Summer hibernation

This blog was a device to help a sabbatical study along. That study is now more or less over and enters a stage where anybody and everybody is free to comment on its modest results. I would be grateful if any passing bloggers felt they wanted to add their bit.
You will find the short paper by clicking the Concept link on the right, but please place any comments back on this site.
After the summer, perhaps there may be enough of a mood out there for someone to take this thing further.

Visiting hours

Come to visit the old sinner, 'ave you, luv?









Is £10 the penance I pay for coming here on Ash Wednesday?
No, luv, here you get to be a paid-up sinner every day.




OK, that’s unfair. Westminster Abbey will let you in for free if Securitas think you really want to pray. Practise the look: that’s penance enough.

But what else can they do? Deans of Cathedrals beat their breasts about it all the time: some say, without any government support, clobbering the visiting thousands is the only way; others say, Cathedrals are the ultimate spirituality workshop to which all should be invited unconditionally.

In a Sanctuary UK world, I’d go with the first, sad though I am to say it. I believe people are ready to pay for the big-and-special, and that Cathedrals – as tourist honey-pots – should be as close to self-financing as possible.

As for spirituality workshops, every community should have one, and on the whole does so, where bells summon to weekly happenings that are often under-rated, where experiment can be cutting-edge, where ordinary people find themselves - and others, who soon become friends.

Sanctuary UK’s investment is in the local. The big boys must fend for themselves.

There's somebody out there

A problem confronting every amateur researcher (which is inevitably what a sabbatical student is, I suppose) is that the urgency of your enquiry is not matched by any sense of priority from those experts whose wisdom you seek to tap. In fact, the first thing you discover is that discovery is an elusive pleasure, and that the experts – once finally contacted – have to tell you that your ideas are already well researched, which is why they didn’t get back to you in the first place.

It’s been that sort of week, but without necessarily that sort of negativity. After chasing people I had first written to in November, suddenly the Inbox filled, the phone rang, and I even got a white envelope through the door. It transpired that Sanctuary UK had been talked about in high places, and that the easiest way to deal with this unsolicited initiative, was to depute someone on behalf of all experts everywhere to have a little word with me.

Unfortunately that didn’t happen, so a host of guilt-ridden correspondees all communicated at once, which was heart-warming. The communal message was plain: there are already plans afoot for a ‘National Trust’ of churches, and though English Heritage doesn’t like the idea (for reasons I shall ascertain this coming week), there is some momentum in that direction and in others which makes the aspirations of Sanctuary UK probably superfluous.

Well, of course, I don’t think so. But then I wouldn’t have my blog if I did, would I?

Uppermost in my mind at this moment is the image of Pastor Oswald’s look of incredulity as I explained to him in Potsdam this week what bills a Church of England parishioner is expected to pay. The vicar’s salary and pension. The mission of the Church. The maintenance of an often ancient building.

“Was bezahlt denn Eure Regierung?”
“Gar nichts”.
“Das kann doch nicht wahr sein”.

Starting somewhere

This blog doesn’t attract so many hits that anyone seems to have missed me, but for the record, I’ve been in Dublin for a long weekend, and most enjoyable it was. The first sight to be visited turned out to be the most apposite, as far as Sanctuary UK goes. The Tourist Information Centre is housed in the former St Andrew’s Church, and a vast improvement it undoubtedly makes of the place, though in this land where identity is supposedly all to do with religion, this gothic siting of a cash machine gives one occasion to reassess modern Ireland.
Not that Sanctuary UK, by definition, has anything to do with eurocentric, optimistic Eire. A number of people whose advice I’ve sought have said I really ought to be serious about the UK bit, though, and not just focus on England, or worse still, the Church of England. Bring in Scotland, Wales, the Methodists, the Catholics, and the rest.
That’s all very well, but you have to start somewhere, and the fact is, England’s bizarrely established Church provides some useful ready-made structures, which saves the trouble of inventing them. (Who could invent the Church Commissioners?) If we can find a way of getting Sanctuary UK to work with a significant percentage of England’s listed churches, then there’s every reason to share such success as far and wide as you like. One day there might be a Sanctuary.de or Sanctuary.fr – or yes, even a Sanctuary.ie.

High hopes

Well, the Synod’s safely over, with absolutely everyone voting in favour of apple pie. (Not strictly true, with 350 voting on women bishops before lunch becoming 220 after coffee to worry over built heritage.) I’d hoped to be in the public gallery to hear for myself all the happy stories of what people are doing to keep their churches solvent and sensible, but my son was playing a recital in the Midlands and I wasn’t going to miss that even for the Bishop of London’s performance.

Now Synod members (and the Church of England as a whole) are charged with making their high aims reality. The most important task is undoubtedly to get government at various levels to pick up a significant part of the tab, and that’s presumably the job of the more august and well-connected memberships of the Church Heritage Forum and such like.

As far as Sanctuary UK is concerned, we have to start at the other end, with the local churches enthusing their communities to ‘own’ their ancient (or not-so-ancient) building. Hand-outs from on high, if we can get them, are all very well, but they will only stimulate local and long-term engagement with the problem if the neighbourhood has some interest in what’s going on; (viz the exciting stories of tourist trails or community and multi-cultural use of the building).

Sanctuary UK provides an umbrella for initiative emanating from the community. In a sample survey of three dioceses, 83% of clergy respondents said they thought this was just what was needed. Several of those who thought not missed the point and saw another centralized megalith being erected.

The vicar of Holy Trinity Stratford-upon-Avon, who might be said to have particular challenges and opportunities, nevertheless offers a typical survey response to the idea of Sanctuary UK:

Can I just say what a great idea this is - a national 'brand' for 'Friends' groups in a way. Something like a National Trust for churches is desperately needed. To expect my 200 faithful givers to raise £107k parish share this year, and finance local worship and mission, and single-handedly finance the urgent restoration of a huge national monument is neither feasible nor fair.

It’s not going to be easy to get discussion going on this one, though. I abandoned my blog for less sophisticated technology at this week’s Christian Resources Exhibition (see photo). The sandwich-board caused more excitement than the message it was carrying! – happy memories of Marshall McLuhan. I scattered some come-blogging invitations around, so we’ll see if anything happens.

Flavour of the month

Lots of good stuff about church buildings around at the moment: a survey commissioned by the Archbishops’ Council and English Heritage has just revealed that lots more people are visiting churches; and the General Synod of the Church of England is debating its “built heritage” on Thursday.
It’s not as though this issue is a neglected one! – the best in the land are focussed on it.
In the end, however, it’s a tiny group of volunteers in every community in the land which is struggling to preserve its (often ancient) ‘sanctuary’. In spite of encouraging statistics, and debates pressurizing the government to help (please), the sum of any success and the hope for any future rests firmly in the local community.
Even in the unlikely event of the government agreeing to meet half the churches’ annual repair bill (as proposed next Thursday), that still means the other half has to be found. Obviously it’s nice to have to find only £50,000 instead of £100,000, but – you take my point.
And anyway, do we really imagine the political and economic timings are right for what would quickly be criticized as a latter-day Kirchensteuer? And if there was some political mileage in massaging the Christian vote (or at least the Time Team vote), there still won’t be money for everybody. It’s always going to be the church down the road which gets the Grant.
No, the universal (‘catholic’) Christian Church finds its typical expression as essentially a local phenomenon; its buildings the product of local initiative and finance. Both should be empowered to find their own respective 21st-century solutions - in the locality.

To start...

I have two months in which to get stuff out of my system which has been gnawing away at me for years. Nothing as benign as a dormant opus, just an inoperable mass of common sense which has to be exposed for others to diagnose and treat.

There’s a lot of breast-beating going on about what we are meant to do with our church buildings in Britain. This is for a variety of reasons: they are old and tend to decay as are many of the people who inhabit them (I am 60 myself); they are not easily adapted for any kind of use, including Christian worship; they cost a ridiculous amount of money to keep in shabby shape; they are subject to an inordinate amount of control from often vying vested interests.

The best answer we can come up with at the moment is to ask the government to take greater responsibility for this heritage (can you imagine anything worse?). The reality is that we are rapidly moving to a time when nobody much will care. It is not difficult to imagine gutters being neglected, windows and plaster falling out and off, and trees growing through church roofs. It’s happened before.

Now it is getting as difficult to find a potential churchwarden able to fulfil his legal responsibilities as it is a school governor in some urban areas or a parish councillor in the countryside. As for the clergy – many of them have up to ten Grade 1 or Grade 2 buildings to look after, but are on the whole more concerned with reviving their flagging congregations. Indeed, encouragement from on high towards ‘new expressions of church’ will almost certainly accelerate the congregation’s abandoning of traditional fund-raising for the tower.

Sanctuary UK is a concept which seeks to give ancient church buildings back to the communities which built them, capitalizing on local loyalty, knowledge and energy, while benefiting from the resources of a national charity. Click the Link to read the short "Concept".