Following the lead of online retailer Amazon, the Church of England has unveiled plans to use unmanned drones to deliver church services to places of worship, homes, places of work or even outdoors..

While plenty of candidates for the Anglican priesthood continue to come forward, and plenty continue to be ordained, it has long been the Church of England’s policy to reduce the number of paid clergy posts as they cannot afford to pay them, or their pensions. This is because most of the money raised by Henry VIII’s mahoosive sell off of monasteries and their lands was blown by investing unwisely in the property bubble of the 80s.

The new system of drones will allow centrally-piloted, hovering robots to deliver approved services and even display the words on an abdominally-mounted screen. Congregations can request services by typing in the post code of their chosen place of worship, the date, time and type of church service they wish to have and indicating what the drone is to do if nobody is in. These options include: say the service anyway, give the service to a neighbour, leave the service in a safe place, or drop the service into a local church to be said by a human at a later date.