Wotton Church

St John's Wotton is a church I tried to get into umpteen times before finally begging one of the churchwardens to let me in some while ago. It isn't a church that's been very affected by the Catholic Movement, and its best feature is the bleak and rather strange Evelyn Chapel which you are very much not allowed to photograph, but it has a wonky sanctuary lamp and a nice, elaborate reredos flanked by curtains on rods.

Meanwhile the mid-Victorian pews have these little folding shelves, which I was told might have been to rest top hats on. They only feature on one side of the church, so there may be something to this story, and they indicate the chaps' side.

Major Considerations

The Vicar of Tophill and the priest-in-charge of Hornington described for the meeting’s benefit the process of establishing the new ‘minster’ parish that will cover them both. When we last mentioned this here, some of my readers expressed a degree of scepticism over whether the term ‘Minster’ was really applicable to Hornington church which is a sprawling and very badly organised parish church rather than anything grander. His Grace of Tophill stated that ‘minsters’ were often former monastic churches and Hornington qualified partly due to once being a Benedictine monastery. I don’t know where he got that from: it may be scrambled from the fact that there was indeed an Anglo-Saxon ‘minster’ there, but those were not always monastic and not always very big either. He outlined the current requirements for a church to be designated as a minster. The trouble with this is that what he’s talking about is not actually ‘minster status’ but ‘major church status’, something which I think has existed since about 2020. This seems to have developed from, and is still tangled up with, the notion of a ‘Greater Church’ which is about thirty years older.

In 1991 a group of big and historic churches, often former monastic ones, which were of a near-cathedral size (and in many cases bigger than small cathedrals like Carlisle and Oxford), but lacked the recognition and resources available to cathedrals, set up the Greater Churches Network to swap ideas about fundraising, marketing and management. There were more in some areas than others: Dorset had three (Sherborne Abbey, Christchurch Priory and Wimborne Minster), but Surrey, none at all. The GCN trundled on for a couple of decades and then in 2016 the Church of England issued a report discussing the idea of the ‘Major Church’. To be designated ‘Major’, a church had to fulfil several criteria: it had to be more than 1000 square metres in size, be Grade 1 or 2* listed, to have exceptional historical significance, and a role beyond that of an ordinary parish church. When the GCN dissolved itself in 2019, it had 55 members; the 2019 report had already identified 300 ‘major churches’. Not all were as big as the former ‘Greater Churches’; not all were even very old, as the number included Fr Gresham Kirby’s modernist gem St Paul’s Bow Common. It’s this designation which Hornington is being proposed for, rather than the courtesy title of ‘Minster’ which doesn’t really mean anything and which certainly carries no legal status whatever; you’d have to be very imaginative indeed to describe St Paul’s Bow Common as a ‘minster’. As I mentioned, the GCN is no more, and is now the Major Churches Network, and designated Major Churches can apply to join it (though its membership is still only 65).

It seems clear that Major Churches are just one element of a Church in a state of flux. It might be that they could indeed develop into being something like the Anglo-Saxon minsters, centres for Christian activity locally, with dependent daughter churches or communities, and organising and galvanising bodies for mission; but that’s not what they are yet. They would need to work out the boundaries between that kind of activity and the strategic role deaneries are supposed to be developing, and what happens to those churches who find themselves in the region of a Major Church with which they are out of sympathy ecclesiologically? That’s likely to be the case with Swanvale Halt and Greater Hornington. It only makes the £300K the Diocese is giving to the putative new ‘minster’ for additional staff grate all the more. If there’s that kind of money to be given away, I could make use of some!

Stretching Credulity

Here's another in our occasional series 'Media Misrepresentations of Clergy and Churchy Stuff' and given the last post it's a coincidence that it comes courtesy of a TV drama scripted by former Dr Who  showrunner Steven Moffat and starring David Tennant, having a break in between stints portraying the good Doctor themselves. Not having a TV licence I have no option of watching Inside Man as broadcast, and judging by the reviews I am not much inclined to seek it out. The story begins as parish priest Harry Watling agrees to look after a memory stick from a parishioner who wants to hide it from their mother. His son's tutor ends up looking at it, finds it contains child porn, the vicar's son claims it's his without knowing what's on it, and his father knocks the tutor over the head and locks her in his cellar while he works out what to do next. Needless to say, this is not a wise move. What's more, he does this not to protect his son, but the parishioner who gives him the USB stick because he claims he has a duty of care to a vulnerable person. Several reviewers have pointed out how weird and unrealistic the whole show is. I will merely observe that Rev Watling has somehow managed to avoid the umpteen and endless safeguarding courses that all the rest of us have had to go on over recent years which lay out in pitiless detail what we are supposed to do whenever anything remotely like this comes our way. The procedure is roughly:

1. Break out in a cold sweat

2. If you are in a safe place, such as your parsonage, run around screaming

3. Call the Diocesan Safeguarding Department and gabble an incoherent explanation

4. Do what they tell you

5. DON'T DO ANYTHING ELSE LIKE LOCKING PEOPLE IN YOUR CELLAR

That this drama has come out at the same time as the Church of England's Past Cases Review is especially ironic, as it's clearly written by someone who doesn't know how we now all have safeguarding processes positively riveted into our heads by those responsible. Perhaps Mr Moffatt should have conversed with his fellow Dr Who writer Paul Cornell, who's married to the Vicar of Fairford. Nothing like having a clerical consultant on hand.

The Manner of Our Departure

It was a beautiful, elegaic moment as Jodie Whittaker’s 13th Doctor regenerated yesterday evening into – well, if you don’t mind spoilers, an earlier version of herself. And every Dorset native will have been squee-ing to see where she chose to watch ‘one last sunrise’ – the unmistakable outline of Durdle Door on the Purbeck coast. My first thought was how lovely it was, and my second how aghast the Dorset emergency services would be at the prospect of viewers thinking it might be fun to try and recreate the moment. Sure enough, the Lulworth Estate which owns Durdle Door has denounced the BBC’s ‘duplicity’ (now that’s a strong word) in not telling it what the request to film at the limestone arch would actually produce. There’s no safe way along the top of the headland and people have been badly injured diving off it. Unless you actually have access to a TARDIS, it’s best admired from a distance.

‘It’s such a shame you can’t pick the date, time, place and manner of departure, isn’t it? Well, you can in some sense, but that’s obviously more likely to be a messy route, and I don’t like mess’, mused Ms Kittywitch to us the other day. Ms K, who has battled a bewildering variety of medical dangers since before her heart-and-lung transplant at the age of 13, now faces a new diagnosis I can barely remember, and a new drug which might buy her another X years or finish her off with an allergic reaction. She is right, though I would choose not a sunrise on Durdle Door (or indeed chucking myself off it), but a rainy late afternoon on Chesil Beach, the ‘melancholy, long withdrawing roar’ of the Lyme Bay seas on the shingle. I can’t see how that could be managed, though, and might have to settle for Dorothy Parker’s more realistic option: ‘O let it be a night of lyric rain/And singing breezes when my bell is tolled’.

Most of us will be ushered from this earthly existence as part of a medical drama. On Thursday night I was called to the hospital to see Edgar: Jackie, his wife, apologised for calling me on my day off once she realised that’s what it was, but I’ve learned that you mustn’t delay these things if you can help it, and had we left it to Friday morning Edgar would have been unresponsive. It was hard to understand him, beyond the single word 'Amen'. His operation months ago to correct an essential tremor was successful but his enjoyment of it never materialised as his recuperation was interrupted by a fall and broken ankle, pneumonia and finally a fatal infection. That’s how it goes. Not for most of us the singing breezes or the crashing waves, but the quiet of a ward side room and the hiss of an oxygen mask, and as much faith as, with God’s grace, we can muster.

A Matter That Concerns Us All

This was the title of a video we used to play at the museum in Wycombe: it was about 1935, and the Mayor was appealing for money to buy a new ambulance for the (privately-funded) hospital. It wasn't one of the most riveting visual experiences we had to offer visitors. 

On Thursday this week I was pursuing my church-visiting mission, sitting outside Ockham church with a sandwich for lunch and with the radio turned on, listening to the resignation statement of the Prime Minister. To my surprise, I found my eyes stinging with tears. This was certainly not for her, much as I might sympathise with anyone who finds themselves humiliated so publicly: it was more for shame at the disgrace and degradation of our public life, not just over recent weeks, but for quite some while. I also realised it was also coloured by fear at what might come next. The people in my parish, the people who we are thinking about helping with an after-school meals project or the visitors to the food bank, desperately need stability and good order, desperately need the generous condescension of the financial markets. Will another Tory leadership contest really provide it?

Although I try to keep this blog moderately anonymous, given that you realise Swanvale Halt is not a long way from Guildford it is probably no surprise that the MP for Southwest Surrey, the Rt Hon Jeremy Hunt, is our local elected representative. Politically I know he will be up against the wall when the Revolution comes, but I rather warm to him on a personal level. I last met him in the parish when he was out with a volunteer litter-picking campaign: ‘you’re well out of it’, I failed to say to him, and little did I, or presumably he, know that in just a couple of weeks’ time he would be picking up other people’s trash in a far more globally-significant way.

What can we, the citizenry, do as the Conservative Party decides who to impose on us as, in some sense, our common representative? Notwithstanding their constitutional right to do so, it feels invidious that we must sit passively and watch while our fate is decided. If we have a Conservative MP I think we are probably entitled and maybe morally required to say something, especially if, as Mr Johnson’s backers are to be believed, their inboxes are full of emails saying ‘Bring Back Boris!’. So in the end, after faffing about like usual, I did get in touch with Mr Hunt, and tell him I thought his colleagues ought to have especial regard to the qualities the country might need in its new PM, and to the fact that the Conservative Party membership might feel differently. I popped a message on the church’s LiberFaciorum page encouraging them to contact him, too, not that I would ever dare to tell them what to say. It’s part of the church’s ‘community-building’ brief, including truth, discourse, and common responsibility for our future. 

I also took the opportunity to suggest to our new Chancellor that he might like to respond to a few questions for the parish newspaper, after the Halloween financial statement. If he still is Chancellor by then, that is.

PS. Well, how that's turned out is something of a relief. For the moment.

Oleum Infirmorum

It must have been a copy of the parish magazine from the 1950s that recently came my way in which I learned that my illustrious predecessor-but-four Canon Artington had intended to start a healing service, which seemed a rather unusual thing for the time, and even more for a solemn graduate of King’s College London and St Stephen’s House. Without access to the service registers from then I don’t know whether anything came of it. Anyway, I had Canon Artington in mind on Tuesday when we had a contemporary go at the same kind of thing. It struck me months ago that there was an Autumn gap in the calendar of Churches Together in Hornington & District between the August open-air service and the Christmas excitements, and St Luke’s Day on October 18^th caught my eye. He is the patron saint of physicians. None of the local churches does anything explicitly connected to the healing ministry; as a healing service isn’t necessarily eucharistic, it ought to be something all our local congregations could subscribe to. Of course having come up with the idea I had created a rod for my own back in planning it, but in the event everyone I asked to take on a task said yes. It was quiet, reflective and candle-heavy, with piano music and a modest schola singing the Ubi Caritas, laying-on-of-hands and anointing in the proper manner, and a team from Tophill to provide individual prayer if people wanted it – in fact that caused the only slip in the liturgy as they were still praying with some people as the main action reached a pause, with no sign that they were coming to a halt: even in a ‘quiet and reflective’ event, if you are sitting doing nothing when you know that there’s something left that you will be doing, there’s a point when expectation shifts uncomfortably into tension. I found myself approaching the service with more trepidation than I expected, and not for fear that it might go wrong or nobody turn up, but that I was deeply unworthy to be saying the words I would have to. I kept a semi-fast through the day (fluids and bread only), and felt more acutely than usual having to recall that these are the declarations and actions of Christ, not me. As well as being candle-heavy, the service was also clergy-heavy, but their feedback afterwards was especially appreciative. Perhaps clergy have an unusual need for the healing grace of the Spirit.

Peace Be With You All

Returning to work after a fortnight’s break in the Autumn is always a bit of a rude awakening for me: no matter how much activity I may have packed into those two weeks, they very soon recede into the mists of memory. The last out-of-the-ordinary event of my holiday was attending a Goth night at Aces and Eights in Tufnell Park: I was glad I did, but the transport system has now made it very hard for me to manage nights out like this, as the last train for Swanvale Halt leaves London well before midnight. On Saturday I parked in Kingston and caught the train there, and even the Kingston trains ran no later than 0.42 unless I’d wanted to catch the one an hour after that culminated in a bus journey from Surbiton. I managed to make it to an 8am mass the next day, but the church I first tried was shut leading to a mad rush to the Cathedral. I’m not sure which edition of the Prayer Book the celebrant was using, but their prayer that the Lord might ‘so rule and govern the heart of thy chosen servant George our Queen’ suggests they’d been up late as well.

So Monday morning began with Bible reading. While I was away various things had gone slightly awry, people not being where others expected them to be, and allegations of unhelpfulness by some parties against others, and I wasn’t looking forward to dealing with them (I shouldn’t have looked at the emails in advance). My eye was drawn to Christ’s instructions to the disciples in Luke 10, ‘First say, Peace be to this house’, and that seemed like a clear instruction if ever there was one. We mustn’t allow a high value placed on the Peace of God to obscure real problems in a Church community, but it does no harm for it to be the first word the pastor says to it. It reminded me what I am here to do, and I thank God for that.