By John Cole

4. Ancient Monuments

If the geographical parish is now in most cases just a monument to an age which has past, so surely is the church building. If congregational life has become dislocated from its context and we are actually wanting to see a shift in the centre of gravity of church life in the direction of more informal and smaller groups, what is to be done with those glorious, evocative, prayer-filled, time-hallowed but apparently almost useless medieval churches in which so many of our congregations are based? Is the only effective ministry a ministry to tourists?

The problem is the extent to which in the last hundred years or so the building has been hi-jacked by its congregation. Whatever we may say about offering a welcome to all comers, our body language and the way we have fitted out the building says "It's our church; you'll come on our terms." And the moment we do this, we are effectively putting up a sign which reads "Private: keep out!"

But is the parish church our private property? History suggests no simple answer. The story of church buildings over the centuries is one of three distinct and somewhat conflicting functions - and a pattern of almost continuous evolution. Tell that to the conservationists and those who don't want you to touch a single pew!

The essential reason for having a church building is to provide a roof over the place where Christians gather when there are too many of them to meet in each other's houses.

1. In the earliest years of the Christian church, if they provided a specialised building at all, it seems to have been much like a Jewish synagogue. A plain box was sufficient for the varied activities that took place within it.

2. When Christianity was made ‘official’ at the time of the Emperor Constantine, where would the increased numbers of Christians meet? The conveniently available roof over people's heads was the Roman Basilica - the existing multi-purpose pride and joy of most self-respecting late Roman towns. Where a basilica did not exist, the obvious solution was to build one - with the result that an arcaded building with a single main axis became the norm for larger church buildings virtually ever since.

3. Alongside the development of places for large group worship and celebration meals etc, a third strand had a profound influence on our church buildings, how they are constructed and what we feel we want to use them for. This strand is reflected in Rome in the catacombs and in the orient in the monastic and eremitic tradition of caves, etc. The earliest churches in the east outside the towns tended to be small, dark and often semi-undergound - places of prayer, of loneliness, of spiritual warfare, of ‘coming away into a place apart’.

The churches we inherit from the middle ages illustrate an attempt to combine the two experiences of the public basilica and the monastic ‘place apart’. As all life was lived within an all-embracing ‘Christendom’ the need for a gathering of Christians for teaching - in competition with a pagan world - was no longer necessary. The two remaining strands were reflected in the division between nave and chancel/sanctuary - the nave where almost anything could happen (they kept the town's fire-engine in St Wulfram's, Grantham, until the middle of the 19th century!), and the chancel which was reserved for the holy mysteries.

The reformation saw a rediscovery of the ‘synagogue’ strand in church building, but in the much narrower context of a preaching house. Individuals were discovering a new self-consciousness in their Christian commitment focused on the newly-available printed Bible.

The result over time was that the medieval naves were filled with pews - so that all could hear the authoritative voice of the preacher, even though the acoustics were never meant for sermonising!

By the nineteenth century, the teaching activity is gradually finding its way out of the church and into the schoolrooms, leading ultimately into the development of day schools.

With such a complex history and with three conflicting functions, it must be no surprise that throughout the twentieth century most of our churches seem to have been less than well suited to almost any purpose at all! Congregations have therefore made themselves comfortable in them for their Sunday worship as best they could.

But we need to recover a clearer vision for these extraordinary buildings, both in terms of prayer and mission, if we are to justify the enormous cost of keeping them - for keep them we surely must!

For a start perhaps we can rediscover their role as more versatile public places - at least in more rural areas. Larger town centre churches also surely still have a civic function which ought to be developed more imaginatively than it often is.

Secondly we need to re-discover the potential of our buildings (especially when they are medieval in origin) for providing small and ‘secret’ spaces where small groups and individuals can ‘come apart’ for prayer and meditation.

Our church buildings, especially our historic parish churches, have great potential to feed our new experiences of ‘church’ as cell and celebration, but not if we only use them congregationally on a Sunday!

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