9/16: A Trial Run — In-Person Worship During COVID-19

Dear LAC Family,
I hope you are doing well and staying healthy in these early days of back-to-school. We continue to be vigilant about the incursion of COVID-19 in our community. With great care we managed a socially distanced meet and greet for Ekama Eni last Sunday. The small number of participants helped make the event participants feel safer despite the risk of gathering indoors. Our safety monitor volunteers were able to limit the number of people in Russell Hall to 20 people at all times.
Livestream of Worship. This Sunday we will try worshipping in the Sanctuary in-person under our Session-approved safety guidelines, and will permit only up to 50 people to be present in the Sanctuary. We will also livestream the service with a new broadcast platform found on our website: www.lacny.org. You can watch worship from home here [LINK].
In-Person Worship. In order to attend worship on Sunday, you must reserve a place here [LINKby 12:00 p.m. on Friday, be in good health, and free from quarantine restrictions. Please wear your mask at all times inside the church and while in line outside. We encourage everyone to come by 9:40 a.m. in order to be greeted by our safety monitors who will conduct a wellness survey, temperature check, and contact tracing register. We ask that you not use the LAC bathrooms, unless for emergencies, so please plan ahead. After worship, ushers will direct people to exit by rows, closest to the Larchmont Avenue doors exiting first. I will host a virtual zoom coffee hour at 11 a.m. for everyone who attended, virtually or in-person.
Sunday School for our youngest members will commence virtually this Sunday, September 20th via Zoom. Classes will meet every other week.
PreK-1st Graders: 11:30 a.m. -11:55 a.m.
2nd – 3rd Graders: 12:00 p.m. – 12:25 p.m.
4th – 5th  Graders: 12:30 p.m. – 12:55 p.m.
The meeting schedule is on the church website. For the alternating weeks where we do not meet via Zoom, there will be a short video lesson posted on the Sunday School section of the  redesigned church website. Please register HERE [LINK] so we can send you the login details. We look forward to learning with you!
SHIFT and TGIF will have a joint youth kickoff event on Wednesday, September 23rd from 6-7:30 p.m. on the Manse deck. There will be pizza, music, and fun socially distanced shenanigans as Ekama Eni will get to meet all of you and we finish up our planning for this calendar year. If you are a youth or a parent of a youth and you have not yet, please fill out this form [LINK] to aid us in our planning for the year! Questions? Contact Ekama Eni at eeni@lacny.org for more details.
At the end of the month, Session will assess the worship experience and interest level of the congregation of in-person worship to determine if we continue in-person or go back to on-line worship for October.
Yours in Christ,
Ellen
Interim Pastor, Larchmont Avenue Church