Wednesday 30 November 2011

troubled times for the church

The parish magazine arrived today, with a flier about the restoration fund for the church.  The church has been known for months to be in a bad way, since part of the ceiling fell in and the rest was judged to be unsafe, and Sunday services have been held in the village hall since the accident.  What we hadn't known, until we got the leaflet about the appeal, is that the tower needs substantial work as well, and the estimated cost of repairs has been put at £120,000.

The church serves two parishes.  The church in our parish was deconsecrated and turned into a dwelling back in the 1970s, though the churchyard is still open and kept in a rather delightful state of controlled decay by the council.  In late winter it is a sheet of snowdrops.  The building makes a stylish house.  Our village is extremely spread out (there is a theory that this is characteristic of settlements on light and easily cultivatable soil) and the former church is not at all close to about 99% of the houses in the parish, and is small with no car parking facilities whatsoever.  I presume that is one reason why it was selected for the chop when the parishes were merged.  The merged parishes, as well as sharing the remaining church, share the vicar with a third local parish, as is normal nowadays.

Now £120,000 is a substantial amount of money to find.  It equates to around £75 for every man, woman and child living in the two parishes.  If the appeal can raise some funds locally, the organisers will then be eligible to apply for grants, but there is no guarantee that they will be successful.  A couple of people organised an accordian concert a couple of months back to raise money, but you need an awful lot of concerts, and jumble sales, and sponsored walks, and quiz nights, and coffee mornings, and sponsored hair-growing or head-shaving, and all the other fund raising staples of provincial England, to make much of a dent in £120,000, or even £60,000.  The two parishes are middling sorts of places, not deprived but without many rich households, and there aren't many big local businesses to tap.  And goodness knows how much per head £120,000 equates to for those people who actually go to church.  Most don't.

The painful question is whether society needs so many churches, and can afford to keep them up, or at least is willing to find the money to do so.  What exactly are churches for, in an era of declining church attendance?  We are not practising Anglicans, and have never been to a service in our church in the 18 years we've lived in the parish, nor are we likely to do so if they ever manage to get it back in commission.  We're not originally from the area, so none of our families were married or christened there, and none of our relatives lie buried in the churchyard.  It has no resonance for us at all, except as an historic building.

Unfortunately it isn't a very distinguished church.  Much of it dates from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and it is Grade II* listed, so I shouldn't be too sniffy about it, but it doesn't make it into Simon Jenkins' Thousand Best Churches, or get a mention in my County Guide to English Churches.  The flint tower is nice, but it's not an outstanding building, and it doesn't occupy a key commanding position in the landscape, being set back from the road, outside the main body of the village, and behind some farm buildings (admittedly compared to the age of the church they should be viewed as temporary structures).

There are so many church buildings that need funds for repairs.  A couple of years ago, English Heritage estimated that six cathedrals needed a total of £60m spent on them over the next decade, which includes Canterbury, York, Lincoln, Salisbury, Winchester and Chichester.  The pot of money available from English Heritage for cathedrals is shrinking as government funding declines.  The Church of England is struggling to balance the need to maintain its historic buildings with the cost of providing clergy wages and pensions and carrying out the actual work of the church.  Which is more urgent, to conserve York and Lincoln, which are great world-class buildings that make my heart sing when I enter them, or to repair my village church?

I'm afraid our church missed a trick in not reinventing itself for more secular times.  When we arrived in the village, knowing nobody and quite keen to fit in, subject to the rigours of commuting, we did not get a welcome from the vicar, or an invitation to a monthly meal where we might have met people from our new community, or any other kind of church led social introduction and inclusion.  If we didn't want to go to church services, the church didn't want us.  Indeed, all we got was a fair amount of grief from our new neighbours who wanted us to construct a separate access road to our property, at considerable expense, so that we would not drive past their house.  They were, you guessed it, leading lights of the local church.

The fund raising letter that came with the parish magazine ends optimistically, saying that any monies left in the fund after work on the ceiling and tower will be used on other repairs needed.  In the circumstances I'm afraid it might have been more apt to say what would happen to funds raised should the appeal never reach its target, and work on the ceiling and tower not take place.

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