Baroness Wilcox
Main Page: Baroness Wilcox (Conservative - Life peer)
Baroness Wilcox (Con)
My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Cormack very much for giving the House the chance to debate the importance of the English parish church. I am an oblate of the Anglican Community of St Mary the Virgin at Wantage. I go home at weekends to my village and my church of St Just in Roseland. When I am in London for the rest of the week I can worship at St Peter’s Square, so I am used to a fair variety of Anglican worship.
Today, I am here to speak as the chairman of the Diocesan Advisory Committee for the Care of Churches in the diocese of London. From this position, I can reliably inform noble Lords that in the diocese of London bats are our friends because they do not, largely, like our church buildings and steer clear of them. I will also explain a little further about the importance of the English parish church in an urban, metropolitan context.
The diocese of London consists of 480 parish churches, each with its own defined parochial area. The diocese covers London north of the Thames from the M25 in the west as far as the River Lee in the east, including the heart of the East End, the City, the West End, Metroland and beyond. The rest of greater London is shared between the dioceses of Southwark, Rochester and Chelmsford. I need hardly remind noble Lords of the great diversity and stark contrasts to be found in these places, from the hardest pressed urban deprivation to the richest square mile in the world, with every inch of this area having its own parish church—whether it wants to use it or not. The best English parish churches do not conform to any defined standard imposed from above. They find their place among their local community and grow out of it, imaginatively tailoring their activities to the needs of their locality.
My role in the diocese of London is to chair a learned body called the diocesan advisory committee, or DAC. DACs have been around since the 1920s and have a very specific remit in preserving, enhancing and promoting the importance of English parish churches. I count among my predecessors Ivor Bulmer-Thomas, Member of Parliament for Keighley and founder of the Friends of Friendless Churches, and Sir John Betjeman, already lyrically referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths of Burry Port, and whose writing on churches is among his most enduring.
Each of the 42 dioceses of the Church of England is required by law to have a DAC and the purposes and workings of each of those committees are equally clearly defined in legislation. The DAC provides advice on all aspects of managing church buildings. In London we see around 300 cases every year, from major extensions and restorations to minor re-orderings and making lavatories accessible. In this way the diocesan advisory committee is a key guardian of English parish churches, protecting their importance for future generations.
As chairman I see two main branches to this. I am sure that we are all familiar with the historical, architectural, artistic and academic importance of our church buildings, each of them a record in stone of the people who built them and the generations who have worshipped there since; witness to the formative events of our country, nationally, regionally and parochially. This importance is duly acknowledged by Her Majesty’s Government: 45% of all grade 1 listed buildings are Church of England parish churches. Following changes to VAT rules in 2012, the Government acknowledged that more prosaically by generously providing funding to ensure that the impact on historic church buildings was minimised.
What can sometimes be forgotten is that that rich cultural resource is as rich as it is only because the buildings have been used. The use of the buildings is the second branch of importance that I oversee. Our churches have been chopped, changed, extended and reduced, with every phase adding its piquancy to the cultural soup. In being awed by the splendour of these buildings, we must not be lured into misguided preservationism, which will silence our generation to the ears of the future. Church buildings must be permitted to change to meet the needs of the present. That, in turn, will give them a sustainable future.
Balancing between those two potentially competing forces—the accident and the substance of churches, if one wishes to be philosophical about it—is the challenge that greets every new DAC chairman, such as me. The governing legislation enjoins us to,
“have due regard to the role of the church as a local centre of worship and mission”,
not only to ensure that the building is well fitted to its congregation but that the very act of making it so may become a new chapter in the rich history of that building.
One thing that is changing is the way in which church buildings are used. Other speakers have referred to this. Long gone are the days when it was frowned on to clap in church—I remember when you could not clap in church—and in many cases, church doors were shut during the week. The activities of parish churches in London now encompass much more than worship alone. They include running 150 schools, educating 53,500 children from all faiths and backgrounds and administering more than 1,000 projects of social transformation, impacting on the lives of more than 200,000 people annually. All that work is ably supported by more than 10,000 volunteers.
Many of those projects require transformation of the church building and, consequently, the advice of my committee. In recent years, the DAC has seen proposals for post offices, doctors’ surgeries, free schools, nursery schools, a gym, several night shelters, cafes, counselling services and innumerable charitable activities meeting local need. That is not on a small scale. Taking night shelters as an example, over the winter of 2012-13, 280 churches mobilised 5,200 volunteers across every denomination. There were church night shelter schemes in 23 boroughs, offering shelter and hospitality for more than 1,300 people.
The diocese of London has given central recognition to those new developments in the life of the church in London through an ambitious programme entitled Capital Vision 2020. The belief behind Capital Vision is that London’s churches should not be static museums, nor should they be bland community resources. Rather, they should have the confidence to be churches: outward looking and inward welcoming. Capital Vision aims to find the best examples of thriving, open, community-focused churches in London, and to teach their lessons to others that may be struggling.
I like to think that I see a lot of the importance of the English parish church in the work that I do for the diocese of London. London’s churches are as varied and colourful as London's communities. They are places where differing strands come together, both temporal and eternal; places of history and beauty; places of celebration and of mourning; places of splendid ceremony and of ministering to the poor.
Churches are also places where international visitors of all faiths and none can connect with God, yet also places which stand at the heart of their local communities, seeking to connect with people’s hopes and needs. Through being an open presence in the midst of our city, our church buildings will bear a welcoming witness to the Christian faith to all who enter them.
In an era when, nationally, fewer of our citizens attend church for worship, more than ever before are visiting churches for cultural, community, educational and altruistic purposes. In this way the English parish church will, I believe, continue to be the beating heart of its local community and one of the key defining features of English society in the 21st century.