the online course presented
by Mauro Iannicelli, all inspired us to envisage
an ongoing evangelisation experience for
couples. These resources fuelled our spiritual
lives so that in the short encounter with those
hoping to get married in the Catholic Church we
were able to rejoice and celebrate that the Lord
has worked marvels and holy is his name.
Unlike Marriage Preparation we could not easily
continue the care of the bereaved during lock
down other than give support where needed
to those working in the parishes. At least one
group used an online outreach whilst others
continued via the telephone to support those
bereaved within the parishes.
At diocesan level we had the Archbishop’s
permission to extend the Bereavement Ministry
and are currently expanding the training team to
reach out further into the Diocese. This is being
accomplished by an online course plus a faceto-face
meeting as we ease out of lockdown.
The ministry will be led by our new dynamic
couple Deacon Javier and Susan Elderfield.
We look forward, with confidence, to
developing our ministries further in 2021.
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