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.