We would be honoured
to have you join us for our
Ash Wednesday Liturgy
live online in the SYCBaps Cyber Chapel
at 7:00pm (Melbourne time) on Wednesday 10 February 2027.
Our Ash Wednesday worship service is held online on Wednesday 10 February 2027, starting at 7:00pm Melbourne time.
We are serious about all our online liturgies being fully participatory worship in genuine community gatherings. If what you are looking for online is a polished, professional, high-tech presentation of other people worshipping that you can watch at your leisure like a television show, you will have to look elsewhere. But if what you are looking for is the experience of being part of an intimate community who gather online to offer a gift of worship to God that is truly communal and participatory, as well as steeped in the rich spiritual traditions of Christian liturgy and sacraments, then you have probably come to the right place.
A few things to know before you enter the Cyber Chapel
The Ash Wednesday Liturgy is celebrated in a style we call bapto-catholic, or ancient-future worship, but you don’t have to know what that means to enjoy it! It includes spoken and sung prayers, Bible readings, preaching, prayerful silence, and the ritual of ashes. If you would like to participate in the ashes ritual, prepare some ashes in advance (easily done by just burning two or three matches per person, and then grinding them to a powder with the back of a spoon), and directions for what to do with them will happen in the liturgy.
You will see that most of the regular participants have parts of the liturgy that they lead, but this is not expected of visitors or first-timers, so no need to try to work out when it is supposed to be your turn!
We are committed to doing everything we can to ensure that our Cyber Chapel is a safe environment for everyone present, and for that reason, visitors who are not yet known to us will have their microphones muted during the liturgy and will not be able send private chat messages to other individual participants.
At the end most liturgies, we do a few rounds of breaking into small groups for chat, but on Ash Wednesday and a couple of other more solemn occasions, we depart in silence at the end.
Please watch the following short video for our guidelines and recommendations on the best simple settings and screen layout options to use for a full experience of the liturgy. If you are joining from a phone or a tablet device, some of these options will not be available to you, but we are sure you will still find it to be a rich experience.
The next video is a recording of the last Ash Wednesday liturgy, in case you want to see a bit more of what goes on before deciding whether to visit. Of course, watching the recording is not like participating in the real thing. Since it is no longer live, it is now reduced to clunky amateurish TV worship. If you want to experience the real thing, you’ll have to join us in the Cyber Chapel in real time. In the recording, the times of silence have been trimmed considerably, but everything else is as it happened.
If you have any questions about our online liturgies, or about anything else, please use the contact form below and we’ll respond as soon as we can. Don’t forget to hit the “Send” button after typing your message.