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".