People mention the general disillusionment/disinterest of most of the population in (organised) religion/Christianity. Yet, as was mentioned in the conversation which sparked this thread, there are still significant numbers of folk out there who continue to expect the church to be there - if there is a threat of it closing it's a case of 'Who's going to christen the grandkids/marry my kids/bury grandad?'. And when it comes to church buildings being sold off and becoming carpet warehouses or Indian restaurants it's bound to be 'Disgusting, selling off an important part of village history, losing our heritage... my mum and dad were married there, and their parents before them... Sacrilege!"
A good few years ago now I read that 60% of churchgoers under 25 were concentrated in the Greater London area. If true, it meant that the rest were spread very thinly over the rest of the country.
To a point; I suspect young families and students are likely to be clustered around urban conurbations that allow for commuting/studying.
The UK's economy is weighted heavily towards London and the SE and church isn't immune to material conditions - perhaps it should sometimes speak to them too.
Call me a heretic, but I have long held that the Eucharist is not some occult magical rite which only an elite band of inductees can successfully perform.
You're not a heretic - you're a Baptist.
Can't be doing with individual glasses or Ribena lol
The church camp that I grew up at and helped build as I got older, is on the National Register of Historic Places because it was built by WWII veterans for the benefit of their children. Now their great grandchildren are attending. The National Register in some ways cause more problems than solutions. For instance, the current camp board wanted to replace the windows of the cabins but could not do it without the permission of the Registry board. It took five years to get approval.
People mention the general disillusionment/disinterest of most of the population in (organised) religion/Christianity. Yet, as was mentioned in the conversation which sparked this thread, there are still significant numbers of folk out there who continue to expect the church to be there - if there is a threat of it closing it's a case of 'Who's going to christen the grandkids/marry my kids/bury grandad?'. And when it comes to church buildings being sold off and becoming carpet warehouses or Indian restaurants it's bound to be 'Disgusting, selling off an important part of village history, losing our heritage... my mum and dad were married there, and their parents before them... Sacrilege!"
And it is natural and right for people to want to have pivotal moments of celebration and loss given a communal or ritual dimension in a place that feels special and set apart. In rural places, the pace of life may be slower and more intimate: people know one another because they meet while walking dogs or working in fruit pack sheds or coming together for harvest celebrations. Older buildings are loved and revered even when people have lost faith in the institutions that own them.
If we have a funeral here, almost everyone attends because they will have some local connection to the farm labourer, teacher, social worker or police officer who has died. It is a sign of respect to show up for one of us, even if they had come here as an asylum-seeker or agnostic. If there is no minister present, family will still gather in a private home or borrowed hall to put up slides-shows of images, sing songs, tell stories about the loved one. And the graveyard is well-tended here because people remember those buried, it is not an anonymous neglected site. One reason I often think rural churches may prove more resilient despite dwindling ecclesial resources is the closeness to the land itself, the farming communities and persisting village traditions of neighborliness.
People mention the general disillusionment/disinterest of most of the population in (organised) religion/Christianity. Yet, as was mentioned in the conversation which sparked this thread, there are still significant numbers of folk out there who continue to expect the church to be there - if there is a threat of it closing it's a case of 'Who's going to christen the grandkids/marry my kids/bury grandad?'. And when it comes to church buildings being sold off and becoming carpet warehouses or Indian restaurants it's bound to be 'Disgusting, selling off an important part of village history, losing our heritage... my mum and dad were married there, and their parents before them... Sacrilege!"
And it is natural and right for people to want to have pivotal moments of celebration and loss given a communal or ritual dimension in a place that feels special and set apart. In rural places, the pace of life may be slower and more intimate: people know one another because they meet while walking dogs or working in fruit pack sheds or coming together for harvest celebrations. Older buildings are loved and revered even when people have lost faith in the institutions that own them.
If we have a funeral here, almost everyone attends because they will have some local connection to the farm labourer, teacher, social worker or police officer who has died. It is a sign of respect to show up for one of us, even if they had come here as an asylum-seeker or agnostic. If there is no minister present, family will still gather in a private home or borrowed hall to put up slides-shows of images, sing songs, tell stories about the loved one. And the graveyard is well-tended here because people remember those buried, it is not an anonymous neglected site. One reason I often think rural churches may prove more resilient despite dwindling ecclesial resources is the closeness to the land itself, the farming communities and persisting village traditions of neighborliness.
In some ways I think church is losing out in rural Scotland from the growth of local trusts. Our local community development trust, rural development trust, community council, and the programmes they support crowd out a lot of the social support that church might offer. In some ways it's a good problem to have, as these organisations employ multiple paid staff and are firmly rooted locally, but it does reduce the wider function of the church to "hatches, matches and dispatches", with the emphasis on "dispatches".
Good point. We and the local Baptists have several church members actively involved with the community council, development trust and booktown company, so that helps keep the church 'in the picture' as it were.
The Church of Scotland has attempted to tackle this by forming larger team parishes. My village church has been part of a larger team parish grouping since September, after about two years of discussions, meetings etc.
Our new parish comprises five former parishes, three of which were themselves joint parishes. So there were eight church buildings, five manses (vicarages) and four ministers - one of the parishes had recently gone into a vacancy and was not to be replaced. We also had a minister-in-training. One of the four ministers is over 60, and the plan was that he was not to be replaced when he retired. Two of the five parishes (including mine) were holding their own, the other three, more rural, were struggling.
Two of the church buildings and one (and later, a second) of the manses were to be sold.
It hasn't quite gone to plan, as one of the younger ministers has moved to be closer to elderly parents, and is not being replaced as the long term plan was to drop to three anyway.
The pluses: -
a) within the larger parish, the smaller churches remain viable. The ministers take services on a rota, with lay-led services filling in the gaps.
b) There is less duplication of effort; one joint parish newsletter instead of five, for example.
c) The team of three ministers (plus the minister-in-training, who will probably move on soon to a parish of this own) say that they can play to their own strengths within the team. d) We are now part of a larger community, which can feel more vibrant.
e) The sale of the first manse, and the anticipated sale of two of the churches will give the new parish a cash injection and less ongoing costs.
The minuses:-
a) I cannot help but feel that three ministers covering an area which four years ago had five ministers, must mean a lot of extra work for each of the three. It definitely means a lot more driving.
b) At the moment, the churches which had their own ministers are seeing a lot less of him / her (one service a month) but are still getting to know the other ministers which take the other services. That's a teething problem, I think.
c) Our church minister is excellent - we really couldn't have a better minister - and the lay led services just don't match up. But it is better that we have a monthly lay led service, than we have our own exclusive minister, and other churches are in permanent vacancy.
We're definitely on the losing end of amalgamation, understandably given we've not been able to pay even half our way in many years, but the shift from being a sole charge with a full time minister (though our vacancy was extended by shenanigans with the Presbytery Property Committee) to very much the junior partner in a linked charge has been difficult. Our elders have never really been entirely comfortable with lay-led worship (barring trained Readers), even less so when they're expected to be the lay leader. They're scared that monthly DIY worship is the thin end of the wedge labelled "total abandonment by the Kirk" and, because our minister has spent all of 4 days here since October there aren't yet the relationships in place to soothe those fears. We've also been told to "dispose" of our building in the next couple of years, with no clear plan about what to do next. It's tempting to feel like the Kirk sees island parishes as a problem they'd like to just go away. They keep dropping (what sound like) heavy hints "if you're not able to maintain a Kirk Session then this could turn into a Union rather than a linkage". It's deeply unsettling.
Originally posted by @Arethosemyfeet We're definitely on the losing end of amalgamation
That's interesting, because quite a few people here think we are on the losing end of amalgamation. We have been paying our own way, just. Our church and halls are well-maintained and we sold the Victorian manse a decade ago and now have a modern manse in good condition. We have an active congregation, although it is also an aging congregation. Never mind attracting "young people" I think we need to attract the over 50s, as the backbone of our congregation, the active over 70s, head towards being somewhat less active over 80s.
It's the right thing to do, but financially we are now part of a larger group with other congregations who were less financially viable than we were.
Could you explain the difference between a Union and a linkage, in CofS terms?
IANACofSL but: A linkage is when multiple parishes with separate Kirk Session, finances, legal status etc share a minister. A union is when those parishes are dissolved and replaced with a new legal entity with a Kirk Session drawn (in theory at least) from across the territory, functioning as a single parish.
Originally posted by @Arethosemyfeet We're definitely on the losing end of amalgamation
That's interesting, because quite a few people here think we are on the losing end of amalgamation.
And I suspect they're right! The number of "winners" in this is tiny, and they're mostly the ones managing to maintain what they have (Barra has been very fortunate, for example) rather than being better off.
@Baptist Trainfan What Arethosemyfeet said. Our church was "St Mary's" till 1560ish, then X Parish Church 1560-2023. Now we are "Y parish at X." We no longer have a Kirk Session, but send elders to the Y Parish Session.
I feel a bit sad that we've lost our X Parish Church identity, now subsumed within Y parish. But better that than the other churches close completely.
Could you explain the difference between a Union and a linkage, in CofS terms?
IANACofSL but: A linkage is when multiple parishes with separate Kirk Session, finances, legal status etc share a minister. A union is when those parishes are dissolved and replaced with a new legal entity with a Kirk Session drawn (in theory at least) from across the territory, functioning as a single parish.
Thank you. Are there not advantages in a Union? - e.g. you don't need to have a multitude of Session meetings which can take up so much time. Conversely you lose the sense of "localness".
Could you explain the difference between a Union and a linkage, in CofS terms?
IANACofSL but: A linkage is when multiple parishes with separate Kirk Session, finances, legal status etc share a minister. A union is when those parishes are dissolved and replaced with a new legal entity with a Kirk Session drawn (in theory at least) from across the territory, functioning as a single parish.
Thank you. Are there not advantages in a Union? - e.g. you don't need to have a multitude of Session meetings which can take up so much time. Conversely you lose the sense of "localness".
An advantage to the minister, sure, but not really to anyone else (who has to sit through agenda items that are not relevant to them). Unions make a certain amount of sense when churches are close enough be effectively a single congregation. They're a nonsense when even getting people into the same room is a multi-day exercise in logistics.
Could you explain the difference between a Union and a linkage, in CofS terms?
IANACofSL but: A linkage is when multiple parishes with separate Kirk Session, finances, legal status etc share a minister. A union is when those parishes are dissolved and replaced with a new legal entity with a Kirk Session drawn (in theory at least) from across the territory, functioning as a single parish.
Thank you. Are there not advantages in a Union? - e.g. you don't need to have a multitude of Session meetings which can take up so much time.
The problem is that you then have all the problems running Sessions at a multisite church, without the usual advantages of a church that's become multisite.
The Diocese in which I live is perhaps fortunate in being mainly urban/suburban, with not all that many rural parishes.
Most of those out in the country are now grouped into benefices of two or three churches, which, given the shortage of clergy, but a good supply of Lay Ministers (!), seems to work well enough.
Even so, some retrenchment has taken place. I know of one parish where Church A (a real gem of a building) survives intact, Church B has been converted to a house (the congregation joining that of the local URC in what is now a local ecumenical thingy), and Church C is in the care of the Churches Conservation Trust, with a limited number of services per annum.
My next-door parish consists of two separate (and not quite contiguous) villages, along with a large new residential development, still in the course of construction. Village A has a lovely mediaeval church, right on the edge of the built-up area, but Village B's church is remote from the houses, and, being redundant, is now in the care of the CCT.
Its gimcrack Victorian replacement in the village centre started to fall down, and was therefore demolished many years ago. For some years, the Anglicans met with the local Methodist Chapel, but, although that is still alive and well, I don't think the C of E has any involvement now, and I'm not sure if any Anglican services are held in Village B these days - the website is not very informative!
The new *village* development seems to be devoid of any overt church presence, though there is a Community Hall which, I suppose, could be used by any religious group.
All of which perhaps goes to show that there are challenges facing rural churches, to say the least. As some have suggested, lay leadership, and maybe house-based groups (to start with), might be the way ahead, whilst the old churches and chapels no longer needed (or suitable) for worship are given over to those who are prepared to pay for their upkeep...
The Episcopal Church in my old town, where I was for a time on Vestry, went thro a similar process. Initially a separate Parish with its own Rector, when he retired we continued with an Interim Priest in Charge (the Rector from the next town) while decisions were made about the future. Two other nearby parishes were in a similar position, with another nearby Rector as IPC. There was talk of combining all four churches into one group ministry with two team rectors and possibly a curate, with a 5th church (with a soon to retire house-for-duty rector) being included in the discussions. It was decided to maintain something closer to the status quo and our IPC became Rector of both churches, which maintained their own identities, Vestries etc., while the other 2 parishes also continued as 2 parishes with one Rector. The 5th church was eventually subsumed into yet another Parish when its retired Rector was replaced. I believe, since our new Rector himself retired, the two parishes have now combined into one. Certainly there are fewer services where I used to live and more joint services in the neighbouring church.
The small town where I grew up and its neighbouring villages have gone thro similar changes in recent years. When I was a child, there were 5 churches with 4 f/t clergy. Then the nearest parish was linked to our own, with one vicar and a curate... in time the two already linked parishes were included in the arrangement (and gained a SSM). And now all 5 churches form one United Benefice, with, I believe one Rector and a curate, a retired SSM and a couple of Lay Readers. The irony is, what was my parish church is now the main church in a Benefice which takes its name from the Church which was the original 'mother church' back in the 18th century, when it was a mere Chapel of Ease!
Many of the small-town Methodist Churches from an area I recently left have had lay ministers for over 10 years and are holding on with small congregations. There is one Episcopal church in the county and it is served by supply clergy at this time. Many "Bible," independent churches seem to be doing rather well with mid-size congregations and worker clergy.
The National Churches Trust in the UK has recently published a six point plan to save church buildings. It is more about the buildings themselves than worshipping communities, but does highlight the problems while proposing some possible solutions
I spent my teen years in a small city with 3 Anglican churches, 2 Catholic churches as well as Baptist, Uniting, Presbyterian, I am not sure how the demographics of those congregations look these days as the city appears to have maintained population and is a popular satellite town of a much bigger city.
The Anglican church I used to attend had 3 outstations. It's almost 30 years since we moved away and in that time the 3 outstations have closed. The number of services held there used to vary, I think depending on the number of clergy, but were in my memory monthly. One of the outstations did appear to be growing, but I suspect as in many places, people move away often to bigger towns to get work or study and the rural communities are either ageing and struggling or gentrifying and due to social change people look to other community groups for social engagement. The church we used to attend was I suspect one of the growing congregations, but these things are cyclical and change over time.
It has been sad in the last 12 months to see the last two outstation buildings sold and I assume bought to be converted into homes or weekenders.
I have no ideas about how to reverse this, or even if we really should. I don't think it's a case of build it and they will come
Is, though, there any equivalent of "listing" significant buildings, without regard for their function, and possibly helping to pay for their maintenance or restoration?
There is the National Register of Historic Places. That generally doesn’t come with direct monetary help for maintenance, beyond some tax incentives, and churches are tax exempt.
There's the National Fund for Sacred Places, though it's private money - comes mostly from the Lilly Endowment. From their website: "A program of Partners for Sacred Places in collaboration with the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the National Fund for Sacred Places provides financial and technical support for community-serving historic houses of worship across America."
But a lot of old churches, both rural and urban, in the US don't have the resources to qualify for a Sacred Places grant, and the Sacred Places money is not for ongoing maintenance. All the grants I've heard of for building restoration are matching grants; no funds of your own, no grant. The church I worked for got a $250,000 grant from Sacred Places, but the cost of the project, restoring one big stained glass window and the east facade of the 1914 building, cost over $2 million, more than double the inital estimate, because of course you find more problems once you start the project. The congregation raised a little over $1 million from a capital campaign, and they mortgaged the building for the rest. Now they need to do the north facade. And oh, a chunk of terra cotta fell off the tower right before Christmas - they need to fix that. And the roof needs work. And this is a 400-member urban congregation full of upper-middle class people with disposable income.
This doesn't apply so much to rural churches, where there may be no viable congregation anyway, but I know of some urban/suburban churches which, faced with huge costs of repair or maintenance, have taken the sensible way out, and started again from scratch!
One parish, with a large and gimcrack 1950s church, pulled it down, used part of the land for affordable social housing (with the parish earning £££ from the rents), and built a new, smaller, church-cum-hall which is easily maintained, and built of straightforward materials - brick, wood, and tiles.
It may sound a bit austere, but the church is actually quite an attractive building, complete with office, vestry, modest tower (with bell!), and room for Anglo-Catholic accoutrements such as a tabernacle for the Reserved Sacrament, statues of the Blessed Virgin and of the Patron Saint, and Stations of the Cross.
A similar scheme was mooted for Our Place some years ago, which failed for various reasons, but would have given us a much better opportunity to concentrate on our mission and outreach, instead of scraping the bottom of the barrel every week for money to feed the horrendously voracious heating...
This, and quite common for Nonconformists. Not so easy of course if your building is Listed and/or in a Conservation Area (both were problems for my last church).
My present church was built in two stages: Hall (1867), Church (1977) as the surrounding estate was going up. There were plans to have a grand building, these were scotched by inflation and the desire not to have a huge debt hanging over the church. What we have today are not-too-exciting but practical, economical and serviceable buildings which serve us pretty well.
The CofS has a policy now that no congregation should have more than one building, so any church halls not attached to the actual church are being sold off. My parish has a community buy-out in the offing for the (large) church hall, and hopes the resultant money can be used to adapt the large Victorian church building to better meet the needs of the 21st century - adding a kitchen, additional toilet facilities, and discrete meeting space apart from the main worship area, which can be utilised by the whole community as well as providing a more useable base for children's church and midweek church meetings.
As I said, beginning again isn't really an option for many rural churches - certainly not C of E buildings - but imaginative conversions (if the £££ can be found) can provide useful community facilities.
Assuming, that is, that there is still a community requiring facilities! If the community has disappeared, leaving the church stranded, as it were, then demolition may be the best option.
A certain rural benefice in our neighbouring Diocese contains a number of churches (mostly now just vestigial ruins) from whose former parishes the population has long been gone.
Whoops - yes! It was felt better to provide a multi-purpose (if not especially attractive) building at the start, to provide space for both worship and community activities. It has been well-used over the years; for a time one room was the local Post Office! The Hall is still used by Scouts etc, our own weekly Youth Club and daily Playgroup, Parents & Tots, Christmas Fayre etc - and last weekend for our church Panto! (No, I didn't take part - but I enjoyed it). The church itself is less used but it comes into its own in Holiday Bible Club week when the pews are stacked up and it becomes the focus of activity.
This, and quite common for Nonconformists. Not so easy of course if your building is Listed and/or in a Conservation Area (both were problems for my last church).
Arguably the last part of the post very much seems to be 'try to avoid creating future listed buildings' (which is also a strategy deliberately adopted by the Sydney Anglicans).
This, and quite common for Nonconformists. Not so easy of course if your building is Listed and/or in a Conservation Area (both were problems for my last church).
Also harder for National/Established churches with a large penumbra of "cultural" Christians for whom their attachment to the building is stronger than their attachment to the faith.
True although I wouldn't be surprised if villagers in some places feel much the same about "their" Methodist (or whatever) chapel. They may never attend, but it's where their grandparents were married - how dare "they" shut it down?
I just stumbled across a thread on FB in response to a local rural church being put up for sale last year (it had struggled to maintain 1 service a month for the last few years, and is only just over a mile from the next parish church) "So sad" "Why are all our churches going?" "They wouldn't close it if it was a Mosque!" "My parents were married there - shouldn't be allowed!" "I was wanting to have my funeral there!!"
I just stumbled across a thread on FB in response to a local rural church being put up for sale last year (it had struggled to maintain 1 service a month for the last few years, and is only just over a mile from the next parish church) "So sad" "Why are all our churches going?" "They wouldn't close it if it was a Mosque!" "My parents were married there - shouldn't be allowed!" "I was wanting to have my funeral there!!"
But who are they talking to? Not the congregation of the closed church, who are moved -away, or dead. I'm (again) frustrated with church buildings - I spent last weekend mopping up after a burst pipe, the ladies of the congregation from the tenant Sunday-afternoon congregation have ignored 'out of order' notices on 2 out of 3 stalls and have filled toilets with currently un-flushable shite, and I am tired of cleaning drug detritus from the garden. I'd currently be very happy if someone offered to close it, but I suppose I'll have to ring the dynorod man and ask again whose offended sensibilities resulted in the removal of the sanitary bins.
(Thinks back to the recent covenant service. 'Christ has many services to be done; some are easy, others are difficult; some bring honour, others bring reproach; some are suitable to our natural inclinations and material interests, others are contrary to both....')
But who are they talking to? Not the congregation of the closed church, who are moved -away, or dead. )
Oh, it's always 'their' fault - 'they' should do something about it!
Like the litter in the hedgerows, or the closed shops on the High Street.
Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did it. Somebody got angry about that because it was Everybody's job. Everybody thought that Anybody could do it, but Nobody realized that Everybody wouldn't do it. It ended up that Everybody blamed Somebody when Nobody did what Anybody could have done.
I don't know what it's like where you are but around here people like to see churches well used and well attended without it ever occurring to them to attend themselves.
Just as long as somebody's going and not them then organised religion is OK.
I'm not sure they are bothered if anyone actually goes to church, so long as the building is open for business and they can have their wedding or funeral there if they fancy it, and maybe get their baby sprinkled. Or am I just being cynical?
I'm not thinking about the 'matched, hatched and despatched' thing so much as there seems to be a residual respect for religion where I am - although that is diminishing - provided it's something that someone else does.
It's a bit like when I ran a local voluntary arts group. We organised concerts, poetry readings, art exhibitions.
People would stop me in the street and tell me how pleased they were that I was doing this.
I'd never see any of these people at our events.
It was if it was sufficient that somebody was laying something on even if they didn't avail themselves of it.
People would stop me in the street and tell me how pleased they were that I was doing this.
I'd never see any of these people at our events.
.
This is true - I get a lot of positive vibes from random people when I mention being in the church choir at Christmas, even tho they don't have any intention of coming along to the carol concert.
Ah yes. They're pleased that "culture" exists, for those other people that like that kind of thing. They think that generally having "culture" is a good thing, and so are pleased to see that it exists in their area, but don't actually have any interest in it themselves. But they can think of themselves as cultured, because they live in a place that has these things available.
Or perhaps less cynically, I'd be glad to find out that I lived in a place with concerts, and poetry readings, and art exhibitions, and I'd genuinely intend to look in on a few of them, except that I'm doing a million other things, and the poetry reading fails the cut.
Or it is possible they are being polite, to the person who has just told them they give a chunk of their time to something - and not saying “why would anyone want to do that ?”
There are places where the church remains open with a bit of imaginative re-working as a combined church/post office/village shop with plenty of local community involvement.
My church is part of an ecumenical grouping which e.g. provides a Nativity scene in the largest town's square.
At an event in conjunction with that I was harangued by some random man about the church in his village closing. That church was some distance away, and I knew nothing about it. His gripe appeared to be that the church was "the heart of the community," the quality of life of the village was going to be adversely affected and the Church of Scotland had no right....
His complaint was along the lines of we lost the post office, and then we lost the village shop and now we are losing the church
I asked if he was a regular attender and he said no, he had never been......
That sounds a familiar story - the heart of the village, but is it actually still beating?
On the culture thing I totally agree - there are a number of events in my area (open mic nights at the nearby music hub, a poetry writing/reading circle, and a contemporary worship service in a neighbouring town) which I have been genuinely excited to hear exist, and have had good intentions of supporting, but so far have never actually managed to get along.... maybe one day! It is true that people these days do live very busy lives, esp. if they have kids that need ferrying to and fro to different activities - and as someone once pointed out to me, Sunday mornings tend to be very popular times for kids football leagues!
His complaint was along the lines of we lost the post office, and then we lost the village shop and now we are losing the church
I asked if he was a regular attender and he said no, he had never been......
Of course, it's "their" fault.
I used to live in a town which saw several shops closing. In the local paper, people said, "Oh, the shopping is lousy so we go to X instead" (this was before internet shopping became common). They couldn't see that their decisions were, at least up to a point, causing the local difficulties.
Comments
To a point; I suspect young families and students are likely to be clustered around urban conurbations that allow for commuting/studying.
The UK's economy is weighted heavily towards London and the SE and church isn't immune to material conditions - perhaps it should sometimes speak to them too.
To be fair, we don't use Ribena: http://tinyurl.com/mpjjxjwh
And it is natural and right for people to want to have pivotal moments of celebration and loss given a communal or ritual dimension in a place that feels special and set apart. In rural places, the pace of life may be slower and more intimate: people know one another because they meet while walking dogs or working in fruit pack sheds or coming together for harvest celebrations. Older buildings are loved and revered even when people have lost faith in the institutions that own them.
If we have a funeral here, almost everyone attends because they will have some local connection to the farm labourer, teacher, social worker or police officer who has died. It is a sign of respect to show up for one of us, even if they had come here as an asylum-seeker or agnostic. If there is no minister present, family will still gather in a private home or borrowed hall to put up slides-shows of images, sing songs, tell stories about the loved one. And the graveyard is well-tended here because people remember those buried, it is not an anonymous neglected site. One reason I often think rural churches may prove more resilient despite dwindling ecclesial resources is the closeness to the land itself, the farming communities and persisting village traditions of neighborliness.
In some ways I think church is losing out in rural Scotland from the growth of local trusts. Our local community development trust, rural development trust, community council, and the programmes they support crowd out a lot of the social support that church might offer. In some ways it's a good problem to have, as these organisations employ multiple paid staff and are firmly rooted locally, but it does reduce the wider function of the church to "hatches, matches and dispatches", with the emphasis on "dispatches".
Alan
Ship of Fools Admin
Our new parish comprises five former parishes, three of which were themselves joint parishes. So there were eight church buildings, five manses (vicarages) and four ministers - one of the parishes had recently gone into a vacancy and was not to be replaced. We also had a minister-in-training. One of the four ministers is over 60, and the plan was that he was not to be replaced when he retired. Two of the five parishes (including mine) were holding their own, the other three, more rural, were struggling.
Two of the church buildings and one (and later, a second) of the manses were to be sold.
It hasn't quite gone to plan, as one of the younger ministers has moved to be closer to elderly parents, and is not being replaced as the long term plan was to drop to three anyway.
The pluses: -
a) within the larger parish, the smaller churches remain viable. The ministers take services on a rota, with lay-led services filling in the gaps.
b) There is less duplication of effort; one joint parish newsletter instead of five, for example.
c) The team of three ministers (plus the minister-in-training, who will probably move on soon to a parish of this own) say that they can play to their own strengths within the team. d) We are now part of a larger community, which can feel more vibrant.
e) The sale of the first manse, and the anticipated sale of two of the churches will give the new parish a cash injection and less ongoing costs.
The minuses:-
a) I cannot help but feel that three ministers covering an area which four years ago had five ministers, must mean a lot of extra work for each of the three. It definitely means a lot more driving.
b) At the moment, the churches which had their own ministers are seeing a lot less of him / her (one service a month) but are still getting to know the other ministers which take the other services. That's a teething problem, I think.
c) Our church minister is excellent - we really couldn't have a better minister - and the lay led services just don't match up. But it is better that we have a monthly lay led service, than we have our own exclusive minister, and other churches are in permanent vacancy.
We're definitely on the losing end of amalgamation
That's interesting, because quite a few people here think we are on the losing end of amalgamation. We have been paying our own way, just. Our church and halls are well-maintained and we sold the Victorian manse a decade ago and now have a modern manse in good condition. We have an active congregation, although it is also an aging congregation. Never mind attracting "young people" I think we need to attract the over 50s, as the backbone of our congregation, the active over 70s, head towards being somewhat less active over 80s.
It's the right thing to do, but financially we are now part of a larger group with other congregations who were less financially viable than we were.
IANACofSL but: A linkage is when multiple parishes with separate Kirk Session, finances, legal status etc share a minister. A union is when those parishes are dissolved and replaced with a new legal entity with a Kirk Session drawn (in theory at least) from across the territory, functioning as a single parish.
And I suspect they're right! The number of "winners" in this is tiny, and they're mostly the ones managing to maintain what they have (Barra has been very fortunate, for example) rather than being better off.
I feel a bit sad that we've lost our X Parish Church identity, now subsumed within Y parish. But better that than the other churches close completely.
Thank you. Are there not advantages in a Union? - e.g. you don't need to have a multitude of Session meetings which can take up so much time. Conversely you lose the sense of "localness".
An advantage to the minister, sure, but not really to anyone else (who has to sit through agenda items that are not relevant to them). Unions make a certain amount of sense when churches are close enough be effectively a single congregation. They're a nonsense when even getting people into the same room is a multi-day exercise in logistics.
The problem is that you then have all the problems running Sessions at a multisite church, without the usual advantages of a church that's become multisite.
Most of those out in the country are now grouped into benefices of two or three churches, which, given the shortage of clergy, but a good supply of Lay Ministers (!), seems to work well enough.
Even so, some retrenchment has taken place. I know of one parish where Church A (a real gem of a building) survives intact, Church B has been converted to a house (the congregation joining that of the local URC in what is now a local ecumenical thingy), and Church C is in the care of the Churches Conservation Trust, with a limited number of services per annum.
My next-door parish consists of two separate (and not quite contiguous) villages, along with a large new residential development, still in the course of construction. Village A has a lovely mediaeval church, right on the edge of the built-up area, but Village B's church is remote from the houses, and, being redundant, is now in the care of the CCT.
Its gimcrack Victorian replacement in the village centre started to fall down, and was therefore demolished many years ago. For some years, the Anglicans met with the local Methodist Chapel, but, although that is still alive and well, I don't think the C of E has any involvement now, and I'm not sure if any Anglican services are held in Village B these days - the website is not very informative!
The new *village* development seems to be devoid of any overt church presence, though there is a Community Hall which, I suppose, could be used by any religious group.
All of which perhaps goes to show that there are challenges facing rural churches, to say the least. As some have suggested, lay leadership, and maybe house-based groups (to start with), might be the way ahead, whilst the old churches and chapels no longer needed (or suitable) for worship are given over to those who are prepared to pay for their upkeep...
The Anglican church I used to attend had 3 outstations. It's almost 30 years since we moved away and in that time the 3 outstations have closed. The number of services held there used to vary, I think depending on the number of clergy, but were in my memory monthly. One of the outstations did appear to be growing, but I suspect as in many places, people move away often to bigger towns to get work or study and the rural communities are either ageing and struggling or gentrifying and due to social change people look to other community groups for social engagement. The church we used to attend was I suspect one of the growing congregations, but these things are cyclical and change over time.
It has been sad in the last 12 months to see the last two outstation buildings sold and I assume bought to be converted into homes or weekenders.
I have no ideas about how to reverse this, or even if we really should. I don't think it's a case of build it and they will come
There's the National Fund for Sacred Places, though it's private money - comes mostly from the Lilly Endowment. From their website: "A program of Partners for Sacred Places in collaboration with the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the National Fund for Sacred Places provides financial and technical support for community-serving historic houses of worship across America."
But a lot of old churches, both rural and urban, in the US don't have the resources to qualify for a Sacred Places grant, and the Sacred Places money is not for ongoing maintenance. All the grants I've heard of for building restoration are matching grants; no funds of your own, no grant. The church I worked for got a $250,000 grant from Sacred Places, but the cost of the project, restoring one big stained glass window and the east facade of the 1914 building, cost over $2 million, more than double the inital estimate, because of course you find more problems once you start the project. The congregation raised a little over $1 million from a capital campaign, and they mortgaged the building for the rest. Now they need to do the north facade. And oh, a chunk of terra cotta fell off the tower right before Christmas - they need to fix that. And the roof needs work. And this is a 400-member urban congregation full of upper-middle class people with disposable income.
One parish, with a large and gimcrack 1950s church, pulled it down, used part of the land for affordable social housing (with the parish earning £££ from the rents), and built a new, smaller, church-cum-hall which is easily maintained, and built of straightforward materials - brick, wood, and tiles.
It may sound a bit austere, but the church is actually quite an attractive building, complete with office, vestry, modest tower (with bell!), and room for Anglo-Catholic accoutrements such as a tabernacle for the Reserved Sacrament, statues of the Blessed Virgin and of the Patron Saint, and Stations of the Cross.
A similar scheme was mooted for Our Place some years ago, which failed for various reasons, but would have given us a much better opportunity to concentrate on our mission and outreach, instead of scraping the bottom of the barrel every week for money to feed the horrendously voracious heating...
My present church was built in two stages: Hall (1867), Church (1977) as the surrounding estate was going up. There were plans to have a grand building, these were scotched by inflation and the desire not to have a huge debt hanging over the church. What we have today are not-too-exciting but practical, economical and serviceable buildings which serve us pretty well.
As I said, beginning again isn't really an option for many rural churches - certainly not C of E buildings - but imaginative conversions (if the £££ can be found) can provide useful community facilities.
Assuming, that is, that there is still a community requiring facilities! If the community has disappeared, leaving the church stranded, as it were, then demolition may be the best option.
A certain rural benefice in our neighbouring Diocese contains a number of churches (mostly now just vestigial ruins) from whose former parishes the population has long been gone.
Arguably the last part of the post very much seems to be 'try to avoid creating future listed buildings' (which is also a strategy deliberately adopted by the Sydney Anglicans).
Also harder for National/Established churches with a large penumbra of "cultural" Christians for whom their attachment to the building is stronger than their attachment to the faith.
But who are they talking to? Not the congregation of the closed church, who are moved -away, or dead. I'm (again) frustrated with church buildings - I spent last weekend mopping up after a burst pipe, the ladies of the congregation from the tenant Sunday-afternoon congregation have ignored 'out of order' notices on 2 out of 3 stalls and have filled toilets with currently un-flushable shite, and I am tired of cleaning drug detritus from the garden. I'd currently be very happy if someone offered to close it, but I suppose I'll have to ring the dynorod man and ask again whose offended sensibilities resulted in the removal of the sanitary bins.
(Thinks back to the recent covenant service. 'Christ has many services to be done; some are easy, others are difficult; some bring honour, others bring reproach; some are suitable to our natural inclinations and material interests, others are contrary to both....')
Oh, it's always 'their' fault - 'they' should do something about it!
Like the litter in the hedgerows, or the closed shops on the High Street.
Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did it. Somebody got angry about that because it was Everybody's job. Everybody thought that Anybody could do it, but Nobody realized that Everybody wouldn't do it. It ended up that Everybody blamed Somebody when Nobody did what Anybody could have done.
Just as long as somebody's going and not them then organised religion is OK.
It's a bit like when I ran a local voluntary arts group. We organised concerts, poetry readings, art exhibitions.
People would stop me in the street and tell me how pleased they were that I was doing this.
I'd never see any of these people at our events.
It was if it was sufficient that somebody was laying something on even if they didn't avail themselves of it.
This is true - I get a lot of positive vibes from random people when I mention being in the church choir at Christmas, even tho they don't have any intention of coming along to the carol concert.
Or perhaps less cynically, I'd be glad to find out that I lived in a place with concerts, and poetry readings, and art exhibitions, and I'd genuinely intend to look in on a few of them, except that I'm doing a million other things, and the poetry reading fails the cut.
At an event in conjunction with that I was harangued by some random man about the church in his village closing. That church was some distance away, and I knew nothing about it. His gripe appeared to be that the church was "the heart of the community," the quality of life of the village was going to be adversely affected and the Church of Scotland had no right....
His complaint was along the lines of we lost the post office, and then we lost the village shop and now we are losing the church
I asked if he was a regular attender and he said no, he had never been......
On the culture thing I totally agree - there are a number of events in my area (open mic nights at the nearby music hub, a poetry writing/reading circle, and a contemporary worship service in a neighbouring town) which I have been genuinely excited to hear exist, and have had good intentions of supporting, but so far have never actually managed to get along.... maybe one day! It is true that people these days do live very busy lives, esp. if they have kids that need ferrying to and fro to different activities - and as someone once pointed out to me, Sunday mornings tend to be very popular times for kids football leagues!
Of course, it's "their" fault.
I used to live in a town which saw several shops closing. In the local paper, people said, "Oh, the shopping is lousy so we go to X instead" (this was before internet shopping became common). They couldn't see that their decisions were, at least up to a point, causing the local difficulties.