A View from the Rectory: Church Closures, Prayer and the Future

Rev’d Ian Hodges, Pedair Afon Ministry Area Leader reflects on his experiences over the last few months.

Three encounters have stuck in my mind as I have been wandering through the last two weeks.

Here they are.

The first was on the 31st of May. I was at an evening service in St Mary’s, Garth in my hometown of Maesteg. The church was absolutely packed to the rafters with people for whom the church meant something. There were people attending who had been married in the place 60 years ago. There were people attending who had been baptised there, or had their children baptised there.

There were people from the surrounding streets and people from the other churches in Maesteg who had come along too. There was not a seat spare, it was standing room only.

It was a wonderful occasion, as church services go.

The reason for this gathering? Well, sadly, we were all there as it was the last service that was going to be held in St Mary’s before it was to be deconsecrated and sold.

Before the service started, I was chatting with people to find out their thoughts. Many were sad, and a few even voiced the reflective, “Maybe if I had come more often the church would not be closing its doors now.”

Ooh!

The truth is that churches, like other things, exist by the mantra, “Use it or lose it.”

People seem to think that churches are state-funded and have loads of money and as they have been around for ever will be around forever. That is not the case. Sad times.

The second place I found myself was in a field, sitting on a hay bale, just outside the town of Coleshill on the morning of the 8th of June.

There were lots of other people sitting on hay bales as well. These people had come from all over the country and some from other countries too. The reason for this gathering?

We were all there to take part in the blessing of the land that the Eternal Wall Of Answered Prayer will be built on.

This Christian landmark is to be made of one million bricks and will reach 50 meters up and be 80 meters side to side. Each brick will represent an answer to a prayer made in Jesus’s name.

Also, due to its location when finished it will be visible to people driving up the M42 or the M6, or going past in HS2 or flying overhead from East Midlands airport.

We had gathered to worship and to learn and then to take part in the blessing act itself. It was such a joyous occasion with worship and testimony and prayer, and it was a wonderful example of church, but not as maybe us Anglicans would be used to.

God was certainly in the place, but that place was not a brick building with a cross on the top but was a corner of a very dry field with animal food for seats and the sky for the roof. We were from all denominations, and different parts of the Church (with a capital C) but that morning the differences were nonexistent, and the focus was what God had been up to and was continuing to do in the middle of the UK. Happy times.

The third encounter happened on 13th June in St Theodores church in Kenfig Hill. We were there for a meeting of Ministry Area Leaders and the first item on the agenda was Bishop Mary being interviewed by one of the Archdeacons.

We all listened to her story of how she came to be a bishop in our diocese and what God had been up to through her life. After the interview the floor was opened for questions, which was great as something she had said caught me, and so I asked for clarification.

Bishop Mary said she liked the vision we have with its threefold message (Tell a joyful story, Build the Kingdom of God, Increase our capacity for good) and it was on the second point that she said something that caught me.

She had said that, amongst other things, we had to make sure that we were going about building the kingdom and not just trying to keep all our churches open.

The former is what Jesus was about, and the latter is what we can get tied up doing. When I asked her if I had heard her correctly saying these things, she said I had.

I found it refreshing, if not enormously challenging, to hear that our new bishop is somebody who is not afraid to grasp the nettle and help us as we grasp our local nettles.

That nettle will be us looking at the future of how we continue to have worshiping communities, and a Christian presence, in all our communities where it may be that, sometime soon, we need to close a building or two.

I don’t want to see buildings close in our Ministry Area, or in any areas that I have worked in or lived in before for that matter, but if we need to downsize to upsize the Kingdom then so be it. We live in curious times indeed.

I will leave, as an exercise for the reader, for you to think about the commands of Jesus in the gospels and choose which piece of scripture you think best defines being focused on the Kingdom and its growth and not getting caught up, as Bishop Mary says, in the important but periphery work of buildings.

Covid has shown us that we can be incredibly flexible when we need to be, and my recent time of singing in the field of hay bales outside Birmingham has reminded me that the way and place we worship may change in the future but who we worship never will.

Let’s see what God will do next, and keep singing as we do.