Big funeral, small church

[elliejjtiny]

Only had to deal with this once before and that was in summer so could have people outside afterwards.

Church seats about 60 people downstairs and another 30 people upstairs in the balcony. Funeral on Monday is expected to be 120 people. Food afterwards is supposed to be in the church as well. Normally in nice weather people will end up milling around outside, kids will go and play on the trampoline, climbing frame etc. But nobody is going to do that next week. How on earth are we supposed to manage this? Do we encourage people to be there on zoom instead or have people standing in the kitchen?

Of course what will probably happen is that 60 people will turn up, there will be plenty of room and loads of food left over.

That's tricky. Is there somewhere nearby where you could set up a live stream of the service like a function room in a pub or a community centre? Or someone's living room?

I suspect that the Monday before Christmas you will get fewer people than if it had been on a non Christmas week. It’s tricky though. One of my churches officially holds 220 but we can squeeze 250 in for a funeral if people stand at the back. My smaller village churches can only seat 60-80 so we move funerals where lots of people are expected to the town church. Parking is horrible though so I understand why people don’t want to do that.

Given the amount of flu around as well as the weather (cold and wet here) then maybe zoom is a good option.

Thank you. I think a mixture of zoom and borrowing some extra chairs from somewhere is going to be the way forward. It's so hard trying to predict numbers for this kind of thing. Last week we had the carol service and we were expecting 50 people to come. We had all the chairs squished together so there was room for our musician to set up and the nativity play as well. We had 25 people come so if we'd have known we could have spread out a bit.

I recently attended a funeral, and it was standing room only. I felt sad for the folk who could not get in and were forced to try and listen through the doors.