Ship of Fools: St Mary’s, Wimbledon Village, England

The Mystery Worshipper

Ship of Fools: St Mary’s, Wimbledon Village, England

A warm welcome, but a bit of a struggle to get into a Georgian box pew

Read the full Mystery Worshipper report here

Bishops Finger

A congregation of 180 is not bad at all in these declining days of religious observance!

Feeling welcome and comfortable, if unchallenged on this particular occasion, is also good.

BTW, I recall being similarly flummoxed by Georgian box pews in a now-closed church on the Isle of Man well over 50 years ago...

Spike

The report describes the church as having “Anglo Catholic surroundings”. I’m not sure what the reporter meant by that as the picture doesn’t look particularly A-C (two candles on the high altar, no statue of the BVM, or any other saint for that matter etc). From what I know of the parish, they are in the Liberal Catholic tradition theologically with standard Middle-of-the-Road liturgy, which is pretty much the norm in Southwark Diocese.

angloid

I served in the adjacent deanery for a number of years. While the 'liberal catholic tendency' is the default for Southwark diocese (with many significant exceptions, notably the extremely conservative evangelical Emmanuel just down the road), its liturgical and ceremonial expression varies considerably. I would risk an even greater generalisation by saying that the higher the socio-economic status of the neighbourhood – and you can't get much higher than Wimbledon village – the lower the tat-count of the building and clergy. And vice versa. Theologically though extremes are rarer than in the counterpart diocese across the river.