In Defence of Parish Churches

 

If we winter this one out, we can summer anywhere

Seamus Heaney

I stumbled across an incredibly moving sight today; Ribbons tied to the railings outside Old Gourock Parish Church, some Parishioners had even left beautiful little messages of remembrance for loved ones who’ve passed on during the year. This made me think about how difficult a year it’s been for everyone and just how important these structures are to the communities to whom they belong.

So much so that there’s a right good chance my head might just explode if I hear one more fellow Christian say ‘Well Ross, you know, Churches are people not buildings’, in response to the ongoing restrictions on large public gatherings. 

Someone should have told our poor forefathers whose money and sweat literally built our places of worship that they needn’t have bothered because communal worship would eventually become an ‘outdated model’.  

Rather, when I look at an old parish Church I reflect upon the often repeated idea of great Cathedrals offering us a vision of living our lives for those who come after us. This is because Cathedrals were built up by different builders over centuries for their descendants, the builders knew they’d never see the Cathedral completed within their own life times. Therefore each builder’s stone on top of another represents each generation and so, to honour a fine Cathedral is to honour our ancestors in faith too. 

Similarly, all those parishioners who in more recent decades, ran marathons and abseiled off tall buildings to pay for the new Church roof and the wheelchair access ramp, must now be feeling rather foolish, having recently discovered ‘we don’t really need to go to Church to be close to God’.

Of course, it is entirely accurate to say Churches are made up of people, not buildings and it is indeed perfectly correct to feel close to God from the comfort of our own homes or anywhere else for that matter. 

Even so, I am disturbed by how quick we are to suddenly declare our buildings to be insignificant to our faith. Perhaps this type of response has its origin in a desire to cope with the frustrations of not being able to get to Church during the lock-down?   

Or maybe our haste to view gathering for worship as unimportant, is a creative response which seeks rationalise God’s apparent inability to maintain to his own worship amid a pandemic?

Nonetheless, just because we cannot currently (fully and freely) access our church buildings doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have them. Indeed, at what point did we Christians become such iconoclasts and ahisorical post-modernists who see no value in tradition and continuity? 

I suspect much of this disconnection from our places of worship to have something to do with the creeping gentrification of Christianity. Too often, a number of our more affluent and influential parishioners rarely live in the parishes which they grew up in and as such, they feel no deep sense of place or emotional attachment to the particular building where they now attend Mass. 

We all know those types of ‘blaw-ins’, those well heeled, sharp elbowed professional Christians whose vision of Church sounds more like some kind of cross between social work combined with a mindfulness course and a corporate business model based on outputs and efficiency, devoid of piety and popular devotions.   

Yet, our cherished parish churches aren’t simply temples of worship; rather they are also temples of remembrance  which hold within them the eternal memory of the community; all the births, baptisms, confirmations, communions, marriages and funerals across many generations of the same families. 

More so, in a rapidly changing world, parish churches are very often the only physical manifestation of living history in our communities amid ongoing demolitions and new builds all around us. Churches are frequently the only places in our towns and villages where (now lost) craftsmanship and beauty has been preserved. Think of all the ornate and exquisite wood carved pews which each year end up in skips or in trendy restaurants and bars or worse - luxury flats. Think of all the families who’ve sat in these pews down through the decades.

Indeed, one of the great joys I’ll miss this Christmas is to go to the aforementioned Old Gourock Parish Church to sit in the old pews for the annual ecumenical Christmas Carol service. My family once owned their own pew in this Church and whenever I visit, I like think on my Great Grandfather and Great Grandmother and their seven children filling up the Ahlfeld family pew, safe inside the Kirk during times of hardship. 

Enter into any antiquated parish Church, sit down and close your eyes and you can almost see and hear the ancestors, as alive now as they were in life. Look around and you can make out the faithful who’ve passed on over the years, the pastors, priests, organists, elders and passkeepers. 

I think this feeling of closeness to our kinfolk inside Church buildings perhaps explains  why there are so many old stories about the dead gathering for Mass at the stroke of midnight on Hogmanay or tales of clergy catching glimpses of recently deceased parishioners among the congregation in the communion line.

While it might be blasphemous to think of Churches as locations where the distance between the living and the dead is thin, maybe we can safely say that such settings are made holy by generations of humble and pious prayers, season after season, in times of peril and in times of hope.

Of course, none of these justifications are explicitly faith based; rather my arguments are mostly informed by sentimentality and yes, even folk belief. Not for nothing have I been accused of being a ‘superstitious, backwards looking pedlar of folk-Christianity’. An accusation to which I plead guilty to and can happily live with, yet I do not consider any of my arguments for having an emotional attachment to Church buildings to be meaningless or of no importance, why would they be? 

Yes, the principle purpose of a Church building is for it to exist as a space to gather for liturgy and celebrate the Eucharist but for me (and I suspect many others) a sense of memory, place and the importance of heritage still matters.   

So let’s not abandon these fortresses of our fathers which have preserved us down through the ages. Be as sturdy and as stoic as our forbearers, become a friend to a friendless Church

 https://friendsoffriendlesschurches.org.uk/?fbclid=IwAR3URVr8Z014W6sbfV-Zw-P6UtYRDMXJc1IJsu_b2EGGhmXFUxWzKvsd81g

 or chuck a few quid in to help a struggling congregation whose Church hall has just collapsed http://stmarynewington.church/giving/

Most of, please raise a glass and bend a knee for all those who’ve gone before us this year and all the loved ones they leave behind. The parish triumphant in Heaven are always with us and all around us and we will meet again on the resurrection morning.