‘What could be more Christian than to allow the Sikhs to use it?’ Church Redundancy and Minority Religion in Bedford, 1977–8

2015 ◽  
Vol 51 ◽  
pp. 399-411
Author(s):  
John Maiden
Keyword(s):  
Race Relations ◽  
Sacred Space ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
Religious Congregations ◽  
British Council ◽  
Minority Religion ◽  
The City ◽  
The Church ◽  
Migrant Groups

In 1985, Faith in the City, The Church of England’s report on Urban Priority Areas, commented that Christians frequently had an excess of church buildings, while ‘people of other faiths are often exceedingly short of places in which to meet and worship’. The challenge of securing sacred space has been common to migrant groups in Britain, and during the 1970s sharing of space between national historic denominations and migrant religious groups was identified by the British Council of Churches (BCC) and its Community and Race Relations Unit as a leading issue for interreligious relations. In the case of the Church of England, ancillary parish buildings were occasionally shared with non-Christian religious congregations for limited use: for example, later that decade the church halls of All Saints, Gravelly Hill, Birmingham, were being used by Muslims and Hindus for festivals and clubs.

The City, the Countryside and the Social Gospel in Late Victorian Nonconformity

1979 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 415-426 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. W. Bebbington
Keyword(s):  
Church Attendance ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Adult Population ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
The People ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
The Social ◽  
The City ◽  
The Church

The late nineteenth-century city posed problems for English nonconformists. The country was rapidly being urbanised. By 1881 over one third of the people lived in cities with a population of more than one hundred thousand. The most urbanised areas gave rise to the greatest worry of all the churches: large numbers there were failing to attend services. The religious census of 1851 had already shown that the largest towns were the places where there were the fewest worshippers, although nonconformists gained some crumbs of comfort from the knowledge that nonconformist attendances were greater than those of the church of England. Unofficial surveys in the 1880S revealed no improvement. Instead, although few were immediately conscious of it, in that decade the membership of all the main evangelical nonconformist denominations began to fall relative to population. And it was always the same social group that was most conspicuously unreached: the lower working classes, the bottom of the social pyramid. In poor neighbourhoods church attendance was lowest. In Bethnal Green at the turn of the twentieth century, for instance, only 6.8% of the adult population attended chapel, and only 13.3% went to any place of worship. Consequently nonconformists, like Anglicans, were troubled by the weakness of their appeal.

Ritual Settings I

2019 ◽  
pp. 37-59
Author(s):  
Robert G. Ousterhout
Keyword(s):  
Sacred Space ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Regular Part ◽  
Initiation Rite ◽  
Church Building ◽  
The City ◽  
Common Prayer ◽  
The Church

How did the church building become sacred space? Early Christians understood two models of sacred presence. In the first, sanctity was invoked by the congregation coming together in common prayer, an experience that was formalized into the liturgy. In the second, sanctity was represented by the presence of relics or the tombs of martyrs and saints. In Rome, the early churches inside the walls of the city were primarily liturgical; those outside the walls were commemorative, set in relationship to the tombs of martyrs and the surrounding catacombs and cemeteries. Subsequent centuries witnessed a collapsing of the two categories. At the same time, the building vocabulary expanded, with baptisteries serving as symbolic settings for the initiation rite and mausolea offering special settings for privileged burials. By the fifth century, monasticism became a regular part of the Christian landscape.

Notes in the History of Sir Jerome Alexander Second Justice of the Court of Common Pleas, and Founder of the Alexander Library, Trinity College, Dublin

1872 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 220-240
Author(s):  
Charles Rogers
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
Trinity College ◽  
Trinity College Dublin ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Will ◽  
To Receive ◽  
The City ◽  
The Church

The Will of Sir Jerome Alexander, a parchment transcript of which is preserved in the Chief Probate Office, Dublin, is a document of more than ordinary interest; even with its cumbrous repetitions we owe no apology for producing it in full:–“In the name of God Amen. I, Sr Jerome Alexander of the City of Dublin, one of the unprofitable servants of Almighty God, being of a perfect sound disposing memory, praised bee God, this three and twentieth day of March in the yeare of the Raigne of our Soveraigne Lord Charles the Second of that name by the grace of God of England, Scotland, Fraunce and Ireland King Defender of the Faith &c. the two and twentieth, and hereby renounceing and admitting and declareing all former Wills and Testaments by mee at any time heretofore made to bee utterly void & of none effect, doe declare this to bee my last true Will and Testament in manner & form following and doe now soe declare it to bee. And first of all I resigne my soul into the hands of Jesus Christ my blessed Saviour and Redeemer, confidently trusting and assureing myselffe in by and through his onely merritts and mediation to receive life everlasting; and I doe hereby profess myselfe to dye as I have allways lived, a sonne of the Church of England, which is the most absolute and best forme of government in all the world,’ twere to bee heartily wished that it were practised in all the Churches of Christendome, and my body I commend unto the earth from whence it came to receive decent and comely buryall, without any greate pompe or ceremonies whatso-ever, not doubting but at the last day it shall bee raised againe and united unto my soule with it for to partake of immortall and everlasting happiness.

Anglican Rites of Consecration and the Delineation of Sacred Space, ca. 1689–1735

2021 ◽  
Vol 90 (2) ◽  
pp. 324-347
Author(s):  
Andrew Spicer
Keyword(s):  
Sacred Space ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
The Political ◽  
Legal Basis ◽  
Lower House ◽  
New Churches ◽  
The Church ◽  
Established Church

Between 1712 and 1715, the Convocation of the Church of England attempted to replace the existing informal orders used for the consecration of churches, chapels, and churchyards with a single uniform rite. While these efforts have been associated with the erection of the Fifty New Churches to provide for the populous and expanding suburbs of London and Westminster, the discussions actually arose out of the political divisions between the bishops and the Lower House of Convocation. The efforts to establish an official order of consecration was also a response to the changed ecclesiastical climate that followed the Toleration Act of 1689, which allowed for the registration of Dissenter chapels. The Established Church found its religious hegemony threatened and the particular status of its places of worship, achieved through consecration, challenged. The church responded to the criticism of their existing forms of consecration by reforming the liturgy as well as demonstrating the historical and legal basis for the practice. The sermons preached at the consecration or reopening of these churches provided a further opportunity for the clergy to justify the ceremony as well as to draw comparisons between these churches and Dissenting meetinghouses.

England's Second Reformation

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Milton
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Religious History ◽  
Early History ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Church ◽  
Established Church

England's Second Reformation reassesses the religious upheavals of mid-seventeenth-century England, situating them within the broader history of the Church of England and its earlier Reformations. Rather than seeing the Civil War years as a destructive aberration, Anthony Milton demonstrates how they were integral to (and indeed the climax of) the Church of England's early history. All religious groups – parliamentarian and royalist alike – envisaged changes to the pre-war church, and all were forced to adapt their religious ideas and practices in response to the tumultuous events. Similarly, all saw themselves and their preferred reforms as standing in continuity with the Church's earlier history. By viewing this as a revolutionary 'second Reformation', which necessarily involved everyone and forced them to reconsider what the established church was and how its past should be understood, Milton presents a compelling case for rethinking England's religious history.

Hatred, Sexual Orientation, Free Speech and Religious Liberty

2008 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 337-344 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Leigh
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Orientation ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Employment Discrimination ◽  
Religious Liberty ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
Same Sex Couples ◽  
Goods And Services ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The Church ◽  
Partial Success

In recent years, the clash between supporters of religious liberty and sexual orientation equality legislation has led to repeated battles both in Parliament and the courts. First came the clashes over the scope of exemptions in employment discrimination legislation for religious groups. The UK Regulations dealing with employment discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation give a limited exception for ‘employment for purposes of an organised religion’, which allows an employer to apply a requirement related to sexual orientation to comply with the doctrines of the religion, or to avoid conflicting with the strongly held religious convictions of a significant number of the religion's followers. A legal challenge brought to the scope of this exception was unsuccessful but, despite that, the exemption has not averted damaging findings of discrimination against the Church of England. The Bishop of Hereford was held to have discriminated unlawfully in blocking the appointment of a practising homosexual to a youth-officer post within the Church of England. The partial success of religious groups in achieving exemption was followed by defeat in the equivalent regulations dealing with discrimination in goods and services, made under the Equality Act 2006, despite the claims of Catholic adoption agencies that they would rather close than place children with same-sex couples.

The Spiritual Pilgrimage of the Rev. R. J. Campbell

1979 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 261-276 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keith Robbins
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
Religious Leaders ◽  
Public Figure ◽  
Holy Trinity ◽  
Review Of Reviews ◽  
The Times ◽  
The City ◽  
Spiritual Pilgrimage ◽  
The Church

The death of Canon R.J. Campbell on 1 March 1956 did not cause a national stir. There was an obituary the following day in The Times and some comment on subsequent days from friends and associates, but little to indicate that fifty years earlier he had been a substantial public figure. One obscure diarist, who had known Campbell as a young man, felt that ‘the grudging admission…of some academic distinction’ was an inadequate summary of Campbell's life and work. In part, of course, having outlived most of his contemporaries, Campbell was paying the penalty for his longevity. More important, however, was the fact that for decades he had consciously avoided the limelight. ‘No man’ he had written to the novelist Margaret Lane in December 1947 ‘could more carefully avoid publicity than I have done for a generation’. From 1930 to 1946 he had been a residentiary canon and then chancellor of Chichester and before that served as vicar of Holy Trinity, Brighton for six years. It would appear that he possessed an eminently Anglican pedigree. In May 1903, however, a frail, ascetic-looking, prematurely white-haired Campbell had commenced his ministry at the City Temple, the leading Congregational church in London. W. T. Stead's Review of Reviews looked forward to the ‘Renascence of Nonconformity’ under the leadership of this thirty-five-year-old young man. Over seven thousand people attended the services on his first Sunday. Picture postcards of Campbell were soon on sale and later admirers could purchase the R. J. Campbell Birthday Book containing his ‘favourite poetical quotations, portrait and autograph’. There was even A Rosary from the City Temple, described as being threaded from the writings and sermons of R. J. Campbell. The publicity which attended his arrival in London rarely left him for the next dozen years. In September 1915, rumours of Campbell's intention to resign the pastorate and speculation about his subsequent course were thought of sufficient interest to reach the news columns of The Times. His resignation merited a leader in the newspaper and, following his reception into the Church of England in early October, the comments of prominent religious leaders were printed. In 1916 Campbell published A Spiritual Pilgrimage, and a reconsideration of this volume throws interesting light on the cross-currents of Edwardian religious life.

scholarly journals Viewing the impact of Covid-19 through the eyes of retired clergy

Theology ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 124 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-31
Author(s):  
Leslie J. Francis ◽  
Andrew Village
Keyword(s):  
Sacred Space ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Digital Age ◽  
Full Time ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Church ◽  
Effective Contribution

Although largely invisible in the ministry statistics published by the Church of England, ministry-active retired clergy continue to make an effective contribution to liturgical and pastoral provision. The present study compares the responses of 231 ministry-active retired clergy with the responses of 748 full-time stipendiary clergy to the Coronavirus, Church & You Survey, to test the contrasting theses that retired clergy may be seen either as a helpful repository of wisdom or as unhelpfully out of date. The data suggest that retired clergy espoused the trajectory to the digital age with as much enthusiasm as stipendiary clergy. At the same time, however, retired clergy clung more keenly than stipendiary clergy to an Anglican model of ministry that valued both local place and sacred space.

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