English Parish Churches

Debate between Lord Griffiths of Burry Port and Lord Spicer

Thursday 12th June 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, listening to that leaves me with a certain amount of bemusement. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, for bringing this debate and subject to our attention. He was in what I can only call symphonic form, with that lovely opening movement, which I wanted to go for a lot longer, as we visited, through his experience and the music of his words, those rather picturesque places in Lincolnshire and other places. However, there was the sudden shock as a new movement was brought in, where the word “bats” suddenly changed everything and made me wonder how on earth to respond. As a Methodist, responding to a debate about the parish church is the equivalent of Pavlov’s dog responding to a bell. The opportunity to interfere in other people’s affairs is too great a temptation to neglect. We do not have belfries in Methodism, so I guess we do not have bats. I will leave that bit of it aside. The noble Lord, Lord Cormack, then moved into that last scherzoid movement, where money came into it and the pace quickened. So did the temperature. I might achieve that myself by the time I finish my own remarks.

As a phrase, “the parish church” simply conjures up all kinds of images that are not dissimilar from the ones spoken of by the noble Lord, Lord Cormack. Simon Jenkins in his lovely book gave us 1,000 of the best churches in England. Of course, nearly all of them were village churches in one place or another, and every single page was taken with high-definition photography. That showed us why it is lovely to be British and why it is nice to have a day in the countryside. The church I am responsible for, Wesley’s Chapel in London, crept in through the back door and is one of the 1,000, but only grudgingly. Simon Jenkins said that it was a bit of a mausoleum, really, spoilt by all those Victorian monuments. I thought he was referring to Westminster Abbey for a moment, but it was us. I will take him there one day and show him that it is better than he thinks.

There are then, of course, all those monumental works that we become accustomed to, such as Nikolaus Pevsner’s The Buildings of England: 46 volumes, cataloguing in great detail all the great buildings we are thinking about. John Betjeman did it in a different style and mood—how wonderful he was too as a character—helping us to see the importance of the parish church.

All these works point to the importance of our built heritage, but the large majority of these 16,000 churches to which the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, referred are in the countryside. Thomas Gray’s “Elegy”, of course, is almost imprinted on one’s heart: those roses “born to blush unseen” and waste their fragrance on a “desert air”. The rural community was served by these churches when they were isolated from each other and were communities in their own right. Since industrialisation and the arrival of the motorcar they have been on a tourist trail. They are visited much more often, but in their day, before the pre-emptive takeover of the Reformation and before industrialisation, they were positively quintessential places that drew the communities they served together. The dark satanic mills of England’s green and pleasant land drove our imagination into overdrive so that we could think of the parish church as just what we were losing, just what we wanted to keep at all costs.

We have rather fantasised the parish church in the course of these historical developments. Once upon a time, as well as worship, business was transacted in the church. People were at play in the church: they had banquets and parties in the church. Schools were run in the church. There were mystery plays in the church porch. Feasts were held. Then there was a rather puritanical moment when ale could not be served in church, so village halls got built. Suddenly all the fun things started happening in the village hall and the church was simply left for its spiritual purposes. That is a rather sad moment to record in the history of our land. I want to have fun in church; I do not want to have to go to a dingy little hall to do it. The harvest festival suppers I have been to in church halls, when there was a lovely space just across the road, do not leave me with happy memories.

Then has come the reinvention of the village, as wealthy people bought houses as rural retreats, or they became dormitories for commuters, or places where the retired emigrated to, or second homes for those with ample means. Suddenly the village was reinvented. It was no longer the community of people indigenous to it. The vision of the English countryside as “timeless”, dotted with ancient houses and an immemorial landscape, became what featured in our imaginations and on those railway posters from the early days of British Rail, attracting us to leave the cities and go into the countryside. Suddenly we were thinking about “The Archers”, “The Vicar of Dibley” and “Midsomer Murders”. They all brought a rather fantasised understanding of the village to our imagination. Villages progressively lost their doctor, their school, their garage, their pub, their shop and their post office. The church, too, should have gone under by way of those same market forces. However, the wealthy people who had come to live there put their hands in their pockets, organised events and signed cheques, and against the evidence of the market the village church was maintained.

Alongside all that—I am sorry about the history lesson but I have had to dispose myself against my natural inclinations in order to remind myself of the real importance of the parish church—there is the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings and all the preservation societies that the noble Lord sits on, or has sat on for many years. Sir Roy Strong, in his history of the parish church, makes a rather different remark. He suggests that the word “preservation” has been unfortunate, that churches were great at adapting to their circumstances and at serving the needs of their generation, and that preservation seems to oblige us not to change a thing but to keep things exactly as they were. That is very difficult to imagine in an organism that is breathing and alive.

Those who think of the parish church in these idealised ways—Jane Austen, George Eliot and Anthony Trollope—have left their imaginative mark on our minds, but I want us to debunk some of that and take the parish church on its own terms. Be good and feel good about it but do not keep it as a kind of mothballed creature protected against the depredations of time.

I also want to bring the imagination into the cities, where parish churches also exist. I want to go from “Dibley” to “Rev.”. Shoreditch, where that was filmed, is just around the corner from where I live. So there are parish churches in cities as well as in the countryside, and they, too, do extraordinary things. The chapel that I serve is in a covenanted relationship with our parish church, St Giles Cripplegate. The sacred space has often become secular space in the cities, where space is at a premium, and we should remember that very seriously. In our little outfit, for example, as well as being a tourist attraction—we get tens of thousands of visitors a year to what is effectively a world heritage site—we have 60 or 70 non-governmental organisations or charities within half a mile of us, all because we are near the City of London. They are headquartered quite close to us and use our premises all the time. We introduce charitable bodies to each other so that critical mass might be achieved.

The boys’ school—a state school—just 100 yards from us uses our space. We invigilate examinations for children who have been excluded from school. We provide a safe space and proper invigilation not on school property. When Ramadan falls at a certain time of the year, Muslims come in and find a place where they can lay their mats, turn in the right direction and offer their prayers. When the forensics were being done for 7/7 and dreadful things were being done in the Honourable Artillery Company across the street, people who could no longer stomach what they were having to do month after month in the examination of human remains would come over for a cup of tea, which we were very happy to serve.

Extraordinary things can happen when you have that kind of space as your legacy. It is terribly important that the parish church should be understood to be any ecclesial body which, as well as having its own interests in the field of spirituality and worship, sees itself as being of public service. That should win the acclaim of people instead of the opprobrium that it too often gets.

We have a marvellous thing happening at the moment. The boys’ school that I mentioned has 150 teenage boys singing in a choir. To join the choir, they have to come to school an hour early. They have breakfast and then come to our place to practise their singing. A contingent of them is taking part in a performance of “The Armed Man” at the Albert Hall in September with children from Belgium, France and Germany to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the First World War. All these things are energies that we can harness and give some focus to in the space that we have to administer. So let churches do the churchy thing, but let all of us remember that we have a service—

[Lord Spicer (Con)]

I am sorry; I did not want to break into what is a brilliant speech, but in a way the noble Lord is dealing with the very easy bit—he is talking about space being used in the cities. At some point can he briefly get back to the village church, where there is a serious problem? He said, “Don’t leave them mothballed”, but where you have one vicar now serving 10 churches, how do you do anything else with it?

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port]

I thank the noble Lord for that intervention. I am very happy to offer a reply as that is the very basis upon which Methodists have been organised since time began: with one minister for about 15 churches. Either I would advise the noble Lord to come and join us or I would be very happy to put appropriate documentation under his nose or the names of people he can talk to to help him with his problem.

I was into my concluding remarks and my overdrive—what the Welsh call “hwyl”—with an appeal to see the parish church in its most generic and ecumenical way. It is an appeal to recognise that in the kind of space that people like me are responsible for in our church lives, we see the tools or the premises that we have as being at the disposal of the society that we serve. If only others would see us in that way instead of in a sectarian way, the energies and synergies would be very extraordinary indeed.