rural life

Friends of Friendless Churches: Trying to save sacred pieces of past in England and Wales

Friends of Friendless Churches: Trying to save sacred pieces of past in England and Wales

The structure of St. Baglan's Church in North Wales is simple, with plastered stone walls and whitewashed timbers between the slate slabs of its roof and floor.

The 13th Century sanctuary was rebuilt in the 1800s, but the carved doorway lintel dates from the 5th or 6th century. An adjacent field contains the 7th Century well of St. Baglan and for ages the faithful sought healing in its waters.

"This church was built on the site of an earlier church and there were sanctuaries here before that. People in Wales have been coming to sites like this for worship back into pre-Christian times," said Rachel Morley, director of the Friends of Friendless Churches since 2018.

During a visit to Llanfaglan parish in Wales, this tiny, abandoned sanctuary was surrounded by sea mists and low clouds from the mountains, she said. Then the sunset light over the Irish Sea "shot under the eaves and the church lit up inside with golden light. It was a complete sensory overload. That had to mean something."

Was this church designed so that this light would illumine the prayers of evensong? That's the kind of question members of the Friends of Friendless Churches have been asking since 1957, when Welsh journalist Ivor Bulmer-Thomas founded the charity with the help of poet T.S. Eliot, artist John Piper, British politician Roy Harris Jenkins and others.

The goal was to preserve historic, "significant" churches "threatened by demolition, decay, or inappropriate conversion." By the end of 2021, the charity will control 60 churches in England and Wales, almost all of them Anglican sanctuaries.

Year after year, the Friends of Friendless Churches watch as 30 or so truly historic churches go on sale and "there could be many more closed at any time," said Morley, reached by telephone.


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New podcast: Religious wars over vaccines? They're more complex than those headlines

New podcast: Religious wars over vaccines? They're more complex than those headlines

Once again, it’s time for some time travel on the religion beat — as we ponder the current state of news coverage about the COVID-19 mask-and-vaccine wars.

Think back to Easter a year ago. Church leaders were wrestling with the real possibility that they would not be able to worship during Holy Week and on the holiest day on the Christian calendar. This was got lots of ink from the press, with good cause. There appeared to be two camps: (1) Crazy right-wingers (many journalists saw Donald Trump looming in the background) who wanted face-to-face worship at any cost and then (2) sensible, sane clergy willing to move to online worship and leave it at that.

The reality was more complex, especially since some (not all) government leaders seemed to think that worship was more dangerous than other forms of public life. During this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in), host Todd Wilken and I discussed how it’s easy to see the same patterns in news reports on bitter battles over COVID-19 vaccines. For some on the left — see this fascinating Emma Green piece at The Atlantic — super-strict coronavirus rules have evolved into faith-based dogma.

Now for that early COVID-19 flashback. In a post and podcast a year ago, I argued that this wasn’t really a simplistic story about two groups (good churches vs. bad churches), but one in which there were at least five camps to cover:

Those five camps? They are (1) the 99% of religious leaders who cooperated and took worship online, (2) some religious leaders who (think drive-in worship or drive-thru confessions) who tried to create activities that followed [government] social-distancing standards, (3) a few preachers who rebelled, period, (4) lots of government leaders who established logical laws and tried to be consistent with sacred and secular activities and (5) some politicians who seemed to think drive-in religious events were more dangerous than their secular counterparts.

Say what? … Why were drive-in worship services — with, oh, 100 cars containing people in a big space — more dangerous than businesses and food pantry efforts that produced, well, several hundred cars in a parking lot?

These five camps still exist and we can see them in the vaccine wars.


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BBC misses religious-liberty ghost in St. Francisville, La.

Through the years, your GetReligionistas have gone out of our way to note that it’s a good thing, every now and then, for journalists to end up on the other side of a reporter’s notebook or camera lens.


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