By John Cole

Six ways to hi-jack your local church!

1 . Treat it as a Totem Pole. The parish church in many villages (and some larger towns) is in effect the symbol of the place, a sign which says "This is our home’’. When this view of the church dominates, just you try moving a few pews or building an extension!

2. Use it as a Mausoleum. How many folk spend more time tending their family graves in the churchyard than they do worshipping the living God in the church? Yet if the church building wasn’t there . . .

3. Simply say ‘’It is our church". People who have lived in a locality for a long time are often the pillars of their local church. In their view, they are the real villagers/townspeople; they can’t allow their church to be taken over by these incomers. Churches can retain a village character (and be dominated by farmers, estate workers and, of course, the elderly) long after the village has become a suburb.

4. Simply say "We’re the faithful few". As a congregation dwindles and grows old (perhaps because it has taken the line suggested in (3) above), so a few families decide ‘’We will keep this church open at any cost’’. Not that they want to see new faces in the church; they are too proud of being ‘the faithful few’ to let that happen!

5. Simply say "This is how we like it". A church which draws its congregation on the basis that ‘’Here we do things how we want them" is almost the norm in suburbia, but it can happen elsewhere. Many town centre churches draw their ‘eclectic’ congregations from far and wide to share in a particular style of worship or a particular way of doing things. A take-over by a new generation of incomers (perhaps wanting choruses, guitars and a great deal of lively informality) is likely to be precisely what the old villagers dread!

6. Turn it into a chocolate box. Affluent incomers buying up the cottages in the village in order to live out a romantic rural idyll sometimes manage to ‘buy up’ the local church as well. The church then looks as though it belongs on the lid of a chocolate box. The church grounds are beautifully manicured; the flower arrangements are exquisite; the formalities of traditional worship (no modern language here!) are done to perfection -but hasn’t the church become little more than a folly at the bottom of somebody’s garden?