You may have gone to church yesterday. Perhaps you are one of the few who go every Sunday, or maybe you restrict your attendance to the great celebrations of Christmas and Easter. Yet even on this most important feast day, I would hazard a guess that if you attended a church in an English village, you probably did not have to get there early to ensure you got a seat.

Maybe you do not attend a service at all, but would still count yourself as a Christian, and like the idea of having a church in the village, with all that its presence implies for your community. It may have been built by a wealthy benefactor or by public subscription.

Within its walls, many generations will have been baptised, taken Holy Communion, been married – and laid to rest in its graveyard. It will have performed other useful services, too. It may have grown yews to make longbows; its clock will have told the time before we all had watches; its bells will have warned and celebrated, and its pulpit will have been the only source of news and communication until the coming of the media. While the area around the altar, the chancel, will have been respected as sacred, its nave (which will only relatively recently have been afforded the luxury of pews) will have been the place where your forebears gathered to talk, to celebrate, even to trade. The church was, until relatively recently in our long history, not only the most important building in the village but the heart of the community.

Not any more. In too many villages we restrict the use of our churches to infrequent Anglican services. They may still look beautiful on the green or by the manor, but they are in danger of becoming irrelevant to the communities they once served. Neither is it good for a village to see its most important building neglected, as if its silent bells and empty nave portend a village life that is now more for the retired than for the young working people who struggle to find affordable housing there.

There are two things we can do to arrest this decline. First, we can encourage all faiths to worship in the same building. Why do other denominations, such as Roman Catholics (like myself), not share the churches that in many cases they originally built? There are no insurmountable issues of religious practice that would prevent this. There are of course some very beautiful and important Catholic churches, but too often Catholic congregations spend money maintaining buildings that do not exactly inspire the “beauty of holiness”. And why should other denominations not share these under-used buildings? Pooling resources helps Church leaders of all faiths who struggle with budgets, and may even leave a bit over to help the poor...Continue Reading

> via telegraph.co.uk