For Pentecost Sunday this year we hosted at Ferryhill a special Celebration Service to mark the start of the new Presbytery of Aberdeen and Shetland. While this kind of service would ordinarily be the kind of festive occasion that would gather folks from many parts, not least from Shetland and across Aberdeen city, with time of worship together and then a bun fight afterwards with copious home-bakes. Today we truly have had to suffice with our own home-bakes, but nonetheless people were gathered together virtually both to share in the worship and in the preparation of that worship.

The service, if you missed it, can be found below.

Virtual Choir

Two of the parts of the service that we had spent many, many hours on collectively were the virtual choir pieces. These came out really well and many thanks to everyone who contributed their parts and a particular thank you from me to Kevin Haggart for all the work in creating backing tracks to keep us all in sync and preparing the musical scores, and to Sophia Johnston for many hours of video editing that she contributed.

This is the anthem, "O Breath of Life" with music by Alan Bullard:

And this is the final hymn with which the service ends: the 14th century York Processional "Hail Thee, Festival Day!" with music by Ralph Vaughan Williams:

May we all relish the life-giving power of the Holy Spirit
at work in our lives and in our communities,
breathing hope and joy
into our souls and actions.