I am always moved by the support our Parish Churches receive in our villages. So many people help in a myriad of ways – those who look after the fabric, those who keep our churchyards tidy, those who deliver the magazine, the list goes on. More particularly when the church fundraises, so many people both get involved and give so generously.
There is something very right in this: the church building does not belong to the PCC and certainly not to the rector! It is the village church. All our three churches hold within their walls nearly 1,000 years of faith, sadness and grief, hope and joy. It is as if the church – the oldest building in our villages by hundreds of years – holds past and present together in one place. I often think of that when I sit in any of our churches on my own. In the same way, as I walk through the churchyards, I think of literally everyone who died here over that 1,000 years – and, until the mid C19th, pretty well everyone who lived here was buried in “God’s acre”, (and 99% of them without any memorial).
I am grateful that in our time so many people support our buildings and our fund-raising – in the first half of June alone, both Madehurst with its Dog Show and Slindon with its Fair, show how many put in time, work and money so that we in turn can hand on our buildings and a living church – its people – to future generations.
I hope this is a two-way process: because it should be! Villagers do all the above for the local church – but a village church in turn should know it is there for everyone. It is not just there for those who come on Sundays. Our churches are intentionally open every day so that anyone can slip inside for a quiet moment.
A parish priest, when they are installed into a church, is told he has “the cure of souls,” (a lovely old-fashioned phrase meaning a care for people on their spiritual journeys) of all who live in the parish. This can be, like all good things, misused by priests thinking they know better and have all the answers! (The older I get the more I know I most certainly don’t know better or have all the answers). We all have our joys, hopes, regrets and failures. In the most profound way, the cure of souls means parish priests, however inadequately they do it, should be there for everyone on their journey.
This is actually enshrined in church law: anyone who lives in a parish has a right to be baptised, married or have their funeral in their village church. Never mind the rector! And rightly so. And again, I am called to pray for everyone in my parishes – I am not as good at praying as many, but I do try to do that.
The church is there for everyone because the faith it has held for that 1,000 years is that God is love and that love is freely available for everyone: truths shown by the life, teaching, death and resurrection of Jesus. However inadequately it sometimes does it, the church’s calling is to be there for everyone and to support them in their journey through life.
RS Thomas has a lovely poem In a Country Church:
To one kneeling down no word came,
Only the wind’s song, saddening the lips
Of the grave saints, rigid in the glass;
Or the dry whisper of unseen wings,
Bats not angels, in the high roof.
Was he balked by silence? He kneeled long,
And saw love in a dark crown
Of thorns blazing, and a winter tree
Golden with fruit of a man’s body.
Peter