Rector’s Reflections
Wednesday 14th February 2024
The Future of our Church Buildings
In yesterday’s reflections, I drew attention to the fact that our church buildings are facing a crisis, but finished by mentioning that various suggestions have been made as to how we might ensure that our buildings survive into the future. What are these suggestions?
A good starting point is a recent report produced by the National Churches Trust, entitled Every Church Counts. A Six Point Plan to Save the UK’s Church Buildings. I should add that this report has a welcome breadth to it – it doesn’t just focus on the Church of England. It covers churches belonging to other denominations as well, and it also looks into what is happening in Scotland and Wales. It’s good to learn from other churches facing similar issues.
The report’s first suggestion is the creation of a network of professional support officers covering the whole of the UK, who would help the volunteers who currently look after church buildings. To this network of support officers could be added relevant online resources and training, and perhaps some centrally provided services which churches could opt into, if they wished to do so. The idea of professional support officers repeats a suggestion made back in 2017 in the Taylor Review, a report which looked at the sustainability of church buildings belonging to the Church of England. In the light of the Taylor Review, some dioceses have indeed appointed Diocesan Church Support Officers.
It sounds a good idea in theory but there are two key problems with it. The first is that it assumes that the basic problem is that the volunteers who look after church buildings fail in their task of regular maintenance because of a lack of knowledge – they simply don’t know the sort of things they should be doing on a regular basis to keep their buildings in a good state of repair. Really? I think most volunteers know that it is good to clean out the gutters on a regular basis; and for many churches, the real issue is finding the volunteers in the first place.
The second problem is one of finance. In a world where resources are tight, and getting tighter, who is going to pay for this network of professional support officers? Where’s the money going to come from? The money simply isn’t there. Or am I being too pessimistic?
But this is only one of six recommendations in the report. We’ll look at the second suggestion in tomorrow’s reflections.