Growing Church

At Banvale Church along the way they've finally completed a rebuilding project that's taken twelve years from inception through argument and divided public opinion to triumphant opening. Banvale is part of the Federation of Independent Evangelical Churches and doesn't co-operate with anyone. They won't even say prayers with anyone who isn't also part of the FIEC, but I do know the pastor and many people in the congregation, so I was glad to go along for their big opening celebration on Saturday afternoon as the rain poured down outside. 

I was sat next to an elderly gentleman who I exchanged a few words with once it was all over. 'I used to be an elder here before I moved to Somerset', he said. 'To be honest I'd rather the money had been spent on evangelism', which wasn't what I was expecting. How would you spend that much money on evangelism? I forget how much the new building has cost, but it would pay for an awful lot of leaflets. Maybe a fleet of blimps with Bible verses on the side. You could employ a whole battalion of youth workers, but where would they meet? A home for a youth group and other church-based activities was why the original Banvale church got built. A church gets to a certain point, and a building becomes the most practical option, quite aside from those Christian denominations whose buildings have symbolic and spiritual meanings in themselves. There is a romantic quality to the notion of the Christian Church growing from small house-based group to small house-based group, never acquiring the inconveniences of a physical structure, but it only gets you so far. That's why we have church buildings in the first place.

Mind you, there is an argument that being fixated on growing, beyond a point, is a vanity for a church community. Pastors prove their mettle developing, managing, and bringing to fruition projects, the bigger and more expensive the better; the projects give the congregations and church leadership teams a sense of purpose and forward movement. It makes everyone feel good. But what if a church said, Actually, no, if we're full, let's decant some of us and set up elsewhere? What if it defined achievement not by size but by division? I've heard of it happening, but goodness it takes some discipline, and neither Swanvale Halt nor most Anglican churches is likely to face the question any time soon.

I nodded off during most of the sermon and didn't even notice how long it took. What most pleased me was that in a fairly big congregation of perhaps a couple of hundred people, most of whom seemed to be church members, I could only see two raising their hands during the songs, and one of those was the singer on stage. If that maddening gesture is dying out of Evangelical culture I shall be delighted beyond measure.

I Heart Badbury

Although I have said I wouldn't post here unless there was something definite to post about, and the days since I got back from leave haven't provided a great deal Churchy to comment on - I see no reason to add to the pile of speculation about how Sarah Mullaly will turn out as ABC - I find I have an itch to write a little. At some point I might retread my steps and report on visits to underground Margate or art exhibitions in London, but they are things anyone can find out about easily. Instead today, as I and Mum drove out to eat our fish and chips at Badbury Rings, I spotted a red heart painted on one of the gnarled old beeches of the 190-year-old avenue lining the B3082 between Wimborne and Blandford. So once our lunch was over and Mum relaxed into a doze I went for a walk not over the Rings as usual but to find the Heart. Here it is: it seems a fairly fresh addition, carefully painted into what I suspect is an old mark on the tree. The great Badbury trees are reaching the end of their lives, and already the National Trust has replaced many with hornbeams; a new line is growing behind them to renew their work when they finally die, but the landscape will look very different when they're finally gone.

Lincolnshire (and Bucks): Big Churches and Things In Them

Of course one of my stopping-points in Lincolnshire was the Cathedral, gigantic and splendid. I was glad the presence of the Imp was pointed out, so I could avoid photographing it by accident and taking its baleful influence with me ("that which holds the image of an Angel becomes itself an Angel ..."). I paid my respects to Bd Edward King, whose statue presumably depicts him raising a hand in blessing, but it always looks as though he's just saying hello. And then there was this wonderfully pompous 18th-century clergyman who is surely thinking, 'God thinks I am a thoroughly fine fellow, and who am I to dissent from the Lord's opinion'.

But there was also a range of huge churches in modest places. St James's Louth was first, with its scary paper angels:

Followed by St Botolph's, Boston, and its carved knight who is surely Death:

And then St Wulfram's, Grantham, where the scary artefact is the shrine of St Wulfram itself:

(And then there was St James's Grimsby, 'Grimsby Minster' as it is now known, which I couldn't get into).

All these buildings are almost shockingly big for churches which have no history of belonging to religious communities - contrast Lincs with my native Dorset, where all the big churches - Christchurch Priory, Wimborne Minster, Sherborne Abbey, and Milton Abbey - were all monastic at one point. That partly reflects the medieval wealth of this part of the country, but also some other historical factor that led to these towns maintaining one major parish church rather than a collection of them. Stamford, which I visited on the way home, is different, though just as prosperous once: there are five surviving medieval churches there, out of at least as many again. 

But visiting High Wycombe, where I used to live, this week, I was reminded that the situation was the same there. All Saints' is the only old parish church, and, like the Lincolnshire examples, is bigger than it needs to be. I was pleased this time to find it open, which it hasn't been for some time. 

Was St Catherine present? She was, though all in relatively modern images; from the left, a window at Louth, carved above the choir stalls of the Cathedral, a window in the crypt at Boston which has a good stab at looking medieval, and a statue at High Wycombe, very unusually holding what I suppose is intended as a small globe. How can I not have noticed it in the seven years I lived in the town?

Lincolnshire: Museums

It's time for an annual slew of posts about thing seen on my holiday, this time in Lincolnshire, an area I only knew from a very brief visit many years ago when applying for a job in Barton-on-Humber, the end of the line in ways literal and metaphorical. My museum-visiting didn't go as expected. Lincoln City Museum was closed for refurbishment; Grantham Museum in the process of being reorganised though the general public could still come in and wander about while the staff tripped over each other moving display cases and the only objects were some old bottle fragments, a mocked-up apothecary shop, and Mrs Thatcher's coat; and Stamford Museum, while still shown on my map, closed permanently in 2011. That left Louth, Grimsby, and Boston.

Louth Museum rams a lot into a very small space thanks to some creative layout decisions which lead the visitor up and down a mezzanine which allow you to view properly some of the exhibits mounted on the walls. You have to do some work as you occasionally come across artefacts whose significance is only explained later on, such as the amazing products of a Louth woodcarver which you meet before you discover who he was and what these things are. But it's good fun.

In Grimsby I eschewed the well-known Fishing Heritage Museum in favour of the Time Trap Museum. This is a decidedly odd experience. The Time Trap is underneath the old Town Hall, and you have to ring the bell and be buzzed in by a member of staff who points you down a corridor lined with portraits of mayors and cabinets of municipal regalia and to a staircase which leads into the Stygian depths. 'Creative layout decisions' is barely an adequate description as the visitor ascends and descends stair after stair through a variety of sections illustrating the history of the town - or, as so often happens in these cases, the history of the town between about 1860 and 1950. And a riotous, weird, disreputable history it is, almost as though the designers are making the point that this is the dark reflection of the respectable municipal world of the Town Hall above. There aren't many objects, and what you will remember is the bizarre dioramas of raucous Edwardian theatre audiences, rioting pubgoers, and drunken policemen accosted by ladies of the night, like cartoons rendered 3D, as well as the overall effect. Part of the building was the old police cells, and one of the artefacts is a wall of bricks from the prison exercise yard, scratched with inmates' graffiti.

The closest Boston has to a museum is the Old Guildhall, the home of the medieval Guild Merchant of St Mary, and after the Reformation to the Corporation and magistrates' court. This makes for a rich history, but whereas I normally lament the lack of attention museums play to the buildings that house them, Boston's focuses on it to such an extent that you get little sense of the development of the town beyond, and certainly nothing of its contemporary identity. It's also quite fragmentary, and really needs a guiding hand to bring it all together. 

But the trip renewed my sense of how important museums are, or at least should be. It was striking that when I visited friends on the way home who are liberals, Liberal Democrats, and liberal Christians, on being told I'd been to Boston they volunteered that the town 'gets a very bad press' which didn't surprise me. I expected a nice little market town which it sort of is, but when, amongst the sadly boarded-up shops every town centre is defaced by, you come across a 'Bulgarian Shop' that, a sign tells you, has been closed by the police due to 'criminal activity' being carried out on the premises; and yards away there's a 'Bulgarian Food Store' which seems to have no more than three loaves of bread and half a shelf of canned soup in it; and there's a surprising number of young men standing next to shiny black cars talking into phones in Eastern European-sounding languages; then it isn't really shocking that my friends called it 'the most Brexity town in Britain'. Something has happened here that hasn't happened elsewhere and you wonder what it is. This is not a place at ease with itself. A bold museum with a commitment to interpreting a community to itself might be able to tell something of that story - of how so many Poles and Lithuanians came to be here - without expressing an opinion about it. There are, funnily enough, not that many Bulgarians in Boston, so the story behind the Bulgarian Stores might be one to treat with great care.

Go Tell That Fox

The Borough Deans gathered for lunch yesterday. What the role will mean exactly once the local governmental structures of Surrey go through the solve et coagula of reform over the next couple of years we are not sure. Nor are we sure what the elections to the ‘shadow authorities’ next year will bring, but expect a significant number of Reform councillors to emerge whereas there are hardly any at the moment. And Reform is a new and untried quantity: will it be, and be committed to being, a constitutional party of the Right which operates within the boundaries of the liberal-democratic order, or will it recklessly lay the groundwork for something worse later? How are we to engage with this new situation?

A couple of weeks ago two members of the congregation here who are local councillors were accosted by a member of the public at an event who told them ‘When Nigel becomes Prime Minister there’s a short rope with a long drop waiting for people like you’. Now on one level this is the kind of loose-tongued rubbish people say when they are angry and resentful, but on another it’s part of a worrying violence in public discourse in a country where two MPs have been assassinated in recent years, where such acts are not theoretical and people ought to be careful about what they say. Presuming my congregants' accuser was referring to the leader of Reform rather than a random Nigel we knew nothing of, I ended up writing to Mr Farage, arguing that though he was not in any way responsible for the words of a random supporter, nevertheless he was responsible for the perception of his party and for not using violent rhetoric or allowing it to be used without comment. That seemed to me a reasonable action. This was a situation that came close to home as far as I was concerned, and there was a principle involved that wasn’t exclusively tied to that particular exchange, but to the whole of our public life. I am very reticent about this kind of involvement but I felt a certain weight on this occasion.

Christ got as far as calling King Herod a fox, but his main concern was to probe beneath the surface of what people said and did to the assumptions and deep spiritual structures that produced those words and actions, and in the same way the Church now should not be partisan but try to get people to step back from the noise and think about what is going on and what their responsibilities are – not to expect change from others, but from themselves. How many will listen is another question, but it’s our best hope and our urgent task. 

Branding

For some perverse reason the diocese always arranges the institution of new incumbents on my customary day off of Thursday, so on a Thursday evening recently I made my way to Hornington for the formal welcome for the incoming rector there. Hornington is one of those churches recently designated a 'minster' despite the ambiguities of that term: it now means whatever the authorities in a diocese want it to mean, it seems. Maybe it can be best summed up as 'this is a church we trust to take on extra responsibilities'. 

As I found my way inside through the throngs I was greeted by the usual group of welcomers, most of whom I know by face if not by name, and later on was plied with sweetmeats at the compulsory bunfight after the ceremony - and they were all wearing tabards emblazoned with the legend 'Team Hornington Minster'. I was put in mind, I'm afraid, not so much of a community of disparate souls committed to a common search for an encounter with God, but a corporate entertainment venue, or a conference centre. Although tabards are usually found at music festivals and the like (I am informed). At entertainment venues and conference centres, too, they would normally be worn by attractive young people rather than older folk trying not to look awkward. If I was a layperson and I came randomly to check out a church where this was the practice, I'd never go back again. 

Now I know what's going on here. It isn't just about identifying people who are acting in an official capacity: in the first place, there are indeed circumstances where you might want to do that (our congregation members at Swanvale Halt who take entry money from visitors to the Spring Fair wear hi-vis jackets to do so), and in the second, there's no need to do so in this instance, as it's obvious what someone giving you a service leaflet or offering you a sandwich is there to do. It's more about trying to foster a sense of corporate identity in a new venture which brings together four separate and distinct places of worship within one structure (in theory, the 'minster' is the whole parish, not just the old parish church in the town). 

At Swanvale Halt we had our own version of this once; a cross, so the rector in the early 1970s claimed, ‘inspired by the ancient symbol of St John the Evangelist, a chalice and a serpent. Containing within itself the monogram S J E … it also suggests the Church spiralling outwards, growing to meet the needs of the growing population of the parish'. All that needed a bit of imagination to see: have a go yourself, I've added it at the top of this post, I have always referred to it as the 'Nuremberg Rally Cross', but even it didn't appear anywhere but on stationery and a couple of bits of decoration. Nobody had to erase their personality by wearing it, nor was it 'gazed upon or carried about'. I still don't like it and am glad it disappeared in the time of my predecessor-but-three. 

And such corporate identity is not the new self we find in Christ, which gathers up and transfigures our natural (and fallen) selves and turns them into something that reflects not the ideology of an organisation, but the nature of Christ. I mentioned this to Fr Donald at Lamford: 'I always think of the disciples as a group of people all with their own divergent personalities', he agreed, joining me in harrumphing, a comfort coming from the incumbent of a considerably larger church than mine. But maybe we are the unusual ones now: maybe laypeople think this is normal, which is a little bit tragic. 

Rainbow Bridge

My journey towards thinking about animals differently didn’t start with Professor Cotillion’s cavaliers, as it really began years ago with my dealings with Christine and her boxers, but since dropping in on online groups such as the charity Bliss Cavalier Rescue’s LiberFaciorum page I’ve become aware of a phrase, an idea, that Christine never used, that of the Rainbow Bridge. ‘Run free at Rainbow Bridge’, grieving pet owners and their comforters will say of their lost animal.

The idea – a beautiful one – is that dead pets go to a meadow landscape where they are restored to health and wholeness, where there is always water and food, and where they play. They wait for their owners to arrive and, when they glimpse them on the edge of the meadow, leave the other animals and run to meet them. Human and pet then cross the Rainbow Bridge together into eternity. Sentimental, maybe, but as I age I'm more reluctant to dismiss sentiment.

The motif of Rainbow Bridge comes, improbably, from a scrap of paper written in 1959 by a 19-year-old Scottish girl who’d just lost her Labrador. It, and she, were chased down by Paul Koudounaris whose book about the spectacular ‘catacomb saints’ distributed across Catholic Mitteleuropa in the 17^th & 18^th centuries, Heavenly Bodies, I have. She was Edna Clyne (later Clyne-Rekhy), and when Mr Koudounaris found her in 2023 she had literally no earthly inkling that her words, originally handed to a few friends in typescript, had, via a 1990s US magazine advice column, found their way around the world - handed to grieving pet owners in vets’ surgeries, shared between friends, carved into stone and placed in pet cemeteries.

Edna disclaimed any direct spiritual influence on her imaginary picture, but the imagery of the rainbow as a sign of hope and its link with animals seems subconsciously to link to the story of the Ark. The rainbow now carries additional meanings, of inclusion and togetherness. But can the motif be accommodated within orthodox Christian thinking in any way?

Even within its own terms, Rainbow Bridge begs questions. What happens to animals humans have wronged, and whose relationship with us is marred beyond repair? The picture clearly imagines dogs as the beloved pets, not surprisingly, though it can easily be extended to cats; where do other animals fit in? And dogs and cats are carnivorous. As far as Christianity is concerned, the idea of Rainbow Bridge is clearly based on popular misconceptions of Christian views of postmortem experience, one of spiritual survival (‘we die and go to heaven’) rather than the resurrection to a new, physical life. Traditionally Christians have shut down discussion about what happens to animals when they die by saying that they have no souls – no soul, no survival – but that seems to fall into the same error. More to the point, the question of what happens to animals is linked to what happens to humans. We participate in the resurrected life not because some immortal part of us survives, but because we acknowledge our sins and turn to Christ; animals have no sin, and so are not redeemed.

But Edna Clyne was only inventing an image, not devising a theology, and if that’s true of her, very substantially the Bible is little different. You’d struggle to define a clear idea of what the soul means – other than being ‘not the body’ – from Scripture, and nothing about the process of what happens to us after death is very clear either.  The greatest clarity we are given, the vision of the Heavenly City, comes in the form of an image, not details about how we get there or what we will do when we arrive. And we know that animals are part of it, because it was part of what Isaiah glimpsed seven centuries before Christ, a renewed world where the wolf would lie down with the lamb and the child place its hand in the adder’s den and not be harmed. None of the ambiguities are insoluble.

You can’t offer a requiem for an animal which has no sin, but you can say as much as that, and maybe that’s all you need to say. We humans have black vestments and unbleached candles to commend us to divine mercy, the tremor of knowing what we are: the beasts, bold and unaware, have the rainbow.