PARISH CHURCHES? how do we keep our - Ecclesiological Society

DR SIMON THURLEY, CHIEF EXECUTIVE, ENGLISH HERITAGE • SPEECH 11
Richard Giles wrote in 1999 in his in$uential book
Re-pitching the Tent ‘the vast majority of our parish
churches will require radical re-ordering to refurbish and
re-equip them for service in the next century....
re-ordering is a continuous process and not a one-off
event’. Surely this must be true. Even looking at the
post-Reformation history of parish worship our churches
bear physical witness to Laudianism, Puritanism, the
ecclesiological movement and evangelicalism, to name but
a few. We cannot expect a congregation to have the same
needs today as they did in the 1840s. Liturgy, like any
other form of etiquette is always is a state of subtle change.
Today’s ordering certainly
wasn’t yesterday’s and is very
unlikely to be tomorrow’s.
Assuming we accept this
assertion, what does it mean
for our most important
churches? Well it means that
we must act from an
informed base. We must
understand what we have
and avoid sweeping it away
in an attempt to
accommodate the latest fad. There are big gaps in our
knowledge. Where are the most important interiors of the
post-medieval period in particular? Just how many
eighteenth-century box pews survive and where are the
best furniture ensembles of the major nineteenth-century
architects? To answer these sorts of questions we need
research and I would like to know from you what you
think our research priorities might be. We don’t have
endless resources – none of us has – but we want to use
what we have in the way of money and staff to its greatest
advantage.
Flexibility like ‘reversibility’ has become something of a
weasel word in conservation circles, implying that any
change can be justi#ed. But it is the right word to describe
an approach that is looking for creative solutions to
managing change, which is what I want to see English
Heritage doing in its approach to the whole of the historic
environment. We must continue to defend what should
be defended with all the vigour and expertise we can
muster and there are clearly some churches that can only
tolerate very limited change. That should not mean that
they are shunted into the Churches Conservation Trust as
museums. We all must help them develop their own
‘worship and mission’ to suit their circumstances. By
re#ning the designation system and creating a wider range
of management regimes in its wake, we might hope to
avoid the con$ict that such cases often cause and promote
the responsible use of historic churches. But this has to be
done by us working together, on a strategic level, and not
piecemeal as now.
De#ning the signi#cant is also vitally important to the
strategy that the Archbishops’ Council is embarking on in
the next year or so. A Future for Church Buildings
successfully demonstrates something that is perhaps
obvious to all of us who are working with churches, that
they are core buildings to their communities, for a
There are so many examples
already of how ‘saving’ a church
on the brink of extinction can
galvanise a community
and re-vitalise its use
wonderful variety of reasons. If they are not now, then
they could be with a little vision and development. The
care and conservation of churches has perhaps become too
wrapped up in itself and needs to be integrated back into
the mainstream of parish and diocesan life as a positive
rather than a negative blocker of the ‘real’ work of the
church. There are so many examples already of how
‘saving’ a church on the brink of extinction can galvanise a
community and re-vitalise its use. What A Future for
Church Buildings promotes is not just relevant to the care of
historic churches, it is really about the re-establishment of
church buildings into community life. That is where the
churches started and that is
how they must be perceived
if they are to survive, and dare
I say it, if the church in this
country is to survive. And
crucially church buildings are
an important part of the
mission of the church – the
fact that they raise such
heated debate amongst those
wanting to be rid of them
surely demonstrates that. It is
going to be essential to change perceptions of the value of
the church’s architectural heritage within parts of the
church – though it will not be easy and will require a
change in culture as well as widespread good examples.
Secular authorities, especially those with money to
spend on infrastructure like the Regional Development
Agencies, need to be convinced that the projects they are
being approached about really do bene#t everyone and are
not simply helping a few. Remember that the Chancellor
of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown justi#ed the
introduction of the scheme to refund VAT paid on church
repairs with the argument that churches were bene#ting
their wider community and so should have greater help
from the nation. It has to be said that the ecclesiastical
exemption has, until quite recently, divorced churches
from the community’s elected representatives in the local
authorities. Politicians may be wary of interfering with
religious matters, but the result of the exemption is that
they and their staff in planning departments know far too
little of the needs of parish churches. Churches might
argue that their decisions are better than those made by
local authorities, and made by people with a higher level
of knowledge, but what chance do local authorities have to
understand and participate in your decisions, when they
have been shut out of the process for so long? There are
lots of good examples of co-operative working, and some
of the case studies in the Synod paper demonstrate that.
But the anti-local authority culture is still very prevalent
within the churches, sometimes based on experience but
too often based on perceptions that have gained their own
momentum over the years. English Heritage also despairs
of some decisions made by some local authorities, just as
we despair of some decisions made by some DACs. But
both systems have much to commend them, not least the
enthusiasm of the devoted staff involved. English Heritage
is in the position to act as an honest broker, to make you