Modernise or close, parish churches warned
Judge warns that buildings risk future as supermarkets if heritage groups continue to block vital revamps
CHURCH buildings will become “supermarkets and dance studios” if traditionalists block revamps in the name of heritage, a Church of England judge has warned.
Chancellor June Rodgers hit out at heritage groups that resist modernisation, warning that churches must change in order to stay relevant.
In a ruling published earlier this month, she said: “If people disagree with sensible and necessary re-ordering of an existing church building to keep it in use, then they should think what redundant churches have been turned into: a supermarket, climbing walls, dance studios, or even demolition.”
She ruled that the Grade II listed Mariners’ Church in Gloucester could install a kitchen, new lighting system, sound system and monitors, and remove pews, as part of an overhaul to help it accommodate a growing congregation.
Local objectors suggested that the sound system would be out of keeping with the church environment and argued that the pews were more valuable than heritage groups had realised. But the Chancellor said that the church “needs people (and money) to survive unless it is to become an empty un-used shell”.
She went on: “Many deserving churches buildings may not receive the necessary financial support from nonchurch going people, who thought a church building ‘sweet’ or ‘picturesque’ but only visited for a daughter’s wedding or a Christmas carol service.
“Visiting a church once on holiday and writing in the visitors’ book ‘So peaceful ... so English’ does not deal with the gutters and the damp or the bats. Tourists do not rod drains, church wardens do,” she said.
Her comments came as the bishop in charge of cathedrals warned that parish churches were becoming “mausoleums” which were no longer at the centre of communities.
Dr John Inge, the Bishop of Worcester, told the national cathedrals conference in Manchester: “Far too many churches remain locked, despite the advice of the Ecclesiastical Insurance Company that they should remain open, and stand like mausoleums except when they open for worship, and have become increasingly marginal to the life of the communities they exist to serve.”
He said churches no longer formed the heart of the secular community. “Traditionally, churches have been at the heart of the communities in which they stand, in both a human and geographical sense.
“It is well known that in the medieval period much of what we would now term secular activity would have taken place within churches and cathedrals. Over the years, particularly during Victorian periods, a piety crept in which tended to exclude everything but public worship from them, all other activities being transferred to other places, halls and community centres.”
Loretta Minghella, the first church estates commissioner, told the same conference that parts of the wider church resented the level of funding given to cathedrals by the Church of England commissioners.
The financial support is “viewed with envy, sometimes irritation”, she said.