Rejoice! Why That Circus in the Aisle Could Bring New Life to Your Church

The Guardian (UK) ^ | 3/26/16 | Tobias Jones

[marshmallow]

The Church of England has nearly 16,000 buildings, three times more than Tesco, but they are empty most of the time. With their maintenance now an urgent issue, radical reinvention may be required

We Britons are famously obsessive about our heritage. Our attachment to stately homes, castles and cathedrals sometimes verges on the fanatical. And yet almost half of all the Grade I listed buildings in England are in the hands of a single organisation - the Church of England, which is mildly bemused as to what it should do with them. It has 15,700 buildings in all, compared with, say, Tesco's 3,376 UK stores.

Those church buildings are almost always empty: a quarter of them have an attendance of 16 or fewer. Some churches enjoy bulging congregations, but even they come together only for a few hours a week. The crisis is so acute that the church is now selling about 20 churches a year. It is not, of course, only the C of E: last autumn the Catholic diocese of Salford announced it was selling about 60 churches and losing half of its 150 parishes.

There are almost 42,000 Christian buildings in the UK, of which 930 are on Historic England's "at risk" register. So each denomination is having the same emotive, and fascinating, debate about what to do with its real estate.

Until now there has not been much urgency to the debate because the decline in worshippers was gentle and never uniform. The buildings are generally sturdy and resilient and no generation wanted to be the one that finally made a clean break with these sacred spaces. But there is now a sense the issue cannot be ignored any more. The Church Buildings Review Group has recently published a report.......

[holyscroller]

I did my part. About 20 years ago I discovered a gorgeous raised pulpit from a Church of England in Birmingham, England for sale. It had stairs going up into it, and much beautiful ornate woodwork in the making of it. I had a huge living room with plenty of room for the pulpit, so I bought it and saved it from being purchased by a satanic group. I’m now downsizing, and praying I can find a new home for the big beauty.