George Moody gets us thinking about the meaning of locality
Over 40% of buildings on the English Heritage at Risk Register are churches.
As English Heritage only includes buildings that suffer from significant structural problems, it seems that many of our ancient church buildings are in trouble.
Rural and town churches
I can verify this from personal experience. In one local benefice I know well, there are four church buildings. In one, a wall of the church hall is liable to collapse. In another, the vestry roof has just been saved from collapsing. Two lack any access to toilets, while both of these attract families with young children. One of the other churches uses the facilities of the nearby village hall, but the hall is not always open. Thus every church building in this rural benefice has significant or serious building needs. In the countryside, our churches appear to be close to falling down.
By contrast, in the town church where my family worships, a beautiful and costly barn conversion has opened the church’s doors to the community around. In a nearby city church, a large double-decked hall blossomed in a cramped space, to be instantly filled with happy youngsters. Thus millions are being spent on a bid by urban churches to extend God’s kingdom. In the town and city it seems that building is booming.
The nature of place
How should we respond to this contrast? One way is to think carefully about the nature of place. In A Christian Theology of Place, John Inge begins by arguing that, while secular writers have explored the importance of place, theologians have done little work in this area. Inge goes on to suggest that in our churches, as in the modern world, we have lost the idea of place as a bounded locality forming identity and providing ‘security and stability’.
This, he argues, has been replaced by the idea of space as an unbounded area allowing ‘openness and freedom’, but accompanied by ‘threat’. He even argues that Protestant theology has encouraged this move as it is, according to O’Donovan, ‘an axiom of Protestant theology that God’s revelation in Christ broke down elective particularity, not only of race, but of place’. This implies that a rejection of the idea of holy places which restrict access to God and an acceptance of the universality of the gospel has carried with it a suspicion of locality in its entirety.
Such a criticism may well be overdone as it seems to hark back to the missionary methods of a previous generation, but the distinction of place and space is helpful. It offers an analysis of the difference between town and country that does not encourage division or envy.
Undermining locality
For town or city, locality has been increasingly undermined. Locally owned businesses are replaced with global chains. Local house-building styles disappear to allow for highdensity housing and affordable homes. Even churches increasingly seem to mimic each other with wooden flooring, flexible spaces and a clutter of microphones and leads. Thus churches become spaces for exploration and ministry. They add rooms for interest groups to network and offices for pastors to plan.
In contrast, in the country, possibly due to a slower pace and a population ready to fight change, locality remains more important. The businesses that survive are often small and local. There is little money or pressure to upgrade church buildings. Housing may be refurbished, but tends to remain externally unchanged. People there value the unique identity of place and have little interest in adopting external forms popular elsewhere. In this way both town and country churches are adopting the local zeitgeist in a way that Paul might well have applauded. In the town, a space is best for mission, as it is flexible, free, open and risky. In the country a place is best for mission, for it is conservative, familiar and reliable.
Too much
To illustrate this, I have just heard of a local church where there is a charity set up as a trust to support the fabric of the building. It seems that most of the village give to the trust, to the point where it has too much money and the trustees have to look for ways to spend it. Yet almost no one attends the church services. Such a structure would make no sense in the city for any active congregation. Indeed it might well be seen as deeply flawed, encouraging entirely the wrong relationship with the church.
Yet in the village it makes every sense. It is the natural and right way for locals to relate to their own place. The challenge is to find ways to reach them with the gospel rather than complain about their attachment to buildings.
Place and space
The distinction between place and space also reveals a source of support for our theology of buildings.
I well remember listening to Phil Jensen many years ago describing a visit to King’s College Chapel in Cambridge. On finding the nave filled with items for sale, he recalled walking up and down loudly preaching the gospel, to the consternation of the staff. In his view either it was a sacred place, in which case they shouldn’t be selling tourist clutter, or it was a rain shelter, in which case he was at liberty to speak as loudly as he saw fit.
To put it differently, if it is a place of local spiritual significance and it is sacred (as in set apart for God’s purposes rather than imbued with some mystical power) then it must be treated with respect by all. If it is a space which is open to any use, then it must be open to the extrovert evangelist as much as to the religious entrepreneur. Their mistake was to try and have it both ways, to have their cake and eat it, a mistake that is repeated in many of our grand church buildings. In this analysis our city churches are quite right to develop their facilities and open up their buildings. These are no longer sacred spaces to any of the local inhabitants and so they become opportunities for mission, which are to be grasped as the Spirit moves and the funds allow.
I have a sense that neither of these quite does justice to the revelation of Scripture or our felt experience. I have just come back from New Wine. It would be hard to class the Bath and West Showground as a sacred place: concrete and cow muck are rarely found together in such places, at least in this country. Yet somehow it has proved to be a special place of blessing for the large numbers who go each year. I am fairly convinced that this could not simply be translated to another site. Somehow people and place come together to release God’s favour. It acts as a place of springs in the desert. There is of course a risk of what Susan White calls ‘magic or … idolatry’, but such a criticism seems unfair: it is merely a recognition that God chooses to work locally and uniquely by his Spirit.
Both true?
In Scripture we can find similar connections. David’s ‘building the house of God’ in 2 Samuel 7 relates to the people of God, while Solomon’s linguistically identical ‘building the house of God’ in I Kings 5 relates to the temple in Jerusalem. It would be easy to argue that one is temporary while the other is eternal, or one is true to God’s revelation while the other is false, but this is not convincing. They both seem to be true to God. They both find fulfilment in a new way in Christ.
If I am right then we need to recognise how spaces become places as they are used and occupied by people, so that we value and take seriously the way people find themselves attached to the buildings we use for worship. At the same time we must allow places to become spaces so as to engage, encourage and awaken people to the revelation of God in Christ. One practical way of enabling this might be to twin town with country, a growing urban parish with a crumbling rural benefice. How would that be for healing divisions?
