Member Article

All Things are Now Bright and Beautiful for Church

A North Tyneside church is looking forward to safely welcoming back its parishoners after COVID-19 restrictions meant that all acts of worship had to be done remotely or online.

To facilitate the return, St John’s Church in Killingworth Village has undergone a top to bottom deep clean and bizarrely, the business who won the work has a number of connections with the church - not least the fact that their name is incorporated in one of the world’s most well known hymns.

Helen Ross runs Bright and Beautiful North Tyneside, a professional home cleaning and housekeeping service with a premium level of customer care, eco friendly products and exceptionally motivated staff. All of her team have received specialist COVID-19 training and are abiding by social distancing rules, operating staggered start times, wearing correct PPE as well as using new hospital-grade eco disinfectant and cleaning their own kit after every job. Helen currently has 13 members on her team and each is uniformed, DBS checked and trained to a high standard in customer care.

“The deep clean process for a church is very similar to what we do with offices and homes but on a much bigger scale,” said Helen.“We brought a large team in to minimise the time spent in the church and we pay particular attention to high touch points such as light switches, door handles and seating areas and thoroughly disinfect with medical grade eco products. Some areas gave our team a challenge including removing cobwebs from the high ceilings and stained glass windows.”

St John’s as well as being very close to Helen’s home in the village is also very close to her heart. She was married there and both her children were christened there.

The church’s vicar, Reverand Sarah Moon was delighted with the deep clean. “It’s made a huge difference to the appearance of the church which has been empty for almost six months and it’s given us all the peace of mind so that we can worship in safety. The last five months has been a steep learning curve as we’ve had to learn about Zoom and Facebook so that we could all meet online but it’s just not the same as meeting physically in the church.”

Although the church’s congregation is about 80 in number, safety restrictions will limit the services to around 30 worshippers.

“Bright and Beautiful have made our church bright and beautiful once more but importantly, they’ve made it safe for us to return,” said Rev Moon.“It looks fresh, it’s brighter and smells wonderful.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Keith Newman .