The following address was delivered by the Rt Revd Vivienne Faull, Bishop of Bristol to the Diocesan Synod that took place on Saturday 14 June 2025
In 1982 I was ordained Deaconess to serve at St Matthew and St James Mossley Hill Liverpool, its funder Matthew James Glenton seizing one of the finest sites in Liverpool to build one of the finest Victorian churches in the north west…and thereby beatifying himself. And there was the ambiguity. Matthew James Glenton was bookkeeper to a family whose wealth originated in the production of sugar in the Caribbean. The fortune which built Mossley Hill church derived from chattel slavery.
The church was the first to be bombed in Liverpool in the second world war and repairs were not completed until 1952. Visiting around the parish when I arrived (we did that then) women recalled walking the plank across the gaps in the Nave as they arrived for their weddings. I commented to the archdeacon that the competed restoration was glorious. He was perhaps having a bad day when he retorted that he wished that Hitler had finished the job by dropping many more bombs on Mossley Hill Church. There was the second ambiguity. The rebuilding had taken so much resource. Was it genuinely constructed of living stones, or had it become not just a memorial to Matther James Glenton but an idol? With so much poverty in down the road in Garston docks, could not the money have been used to relieve their need?
And that ambivalence is there at the heart of the gospel, and particularly in the account of the earliest days of the church as those first known as Christians burst out of the constraints of buildings to speak of the transforming power of the risen Christ and to enact that transformation in sign and miracle.
This new movement of the spirit and the momentum of the evangelists across the vectors of the Roman Empire created an ambivalence towards the sort of specially constructed spaces which were familiar from the Temple in Jerusalem and community synagogues. Christianity was, in its earliest form, domestic, with gatherings to discuss faith, to pray, to organise all home based.
And yet so very quickly places began to be experienced as sacramental, places where the presence of the risen Christ was particularly known and encountered, that touching on something that reached back to the story of Jacob waking from a dream of heaven and earth linked by a ladder and angels and exclaiming ‘how awesome is this place. This is none other than the house of God and this is the gate of heaven’. And that sort of encounter with God is far more common than we recognise. Including for those in this place today.
Table conversations of experience of an awesome place where you have known God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, powerfully with you.
Jacob takes a stone which he has put under his head and pours oil on the stone and names it Bethel as a sign that something holy happened here. And holiness continued in that place.
Table conversations: when has your church been for you the gate of heaven?
The Church of England is a church of place. It is there in the title. England is divided into parishes to which the clergy are called and within which they have the cure of souls, that extraordinarily evocative phrase for our calling to care of the body mind and spirit of all who live there, a care which is pastoral and evangelistic. I have the cure of 1.2m souls and thank God every day I have shared that with the clergy and lay people of the diocese.
Our church buildings record, in graveyards and monuments and community memory the story of a particular place. Our church buildings create and sustain identity for us as individuals and in community. That is one of the reasons I think why there was such anger when churches were closed during Covid. Our identity, our purpose, our destiny was being shaken to the core by mortal threat. The loss of our open churches, those gateways to heaven, and through that gate the hope that all would indeed be well, was deeply felt.
Our church buildings also offer space where people can own their deepest questions, their deepest fears. The political journalist and music critic John Harris has written eloquently about his life with and care for his autistic son. Each Sunday John and James, whose home is in Frome, go for a walk and James usually asks ‘is there a church?’ and they go and sit together in silence, James’ preferred way of being, and sometimes James gets to play the organ (and they are very very careful! And James plays Autobhan by Kraftwerk or something by the Smiths). John reports that occasionally they encounter the vicar ‘when we’ve met them, and that has happened quite a few times, they’ve always been really brilliant and helpful’. John describes himself as a devout agnostic and he urges us to keep our churches open saying ‘that the Church of England, with all its scandals and attitude which seem so off putting, sits in the middle of a world in which people’s yearning for a more profound experience hasn’t gone away and seems to be increasing as the world gets more and more troubled’.
Churches draw people in, if (and it is an if) we enable the threshold to be low enough not to trip people up. And that is why, with prayer and worship at the heart of our church life, there is so much more we can offer and which is received as a sign of hope, as we discovered during the cost of living crisis and continue to discover during the current loneliness crisis. The National Churches Trust, using government financial criteria, has demonstrated what we know anecdotally. In its report House of Good it calculates the economic and social value of churches as £55 bn annually. In its more recent report on health it calculates that the National Help Service we provide contributes the equivalent of £8.4 bn to health and social provision. And if you would like to calculate the contribution of your church to its local economy the National Churches Trust website offers a free calculator.
But we do know that the future of our church buildings is increasingly precarious. We look at the closure of chapels over the border in Wales and the fire sale of Church of Scotland building. If a PCC can no longer sustain the energy, the volunteering capacity or the money to keep the building open the Diocesan Board of Finance takes on the legal and financial responsibility, as it has with All Saints Corn Street.
At the moment in this diocese the church community and the wider community is just about keeping our churches open and safe…and as we have seen through the Annual DAC awards there are heroic examples of reordering, new heating and lighting and kitchen and loos and accessibility provision. More than that, during my time in the Diocese we have celebrated the reopening of St Nicholas in Bristol and the opening of the Pattern Church in Swindon, and more recently the move of the Well into its own church building. And all this is done as a freewill offering to the glory of Christ and to the local community as we create and sustain places of love for God and neighbour
O God, make the door of this house
wide enough to receive all who need human love and fellowship,
and a heavenly Father’s care;
and narrow enough to shut out all envy, pride and hate.
Make its threshold smooth enough to be no stumbling block to children,
nor to straying feet,
but rugged enough to turn back the tempter’s power:
make it a gateway to thine eternal kingdom.
Thomas Ken, Bishop of Bath and Wells 1684 – 1691, buried in St John’s Frome.