The Ethics of the Empty Church: Anglicanism’s Need for a Theology of Architecture

2015 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 172-188 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Whyte
Keyword(s):  
Spiritual Development ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Historical Survey ◽  
Church Building ◽  
International Importance ◽  
University Of Manchester ◽  
The Church ◽  
Church Buildings

AbstractIn this polemical paper, produced for the Churches, Communities, and Society conference at the Lincoln Theological Institute, University of Manchester, I argue that the Church of England has failed to develop a coherent or convincing theology of architecture. Such a failure raises practical problems for an institution responsible for the care of 16,000 buildings, a quarter of which are of national or international importance. But it has also, I contend, produced an impoverished understanding of architecture’s role as an instrument of mission and a tool for spiritual development. Following a historical survey of attitudes towards church buildings, this paper explores and criticizes the Church of England’s current engagement with its architecture. It raises questions about what has been done and what has been said about churches. It argues that the Church of England lacks a theology of church building and church closing, and calls for work to develop just such a thing.

The Parish

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Hill QC
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
Electoral Roll ◽  
Church Building ◽  
Parish Churches ◽  
Church Councils ◽  
The Church ◽  
Church Buildings

This chapter examines the nature of the parish churches of the Church of England, the respective roles of priest and people, and the rights and duties of the parochial church council (PCC), churchwardens and others. It first provides an overview of the parish structure before discussing the parish electoral roll and the annual parochial church meeting. It then considers the Parochial Church Councils, parochial property, the liability of the rector for repairs to the chancel, quinquennial inspection, and diocesan quota. It also describes pastoral schemes and orders, pastoral church building schemes, sharing of church buildings, ecumenical relations between the Church of England and other Churches, and churchwardens. Finally, it looks at other lay officers of the parish as well as non-parochial churches and chapels.

Faculty Jurisdiction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Hill QC
Keyword(s):  
Advisory Committee ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Church Building ◽  
Legal Costs ◽  
The Church ◽  
Church Buildings

This chapter examines the faculty jurisdiction of the Church of England. A faculty refers to a permissive right to alter a church building, its contents, or its immediate surroundings. Undertaking such works in the absence of a faculty is unlawful. The chapter first considers matters that do not require a faculty before discussing the ecclesiastical exemption for particular church buildings or particular categories of building. It then looks at the roles of the Diocesan Advisory Committee, national amenity societies, and the Church Buildings Council in faculty jurisdiction. It also explains issues relating to the grant of a faculty, including objections, unopposed petitions, opposed proceedings, hearings, appeals, and legal costs. The chapter concludes with an overview of particular cases covered by the faculty jurisdiction such as those involving altars, churchyards, demolition, disposal of church treasures, graves, libraries, and pews.

Sermons and the Performance of Historiographical Authority in the Construction of the Roman Catholic Built Landscape, 1880–1890

2020 ◽  
pp. 118-136
Author(s):  
Niamh NicGhabhann
Keyword(s):  
Sense Of Community ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
Building Projects ◽  
Church Building ◽  
The Many ◽  
New Buildings ◽  
The Church ◽  
Church Buildings

During the nineteenth century, infrastructures of devotion and religious worship in Ireland changed dramatically. By 1900, the landscape was transformed by the presence of highly decorated, prominent church buildings. The many building projects of the Roman Catholic church were highly dependent on donations and fundraising. This essay explores the extent to which historical narratives, images, and ideas were used in order to motivate donations, and to develop a sense of community engagement with these new buildings as both symbols of past persecution overcome, and future spiritual glory. It explores sermons and speeches associated with new church building projects as sites for the performance of historiographical authority, and traces the emergence of key narratives of identity and memory, which were powerfully expressed through the spaces and architectural forms of the church buildings.

‘A Serious House on Serious Earth’: Towards an Understanding of the Church of England’s Inheritance of Buildings

2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 128-146
Author(s):  
Benjamin Carter
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
Symbolic Power ◽  
Functional Understanding ◽  
The Church ◽  
Church Buildings

AbstractThe Church of England is blessed with an extraordinary inheritance of church buildings. However, this inheritance, particularly in rural contexts, is increasingly being viewed as a financial millstone and encumbrance to mission. This article takes issue with the largely ‘functional’ understanding of church buildings which is common place in the Church of England. It will argue that there needs to be a rediscovery of the symbolic and sacramental power of buildings. By reasserting the sacramental and symbolic power of church buildings we can come again to recognize how all church buildings – and not just those blessed with a great history or soaring architecture – exist in part to articulate the ongoing presence and activity of God in creation.

The Church Missionary Society and Architecture in the Mission Field: Evangelical Anglican Perspectives on Church Building Abroad, c. 1850-1900

2015 ◽  
Vol 58 ◽  
pp. 197-228 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Turner
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Central Place ◽  
Infrastructure Development ◽  
Gothic Revival ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Church Building ◽  
Church Missionary Society ◽  
Architectural Development ◽  
The Church

The Gothic Revival occupies a central place in the architectural development of the Church of England in the nineteenth century, both at home and abroad. Within the expanding British colonial world, in particular, the neo-Gothic church became a centrally important expression of both faith and identity throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. From a symbolic and communicative perspective, the style represented not only a visual link to Britain, but also the fundamental expression of the Church of England as an institution and of the culture of Englishness. As such, it carried with it a wide range of cultural implications that suited the needs of settler communities wishing to re-established their identity abroad. Expansion during this period, however, was not only limited to the growth of settler communities but was also reflected in growing Anglican missions to the non-Christian peoples of annexed territories. The two primary organs of the Church of England in the field, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) and the Church Missionary Society (CMS), actively employed the revived medieval style throughout the Empire as missions were solidified through infrastructure development. As a popular style with direct connotations to the Christian faith, revived medieval design became increasingly popular with Anglican missionaries abroad in the period between the early 1840s and the end of the century. Not only did its origins in ecclesiastical buildings make it attractive, but it was also stylistically distinctive, and set apart as a sacred style from both secular and ‘heathen’ structures.

Church Building and Architecture

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louis P. Nelson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Church Building ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Church

Contrary to popular perceptions, the long eighteenth century was a period of significant church building and the architecture of the Church of England in this era played a critical role in religious vitality and theological formation. While certainly not to the expansive scale of Victorian church construction, the period was an era of significant building, in London, but also across the whole of the British Empire. Anglican churches in this era were marked not so much by stylistic questions as by programmatic concerns. The era produced the auditory church, designed to accommodate better the hearing of the sermon and the increasing importance of music in worship. There were also changes to communion practice that implicated the design of architecture. Finally, some few Anglicans considered the theological implications of historical inspiration but many more considered the role of sensibility and emotion in worship and in architecture as one of worship’s agents.

parish division and church building failed to keep pace with sharp rises in population. Lady Glenorchy had in 1775 explicitly rebuked the Edinburgh Presbytery over the failure of the establishment to cater for the religious needs of the city’s poor. Her chapel was intended to address those needs and was, despite her arguments, a rival to the existing parish churches. And, although herself neither preacher nor priest in her chapel, she could be regarded as equivalent to a bishop, or overseer, at least in the exercise of some of the supervisory and authoritative functions of that office. It was by buying the land on which to build a chapel that Ladies Glenorchy and Maxwell were able to claim the right to religious authority over the build-ing, because this accorded with the authority over private chapels which had always been legitimately exercised by female aristocrats. The Countess of Huntingdon used the same argument to justify the building of many chapels in which she retained the right to appoint clergy of her own choosing, arguing that she was merely appointing private chaplains. That Lady Huntingdon’s argument finally collapsed, obliging her to remove her connexion from the Church of England and license her chapels as Dissenting places of worship, was due to the greater scale of her religious activity in comparison to other female patrons. But it is significant that she avoided this outcome for so long. Her first chapel was built in 1761, but only in 1783, when she possessed over 60 places of worship, was she finally forced into separatism.

2003 ◽  
pp. 102-103
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
Religious Activity ◽  
Religious Authority ◽  
Church Building ◽  
Parish Churches ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Church

What the church betokeneth: Placing the people at the heart of sacred space

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Varnam
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle English ◽  
Sacred Space ◽  
Church Architecture ◽  
The People ◽  
Church Building ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Church ◽  
Church Buildings

This chapter examines the debate over the relationship between the church building and its community in orthodox and Lollard texts. The chapter begins with the allegorical reading of church architecture in William of Durandus’s Rationale divinorum officiorum and the Middle English What the Church Betokeneth, in which every member of the community has a designated place in the church. The chapter then discusses Lollard attempts to divorce the building from the people by critiquing costly material churches and their decorations in The Lanterne of Liȝt, Lollard sermons, and Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede. The chapter concludes by examining Dives and Pauper in the context of fifteenth-century investment in the church, both financial and spiritual, and argues that in practice church buildings were at the devotional heart of their communities.

A Case Without Parallel: The Bishops of London and the Anglican Church Overseas, 1660–1748

1993 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 450-475
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Yeo
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Anglican Church ◽  
French Canada ◽  
Early Date ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
The People ◽  
Church Building ◽  
The Church ◽  
Do So

‘For a bishop to live at one end of the world, and his Church at the other, must make the office very uncomfortable to the bishop, and in a great measure useless to the people.’ This was the verdict of Thomas Sherlock, bishop of London from 1748 to 1761, on the provision which had been made by the Church of England for the care of its congregations overseas. No Anglican bishopric existed outside the British Isles, but a limited form of responsibility for the Church overseas was exercised by the see of London. In the time of Henry Compton, bishop from 1675 to 1713, Anglican churches in the American colonies, in India and in European countrieshad all sought guidance from the bishop of London. By the 1740s the European connection had been severed; the bishop still accepted some colonial responsibilities but the arrangement was seen as anomalous by churchmen on both sides of the Atlantic. A three-thousand-mile voyage separated the colonists from their bishop, and those wishing to seek ordination could not do so unless they were prepared to cross the ocean. Although the English Church claimed that the episcopate was an essential part of church order, no Anglican bishop had ever visited America, confirmation had never been administered, and no church building in the colonies had been validly consecrated. While a Roman Catholic bishopric was established in French Canada at an early date, the Anglican Church overseas had no resident bishops until the end of the eighteenth century. In the words of Archbishop Thomas Seeker, this was ‘a case which never had its parallel before in the Christian world’.

Investigations at “Julianos' Church” at Umm-el-Jemal

1957 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 39-66
Author(s):  
G. U. S. Corbett ◽  
J. M. Reynolds
Keyword(s):  
Fourth Century ◽  
Church Architecture ◽  
Important Respect ◽  
Princeton University ◽  
British School ◽  
Church Building ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Church ◽  
Church Buildings

The main object of the expedition to Umm-el-Jemal, which was financed by the Walker Trust and sponsored by the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem, in the summer of 1956, was to re-examine the evidence for the history of a church building which had been discovered and summarily surveyed by Professor H. C. Butler and the Princeton University Archaeological Expedition to Syria in the years 1904–1905. This was the church which the Princeton expedition named after a certain Julianos and dated to the year A.D. 344 on the basis of an inscription which they found lying in the ruins and which they associated (mistakenly, as it now seems) with the foundation of the church.Of the hundreds of church buildings which must have been constructed during the first half of the fourth century, very few are known to us, and a church with a recognisable plan and so early a date is a matter of considerable consequence in the study of the development of church architecture. It therefore seemed well worth while to make a special visit to the site of Julianos' church to verify the facts published by the Princeton Expedition; especially as their survey was a rather summary one and seemed, when the writer visited the site in 1953, to be mistaken in more than one important respect.

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