As I explained in my previous post, this year I volunteered to go to Zermatt to be the Chaplain of St Peter’s Church over the Christmas period, covering the first two weeks of the Winter season. After my first few days of leisure, my period of duty began on Tuesday 16th December.
My first duty each day was to open the Church by 09.30 each morning, turning on the lights in the sanctuary, and then locking it again in the evening, no earlier than 20.00. This allows people to visit and use the Church for private prayer. Judging by the number of entries and positive comments in the visitors book, this is very much appreciated.
My other initial task was to update noticeboards, removing the notices saying that the Church was currently closed, and instead, posting ones giving details of all my services, together with a mug shot of the current Chaplain.
I was unsure what to expect on the two Sundays either side of Christmas. At this time of year, it is very easy to lose track of what day of the week it actually is and therefore fail to realise that it is Sunday. So I was quite pleased to have a congregation of ten for Holy Communion on the morning of Sunday 21st December – the Fourth Sunday of Advent. Among them was a Francophone Swiss couple celebrating their wedding anniversary, who were very appreciative of the service and were responsible for this photograph of me. I also believe they were responsible for a rather large contribution to the collection at the end of the service 😉
In the evening, there were just three of us gathered to say Evening Prayer together.
I knew from my experience in December 2024, that the 17.00 Service of Lessons & Carols on Christmas Eve would be popular. I wasn’t the only one. Several people arrived more than half an hour before the service was due to begin, just to be sure they had a seat 🙂 By just before 17.00, every pew was fully occupied, about twenty loose folding chairs were pressed into service, and at least twenty people were standing at the back. Finally, to get everyone in, at least a dozen others sat on the carpet in the central aisle.
In total, there must have been in excess of two hundred people present, wanting to sing Christmas carols and hear again Old Testament prophesies of the coming Messiah, the Annunciation, the birth of Jesus, the visits of the shepherds and wise men, and concluding with St John’s wonderful explanation of the Mystery of the Incarnation. I made that final reading the basis of my sermon and pointed out that they had just sung the truths of that passage in the previous carol.
‘Veiled in flesh the Godhead see: hail the incarnate Deity,
pleased as Man with man to dwell, Jesus our Emmanuel.’
At the end of the service, because of the number of people packed into Church, it took me quite some time to be able to reach the Church doors & shake hands with everyone as they left.
At 19.30 I had a repeat Service of Lessons & Carols, this time with a congregation of sixty-five. This was the only congregation that was smaller than those I experienced in 2024 – down by twenty. All the others were considerably greater with sixty attending the Midnight Eucharist and thirty-one at an informal act of Morning Worship on Christmas Day.
Several people who attended the various services, said that they remembered me from last year and were very pleased to see me once again in 2025. A few also expressed the hope that I would come again in 2026 😉 I did also have a number of enquiries as to whether there was a toilet in the Church or a reesst room 😉 Being a typical nineteenth century Church, there isn’t.
One thing that did surprise me was a couple of people arriving, thinking that services would be in German. This despite the Church being known locally as the ‘English Church’ and the noticeboard and website stating clearly that services are in English. As I had to explain, it will be ‘Anglikanischer Gottesdienst in englischer Sprache’ 🙂
I have several good memories of people that I met during my time as Chaplain. The first arrival for the Midnight Eucharist on Christmas Eve, was Caroline, the rep in Zermatt for the Ski Club of Great Britain. Whilst not a regular Church goer, she enjoyed the service and came up to the altar rail for a blessing, during the administration of Communion. She invited me to come to Ski Club’s social hour held each evening between 18.00-19.00, in the bar of the Pollock Hotel. So I went the following evening where Caroline and several others made me very welcome.
It was coming out of the lift in the apartment block where the Chaplain’s apartment is located, on my way to the Pollock Bar, that I met Victoria and her twelve-year old son Henry. They, together with Richard, Victoria’s husband/ Henry’s father, had attended both the 19.30 Service of Lessons & Carols and my Christmas Day morning service. Their rented apartment was literally a few steps from the Chaplain’s apartment. Victoria insisted that I should join them for a glass of bubbly, upon my return.
So I did! Not only was I given a glass of bubbly, I was treated to a Christmas Day evening dinner including this delightful dessert.
Whilst Richard had been to Zermatt several years ago, with his elder daughter, he was unaware of St Peter’s Church existence. This Christmas, they all were delighted to have discovered it and to be able to attend worship. Richard also got me involved in an interesting conversation about evangelism and expressed his appreciation of my preaching.
On the evening of Sunday 28th December there was a congregation of six for Evening Prayer. One of them was a lady called Edith who is a ‘Villager’, someone who lives permanently in Zermatt. She is one of only two ‘locals’ who attend services on a regular basis. She expressed her appreciation of the service and I was delighted to have made a connection to her.
For three of my four Christmas services in December 2024, I was blessed with the presence of Christine from North Yorkshire, who played the organ for me. So I never got to understand how to play hymn tunes through the Church speaker system, and led one Service of Lessons & Carols singing unaccompanied or a cappella.
This year I had no organist for any of my services. But having arrived early and now knowing how other things such as heating and lighting, work, I had time to get to understand the system. And whilst there was frequently, a pregnant pause, between announcing the hymn or carol and the music starting, it worked!
The one thing that was noticeably different to my experience at Christmas 2024, was the lack of snow! In December 2024, I arrived in a heavy snow storm that lasted for a couple of days with snow everywhere in the town. This year, whilst it had clearly snowed previously in Zermatt itself as there was still some snow on roofs and in gardens, no snow fell at all during my eighteen day sojourn. Quite a surprise!
