Words of Encouragement

The grim monument of Archbishop George Abbott in Holy Trinity, Guildford, provides one of the most Gothic experiences you can have in Surrey. His effigy rests on a charnel house propped up on columns of books, all carved in marble. Yesterday our suffragan bishop had been addressing us all in the church about the theme of ‘Tension’ in Advent, and as I sat with ++George for a few minutes to contemplate I reflected that this dramatic structure also had a tension about it. All flesshe ys grasse, it seems to want to say, and nothing earthly about us abides, but it also wants to do it in grandiose marble funerary art and to remind us that the Archbishop was very, very clever and devoted to his books. He doesn’t want us to remember that he was (to date) the only Archbishop of Canterbury ever to have killed anyone outside conditions of war. Oops! It was an accident, honest.

The Study Morning was billed as a ‘retreat’ though there’s only so much retreating you can do together with a hundred or more other people at a town-centre church. I am better at these things than I would have been at the start of my ministry, a bit less brittle and insecure, and so I can let most of it wash over me and even try to be prayerful now and again. After it was all over I went for lunch with Cara from Emwood and Gillian from Stanpool and we weren’t even that bitchy. Not about what we’d just been listening to, anyway.

On Sunday at Swanvale Halt we’d had three services. The 8am and 10am were a bit thinly attended and as I did the second of a short series of talks about elements of Catholic spiritual life in the Church of England I did wonder whether I was wasting everyone’s time. Problems with the sound system were horribly distracting and the PCC Secretary has just resigned for health reasons, two more little incidents which have contributed to the feeling that the millstones are grinding our little church at the moment. But numbers at the Advent Service of Light in the evening were a bit up on last year.

Yesterday Derek, who came into the church first thing to set the heating for the week, told me how his faith had revived since coming to worship with his wife; at the Study Morning someone I’d dealt with in my role as a vocations advisor and who is now sharing a curacy with her husband came over to tell me how our conversations had been ‘pivotal’ for them both; and Cara thanked me for giving her the idea that it’s important to pray in your church building, as this had actually had a positive effect not just on her own sense of relationship with her parish but also with some difficult souls within it. So perhaps I have done a little good! And the eucharist reminded me of the wonderful gift we are given and can pass on to the souls God loves, which is more important than anything.

A Wander in Wittering

My birthday was last Sunday: there were of course things to do, but I had a yearning for the sea and had enough time to do what many people from Swanvale Halt do and zoomed down to West Wittering on Chichester Harbour and, as we always used to say in our family, 'look at the water'. It was a chilly and windy afternoon, but the low autumnal sun struck across the beach and sand bars, illuminating the walkers, dog-walkers, and wind-surfers who were there in what I thought were surprising numbers on a November Sunday afternoon. A mermaid's purse was waiting to be discovered. The wind whipped the drier sand across the damper in long streams, and it found its way even as far as the table behind the dunes where I sat with my tea and an ice cream. But it was worth the sand, the drive, and even the charge for the car park, to mark the day as something different.

The Churches of Cove

The Hampshire-yet-Guildford parish of Cove is another where an established old church is less interesting from our point of view than a new one. The former is St John the Baptist, built in 1844 supposedly in imitation of the Hospital of St Cross near Winchester, a pleasing but not spectacular church with the usual sort of flashy high-Victorian reredos and not a bad nave altar as these things go, plus some very odd details such as a font cover topped with a weird sort of winged urn thing, and a wooden screen of round-headed arches in the transept.

But then I went to what is now Christ Church, between Cove and Farnborough centre. This was built as St Christopher’s in 1934, and represents Gothic boiled down to its absolute essentials. There is a tall tub-shaped font very typical of the time, and a dramatic east end now rendered a bit of a liturgical backwater behind the nave altar on its dais, a somewhat paltry little table, I’m afraid, compared even to the straightforward one at St John the Baptist’s. Five years after its construction St Christopher’s gained a plaque depicting its patron saint, and it seems to have got its aumbry to celebrate its golden jubilee in 1984. I was rather taken aback by the pentagram-style light fittings, and the church feels quite uncomfortable about them too!

There was a third church in Cove: it was an Anglican congregation that used the Southwood Community Centre from its construction in 1993. In 2019 it ceased to exist as a separate grouping and the members relocated to St Christopher’s, which was renamed Christ Church.

Although we see that the sacrament was once reserved at Christ Church – to judge from experience I wouldn’t like to bet that it is now! – and it had an image of its one-time patron saint, I’ve never seen it referred to as a particularly Catholic church. Instead it shows where expectations of any new church in the mid-20^th century lay.

On the Shoulders of Architectural Giants

Fr Jeremy, the Roman Catholic parish priest, used to sit on the board of the Surrey Churches Preservation Trust and suggested we go to a Trust lecture at Merrow yesterday on the revision of Pevsner's Buildings of England volume for Surrey. It's seventy years since the first edition and forty years since the last revision carried out by Bridget Cherry, and now Charles O'Brien has revisited the whole county to complete the latest one. The talk gave a bit of background to the Buildings series - I hadn't realised that Pevsner got the idea from an earlier series of architectural monographs covering German regions, or how much of a popular audience the volumes were pitched at when first released; Penguin Books produced posters announcing 'The only comprehensive book about the buildings of your county', for instance. We had a whistlestop tour of Surrey churches and discovered that the original house in Stanwell where Dr Pevsner first sat at a table with Allen Lane from Penguin and conceived the idea for the series still exists. We learned how Pevsner's collaborator Ian Nairn wrote far more of the Surrey volume than anyone has tended to realise. I was delighted to learn that some omissions have been made good: St Mark's Hale with its fantastic wall paintings is in the revised volume, when the existing one not only overlooked it completely but called the other church in Hale, St John's, by the wrong name. 

Fr Jeremy has long had a responsibility for the fabric of Roman Catholic churches across the Arundel diocese and some of these are quite recent in date, as former bishop Cormac O'Connor insisted that each deanery should have one major church in it, which often meant building new ones: he asked Mr O'Brien whether he could think of particularly good churches built in the 21st century, or failing that good secular buildings. The author was forced to admit a little shame-facedly that the new Guildford Crematorium chapel wasn't in the revised book, as he was familiar with the old one and hadn't thought it worth while to go and check its replacement, 'and actually it's quite good. But it can go in the next edition'. We were all encouraged to get the new book, and if you order through the Yale University Press and quote PEV22 you can get a discount. There was one copy there at the lecture, and so many people crowded round it to look I didn't get to check whether Swanvale Halt church's entry was any improvement on the old one, which amounted to three words: 'dull lancet chapel'.

So What Does Your Parish Need Exactly?

It’s been a long time coming for us, the Parish Needs Process, but on Saturday I, churchwarden Grant and his wife Sue who is our sole Deanery Synod rep (we are entitled to two but I’ve never found anyone else to do it) went to Tophill church to be told how it’s all going to work. Essentially this is an attempt to kickstart what we used to call Mission Planning, with the stress laid on the diocese helping parishes to identify what they want to do and working out how they can be supported to do it. There is nothing wrong with that, but my problem is that I’ve been around too long and remember the last time I went through this process seven years or so ago. I took on board all the injuctions to involve the whole church in settling its priorities for the next few years, getting people talking about ideas and plans, and we came up with a document that had my initials alongside action points suspiciously often. The number of people who actually wanted to use their limited free time to engage in the process was never very large and for the most part the congregation nodded and smiled and then went home. I have become entirely sceptical that this exercise as a process brings its supposed benefits to the church community, any more than constantly assessing what we do in the way we normally would. Attentive readers might remember, in the dim and distant past, the diocese’s Twelve Transformation Goals. Feedback indicated that nobody could remember what they were, so since the Pandemic they have been shrunk to three, stressing the priorities of discipleship, evangelism (what is called 'Growing Diversity' on the logo means outreach and evangelism), and community service. These, it seems to me, are more or less exactly the same as the three goals our former bishop set the diocese long before ‘Transforming Church, Transforming Life’ ever came along, and this is no coincidence because these three areas of activity are what the Church of Jesus Christ is for. Any plan for the future of any kind will always and I dare say has always included them, and so what the diocese has come up with is not only not new, it is exactly the same as anyone would.

All that said, in theory it helps to have something to guide your activity rather than flailing around randomly, and Mission Planning, or Church Development Planning or whatever you want to call it, is useful to that degree. After our conversations on Saturday I came away from the meeting less dreadfully negative than I started. In the new year a Mission Enabler from the diocese will have a conversation with me as the parish settles its ideas for the coming couple of years, and eventually we will have a Plan on a single side of A4 which the Archdeacon will look at when he makes his visitation in June. I’m not sure how much the diocese will really have had to do with it apart from kicking us all until it gets done.

Tophill has a nice new church Café which functions as a separate business and which serves coffee at least as posh as the café opposite Swanvale Halt church, the beans not exactly rolled on the thighs of dusky maidens but nearly. Everyone attending on Saturday got a discount voucher for their coffee, but we still had to pay for it. I was not alone in thinking this was a pretty poor show for laypeople giving up their free time to sit in a church and talk about toddler groups and the like, and I’m afraid I’ve said so on the feedback form so we’ll see whether I get feedback on my feedback.

Canalside Scenes

My original plan last Thursday was to go walking around Long Valley near Aldershot, but the military ranges were closed, so instead I picked out a set of interesting features to go and look at near Deepcut, around the Basingstoke Canal. In the event a series of locked gates on the land associated with the old Deepcut Barracks meant I couldn’t see those either; some people do, because I’ve seen references to cyclists visiting Porridgepot Hill and the Old Windmill watertower not far away. But I had to be content with a short circuit around the Canal.

The Basingstoke (Dr Bones will confirm) is one of the less-used waterways in the network: it’s not well-supplied with water and traffic is regularly stopped, and it doesn’t take much of that for boat-users to avoid it (in fact I remarked on this a few years ago). The houses lining one bank not far from Deepcut Bridge all seem equipped to take advantage of their location with kayaks or rowboats but apart from one short narrowboat which showed signs of not having moved for a long while I saw nothing bigger. But there were chaps fishing around Frimley Lock, carved owls, folly-like water-gates at Wharfenden Lake, and remarkable graffiti at Deepcut Bridge. They’ve been there for at least twelve years, but nobody seems to know the artist or who they’re depicting.

That Doesn't Make Any Sense

Trevor has been quiet for quite some time: his delusions haven't been of the kind I can do anything about, and I have stopped arguing with him as there is no point. They are so deep-rooted and such a part of him that there is no dislodging them even as they upset him. But just over the last couple of weeks he has been complaining about the Adversary's activities again.

Trevor: I'm experiencing supernatural events. I keep levitating.

Me: When does this happen? Are you sitting watching the TV and then lift up out of your seat?

Trevor: It's when I'm lying on my bed. [clue: this means he's asleep].

Me: Has anyone ever seen this happen to you?

Trevor: Leeeet meee thiiiiink ....

Me: I think you'd probably remember if anyone else had been there.

- As indeed any potential observer would have done. Trevor wants to be exorcised, but I reminded him that I can't do that without referring to the Diocesan Advisor on Deliverance, and I have taken him to three of those over the years and none of them have deemed exorcism a necessary step to take. He accepted that without complaining, for now.

In the afternoon it was Church Club. The story was Gideon, and taking a cue from the episode of the fleece my theme was experiments. For some years when I've told this story I've taken a pair of tarnished copper coins into school and, during storytime, put one in a jar of vinegar until the end of the session to show how the vinegar cleans it. I sat down to do this yesterday and Disaster! found no bottle of vinegar in my bag|: I was convinced I'd brought it. I apologised to the children. 'There's some vinegar at the bottom of the toy box!' cried Bryony brightly. The toy box sits at the side of the hall, full of foam rubber balls and the like and the children had all been playing with them while we got ready for storytime; it seemed prima facie most unlikely that the school would be storing vinegar in it. I went to investigate, surrounded by a crowd of excited children, and, sure enough, right at the bottom, was a bottle of vinegar.

For a moment, I admit, I was bewildered. All my expectations, which seemed so reasonable, were confounded and I could not work out any reason why the school would want to have vinegar around other than in the canteen, let alone hide it in the hall under a mountain of foam rubber balls and rings. But this was only a moment: I realised it was my bottle of vinegar, which must have fallen out of my bag thanks to the children rummaging around, and found its way to the bottom. This was a relief, or I might have had to concede that perhaps Trevor had been levitating after all.