THOUGHT FOR THE WEEK - From Michael Sargent

Pastoral Thought

In my years of writing various thoughts for magazines and newsletters I have never consciously turned my attention to the Church Times as a basis for what I am passing on to my readers. Things are different this week because I was drawn to two articles that I first glanced at and then went back and read them properly.

The first was by a former Professor at Exeter University (Nicholas Orme) who said that when he was twenty in 1961 his elder brother suggested they had a drive out to the Forest of Dean and visited the ancient church at Newland and then noticed that a grammar school had been founded in that small village way back in 1446! He described this as his “Damascus Road” encounter, that resulted is spending years studying the ‘history of childhood and what is developed in them that makes them the adults they become!’ He ends this cameo of ‘Holy Places’ with these words, “To go into any ancient church is to be brought into contact with centuries of inspiration and devotion, often changing, and yet rooted in where it began - the Gospel of Jesus. One can come out from even an empty church building a different person from the one that went in (as I did when a 20-year-old in the Forest of Dean). And, for that, we need our churches to survive, including the small and the rural: we cannot do without them, for the Church of England is made by the England of churches.”

The second article that took my attention were comments about the fake graffiti in Canterbury Cathedral that was intended to provoke questions about the nature of God and what the church stands for, but the majority of those who have seen it are appalled, describing them as ‘hideous and very obtrusive’. What the author of the article goes on to comment about is that it detracts from the importance of medieval cathedrals in Western Europe. He (Andrew Brown) quotes from the Spectator that concluded, “The Canterbury graffiti ... does not teach, it poses questions which, at best, are the proper province of prayer and debate ... it brings to mind not the beauty of holiness, but a urine-sodden Zone 3 underpass.”

A cathedral without gimmicks can point towards an answer but the answer is not to be found from a can of aerosol on a space within or outside a building. It was a spectacle for visitors before it became a spectacle for the whole world. It is a hard road for English cathedrals to follow, no matter how much they want to, because so much of their fund-raising depends on tourism; in the end, if those graffiti draw more visitors to Canterbury, they will have done their work.

There was a follow up the day after I started writing this ‘thought’ when various papers quoted, “cultural vandalism is happening under our noses every second, with the quiet decay of parish churches”. The UK has 38,500 churches. An estimated 3,500 have closed in the past 10 years. The Church of Scotland is planning on closing up to 40 per cent of its buildings. In Wales, 25 per cent of historic chapels and churches have closed their doors since 2015.

Churches are the crown jewels of our heritage, containing the UK’s largest collection of art, sculpture and stained glass. The Church of England cares for 45 per cent of the nation’s Grade I listed buildings. What’s more – unlike grand galleries, museums or palaces – they are brilliantly accessible, being free to visit, and local to us all. They don’t tell the stories of the rich and famous, but a cross-section of ordinary, local people, and how they have navigated the past 700 years. As visitors to a church, we aren’t passive observers, gazing at objects through glass; when we take a pew, we sit side by side with our ancestors and play an active role in continuing the story.

There is much more about the demise of the church buildings, but I leave you with the headlines in the Yorkshire Post on 22nd October – ‘Heritage challenge’ as 32% of churches face uncertain future.’

To those who read this and think churches still don’t concern them, imagine a world where they are bulldozed over, the landscape devoid of soaring spires and the distant toll of bells never to be heard again. Let us not be the generation who let churches crumble. Instead, let us commit to save our wonderful churches for the nation, for our future, and for the countless stories yet to be written.

Michael Sargent, LLM Acaster Malbis