Late in life, under the influence of the Anglican novelist A.N. Wilson, the avowedly agnostic poet Philip Larkin decided to reject his father’s clear advice, ‘Never believe in God!’. Larkin, as he put it, ‘tried to be devout’. He attended church. He even started to read Scripture. And, having read the whole of the Bible, he concluded, ‘It’s absolutely bloody amazing to think that anyone believed any of that. Really, it’s absolute balls. Beautiful, of course. But balls.’ Thus ended the poet’s belated experiment in faith. Yet, as Larkin’s biographer, Andrew Motion, notes, this did not exhaust his interest in religion; ‘As Larkin moved towards the end of his life he continued to hope that religious rituals would “always be there” … embodying formal values and enshrining time-honoured traditions.’Footnote ³ This was a theme, indeed, that ran throughout Larkin’s life – as witnessed in his poem of 1954, ‘Church Going’, where he meditated on a visit to an empty and ostensibly redundant building, before concluding that such a ‘serious house on serious earth’ could never become wholly obsolete, ‘Since someone will forever be surprising/A hunger in himself to be more serious,/And gravitating with it to this ground,/Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,/ If only that so many dead lie round.’Footnote ⁴

This essay is not about Larkin. But it is about the experience that he explored poetically in ‘Church Going’ and personally, albeit briefly, in his latter years. It will suggest that Larkin’s account provides us with one of the most helpful ways of exploring the meaning and uses of church buildings by the contemporary Church of England: something that is especially precious because of the striking absence of such reflection elsewhere; something that should serve as a provocation for those of us who care for these buildings – whether as historians, theologians, worshippers, or clergy – and who wish to ensure that we are not, in fact, the last generation of church-goers.

Larkin’s observations offer a way into this subject both in general and in particular. They speak of course, of his own cultural Anglicanism: an Anglicanism which still exists, at least vestigially, among many self-confessed agnostics and atheists; an attitude that led him to describe himself as an ‘Anglican agnostic, of course’, and which has similarly prompted Richard Dawkins to confess that he is ‘culturally Anglican’, someone who would ‘feel a loss’, were England’s parish churches to close.Footnote ⁵ As this suggests, the poem speaks, too, of the many ways in which a church building can be encountered – ways that may be lost to the regular, committed Christian. ‘Church Going’, indeed, provides a series of pen portraits, each describing a potential church-goer, all with their own particular experience of encountering sacred architecture. Larkin depicts the church as a historical or antiquarian subject, attractive to those who ‘tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were?’/Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique’. He likewise points out the many attracted by familiar ritual rather than personal faith: the ‘Christmas-addict, counting on a whiff/Of gown-and-bands and organ-pipes and myrrh?’. He also writes of himself: ‘Bored, uninformed,’ yet pleased to ‘stand in silence here’.

These are all important themes, to which I will return. But first I want to place this wider concern with church buildings within the more specific context of the Church of England itself. And I want to do so not only because this is a theme that is absent from much recent debate – with the last serious attempt to engage with it probably being the General Synod’s curiously un-theological 2004 report, Building Faith in our Future – but also because it seems to me central to the place of the Church of England within wider society.Footnote ⁶

In an important and deservedly influential article of 1999, Wesley Carr offered a helpful way of interpreting the nature and function of the established Church in England. He distinguished between two sorts of establishment: on the one hand, ‘high establishment’, the coming together of crown and church; on the other, ‘earthed establishment’, the parochial system and the day-to-day cure of souls. ‘High establishment’, he wrote, ‘describes the historically based nexus of intertwined privilege and responsibility’ that places bishops in the House of Lords and the monarch as head of the Church. ‘Earthed establishment’, by contrast, is the set of assumptions that leads parochial churches to assume a pastoral responsibility for a whole geographical community rather than just those who attend services. ‘Discussion about establishment’, he went on to argue, ‘often overlooks the fact that these two aspects, high and earthed, cannot exist without each other.’ It is the ‘high’ notion of the national Church that underwrites its local work; and the ‘earthed’ work of the local Church that legitimates the constitutional establishment.Footnote ⁷

Now, the experience of the dis-established Church of Wales suggests that, in some respects, Carr was too pessimistic about the consequences of breaking the link between ‘earthed’ and ‘high’ establishment. There, at least in many parishes, the work of the ‘earthed’ establishment has continued long after – indeed, a century after – the ‘high’ establishment was ended.Footnote ⁸ But Carr’s account remains useful, and is especially pertinent to this essay. For in church buildings ‘high’ and ‘earthed’ establishments come together. In many places, they come together symbolically – with older churches retaining the Royal Arms, and older forms of worship containing prayers for the Royal Family. Parish churches are often the site of civic ritual too: from Remembrance Sunday to the Rush Sunday Service at St Mary Redcliffe in Bristol.Footnote ⁹ More tangibly, churches in England are almost the only category of architecture in this country exempt from government oversight, from the planning and conservation rules that affect every other ancient monument or significant building.Footnote ¹⁰ In that sense, the state has delegated its powers to the Church: something that would be unimaginable in almost any other country in Europe, where the state not only controls but also often owns all church buildings.Footnote ¹¹

Of course, the Church of England is not alone in possessing this ecclesiastical exemption. As the most recent guidance makes punctiliously plain, ‘the Roman Catholic Church; the Methodist Church; the Baptist Union of Great Britain (and on occasions the Baptist Union of Wales); and the United Reformed Church’ all have some freedom to manage their own places of worship.Footnote ¹² But it is an issue which affects the Church of England disproportionately: disproportionately in terms of scale, for Anglicans possess no fewer than 16,000 church buildings; and disproportionately in terms of importance, for more than a quarter of these churches are grade I listed. This is the highest possible category, an acknowledgment of their national, even international, significance. Indeed, Anglican churches make up almost half of all buildings listed as grade I. In that sense the Anglican architectural patrimony is strikingly analogous to the only other category of buildings exempt from planning law, the Royal Palaces. And the comparison can be pushed further, for in the palaces here again is a collection of globally significant buildings for which the state has no real oversight. Church and Crown, then, are equally free from state control – and equally unsupported by state subsidy.Footnote ¹³

Yet even these comparisons can only go so far. For one thing, the Church of England possesses far more buildings than the Crown. More than that, it is self-evidently the case that if 4000 Anglican churches are grade I listed, then this leaves another 12,000 which are not. Many have lower listings, but some are unlisted – and are very unlikely ever to be listed. Unlike the monarchy, then, the Church is thus responsible for large numbers of buildings, some hugely important and some of much less significance.

From a denominational perspective, too, the Church of England’s attitude towards its architecture is very different from that of the other Christian traditions, not least because of its reluctance to close churches. In the London Borough of Southwark, for instance, the population shrank by more than 40 per cent in the three decades after 1961 – something reflected in the closure of numerous free-church chapels across the borough. Yet at the same time, only 54 Anglican churches – some 13 per cent of the total stock – were actually closed.Footnote ¹⁴ In Oxfordshire, at the same time, something even more remarkable happened. There, the twentieth century witnessed a massive depopulation of the countryside, a move that resulted in the closure of more than 100 non-conformist places of worship. Yet, at the same time, only 17 Anglican churches were closed: a number which was more than matched by the number of new buildings erected. The Church of England in Oxfordshire consequently ended the twentieth century with more churches than it had at the start, many serving localities with a vanishingly small local population.Footnote ¹⁵

The explanation for this is theological – or, perhaps more strictly speaking, ecclesiological. Surveys have shown that Anglicans, especially Anglican clergy, tend to value church buildings in themselves as an instrument of mission far more highly than their equivalents from other denominations. Interviewed in the 1990s, for instance, a clear majority of Free Church ministers argued that if a building was no longer needed – even it had served as a chapel for generations – then it should simply be disposed of.Footnote ¹⁶ The attitude of many Anglicans, by contrast, can be summed up in a survey conducted in the late 1980s, which recorded one Anglican priest, who served a rural parish in Cornwall, maintaining that ‘If you’ve not got a church you won’t get the congregation … they won’t go anywhere else. If you’ve lost the visible church you’ve lost witness.’Footnote ¹⁷ Underwriting all this is undoubtedly Wesley Carr’s ‘earthed’ establishment: a sense that the church building symbolizes the Church itself, an established church with a presence in every community and a history which stretches back through time. When church guidebooks begin (as they generally do) ‘this has been a site of Christian worship for a thousand – or even just a hundred – years’, they are making a theological as well as a historical point, and one that helps explain the Anglican unwillingness to close a church. It seems to many like a sign of defeat, an abdication of responsibility – or, more precisely, like the Church withdrawing or abandoning a piece of territory.Footnote ¹⁸

As this implies, the importance of architecture to Anglicanism is not confined to the simple fact that the Church of England is the custodian of large numbers of often ruinously expensive church buildings. Precisely because these buildings have been – and are still – seen as symbolic of the Church’s mission, they have repeatedly been the subject of reform, restoration, and rebuilding as the Church of England has sought to reform or sustain itself more generally. And this means – and has always meant – that how the church is arranged inside is as revealing as how the church is seen from outside. So, in true Laudian fashion, the seventeenth century witnessed an attempt to drive the profane out of the church, with east-facing altars fenced against sacrilege.Footnote ¹⁹ So too in the nineteenth century, a renewed emphasis on the parochial – on the idea of the church as space of prayer open to all – resulted not just in the removal of box pews and the installation of what were termed free sittings, but also the introduction of a ‘collection’ in each service, an innovation which has of course continued.Footnote ²⁰ Thus liturgy can follow architecture. But architecture, of course, also follows liturgy. Hence the multiple re-orderings of the twentieth century, as new liturgical fashions like the abandonment of the east-facing altar, and, later, the growth of more informal, charismatic worship styles, all had their effect.Footnote ²¹

Such changes have also always been highly controversial, disrupting ‘high’ and ‘earthed’ establishment alike: contributing to Laud’s deposition as Archbishop of Canterbury in the 1640s, for example, and leading to parliamentary legislation in the nineteenth century; but also, of course, provoking bitter battles within parishes. Anyone who has had anything to do with local church life will recognize the combination of fury, disappointment and discontented resignation that Owen Chadwick outlines in his description of the struggle between parson and squire in the Norfolk village of Ketteringham. Here, as he shows, the mid-nineteenth century witnessed a contest for control of the church building, as the High Tory lord of the manor contended with the low church vicar; not just, indeed, not principally, about the nuances of belief, but about issues of applied theology: who could use the building and how, who could decorate it and how, and even who could be commemorated within it and how. The west gallery – with its inscription directed at the parson’s pulpit – still stands as a monument to struggle for control that played itself out in the Victorian era.Footnote ²²

What this reveals is not just the way in which architecture can serve as a focus for social, political or theological debate. It also exposes the role of material culture in constituting meaning, in embodying theology.Footnote ²³ This is something that the Victorians understood well – and something we have rather lost sight of. For many nineteenth-century commentators, every detail of a church was resonant with sacred meaning: from the furnishings, each of which was intended to ‘teach its special lesson’, to be a sign of ‘some deep, full, abiding truth’;Footnote ²⁴ to the building as a whole, which was described as ‘an exposition of the distinctive doctrines of Christianity, clothed with a material form’.Footnote ²⁵ Such beliefs help reveal why the controversy over church buildings was so particularly prolonged, intense and bitter in the nineteenth century.Footnote ²⁶ If, as many Victorians claimed, architecture was ‘a thing that speaks to the soul; an embodying of religious feeling’, then it was vitally important to choose the right style, the right plan, the right ornament, and even the right furniture.Footnote ²⁷

The evidence of the importance of this assumption – the belief that ‘art may speak as well as letter-press’ – can be found in almost every parish church in England, and not just great High Church, Tractarian minsters like All Saints’ Margaret Street in London; though it is, perhaps, especially evident there.Footnote ²⁸ The raised altars, the distinctly articulated chancels, the texts and the stained-glass windows, even the precise location of the font – by the door, ‘to typify that by baptism is the entrance to the church’Footnote ²⁹ – all of this was intended to teach, so that the church building was an instrument of the Word as much as the worship that took place within it.Footnote ³⁰

We may not all accept such ideas now; indeed, the current fashion is for a spare, uniconic – even aniconic – approach, well illustrated by the new Bishop King Chapel at Ripon College, Cuddesdon.Footnote ³¹ Nonetheless, even this is intended to communicate, and although critics have described it as speaking ‘a spiritual Esperanto common to most churches built in modern times – reluctant to show damnation, miracles or apotheoses, or even a too-literal crucifixion’,Footnote ³² its architects and their clients are clear that the chapel has a performative function, being designed ‘to touch the transcendent, moving believer and non-believer alike to wonder and awe’.Footnote ³³ Even such self-consciously apophatic structures, therefore, highlight the extent to which all church architecture embodies meaning and all battles about church buildings, even the most apparently parochial, are always theological debates.

Still more than this, it is vital to acknowledge far more than most scholars have been previously willing to, the extent to which understandings of church architecture are shaped by emotion.Footnote ³⁴ Churches are not – whatever modernists tell us – simply machines for praying in.Footnote ³⁵ They are the outcome of decisions that are not simply rational, much less merely communicative. In Larkin’s words, they are spaces – places – where ‘all our compulsions meet,/ Are recognized, and robed as destinies’. Small wonder that decisions about church architecture evoke strong responses in those who have an emotional commitment to the building. Thus the architect Victor Lundy is far from alone in claiming that ‘The most important question about a church building, after all the intellectualizing, is does it move you?’Footnote ³⁶

Indeed, in a brilliant contribution to our understanding of church art and architecture, the American scholar David Morgan has sought to explore the ways in which both are central to an individual’s faith. ‘Belief’, he argues, ‘is not simply assent to dogmatic principles or creedal propositions, but also the embodied or material practices that enact belonging to the group’. In other words, believers are shaped by their environments: physical and emotional; their religion is not just intellectual, much less is it disembodied, rather it is the product of shared experience within a particular aesthetic setting. ‘Material culture, and the arts more generally,’ he concludes, ‘are ways of generating, transmitting, and sharing feeling’.Footnote ³⁷ They are consequently central to people’s religious life, to their beliefs.

In that way, we can understand why it is that church buildings are so central to the popular understanding of Christianity – and to popular experiences of it. Especially for the Church of England – with its 16,000 churches, its physical presence in almost every community – it is through its buildings that people can experience not just a meaningful encounter with Christianity, but also, for good or ill, an emotional commitment to ecclesiology of establishment. Church buildings, to put it simply, are not merely a historic, statutory responsibility for Anglicanism but also the embodiment of its very nature. They are also a site in which the Church can be encountered, experienced, understood – and even accepted. They are thus the only place from which any large-scale growth can possibly arise.

Such a conclusion evidently begs many questions. One might challenge this thesis on a whole series – indeed, all – of its assumptions. It may reasonably be observed that just because someone feels an emotional commitment to one, local church that does not necessarily imply that they feel the same interest in the Church as a whole, much less the particular ecclesial settlement of the Church of England. Likewise, the fact that architecture can be a medium of meaning – a means of conveying, perhaps almost subliminally, a set of theological principles – does not mean that everyone will interpret church buildings in the same way, or even understand the church as a theological as well as an aesthetic statement. Here again, Larkin is perhaps unexpectedly helpful, with his contrast between the ‘ruin-bibber’, the ‘Christmas-addict’, and his own ‘Bored’ and ‘uninformed’ interlocutor providing us with at least three types of church-goer who might remain utterly oblivious of my emphasis on meaning, emotion and ecclesiology.

Indeed, I would happily agree with both these critiques, which seem to me less attacks on my position than amplifications of it. How to persuade parishioners to see the Church beyond their parish church; how to teach people to understand that the buildings they visit are not merely historical curiosities or aesthetic delights, but – in Coleridge’s words – ‘petrified religion’: this seems to me to be an urgent task.Footnote ³⁸ It is made all the more urgent because so much of what the Church currently does to interpret its buildings is highly problematic both in terms of its responsibility towards its architecture and its wider mission of evangelism.

This can be witnessed in two very different ways: with churches and cathedrals diverging in type between those which reject or deny their architectural inheritance and those which seem to be enthralled by it. Both positions are problematic. Take, for example, the undoubtedly excellent education programme at Canterbury Cathedral, which caters to as many as 100,000 children a year. This is an undeniable good, especially at a time in which – as Ofsted, the government body responsible for school standards, recognizes – much religious education in schools is frankly substandard.Footnote ³⁹ Yet it is reasonable to question the approach taken here – especially for primary school children. The costume trails, where children dress appropriately for the themes of ‘St Augustine’, ‘Medieval monks’, ‘Thomas Becket’, ‘Pilgrimage’, or ‘Tudor times’; the activity rooms, where children can carve with stone, write with a quill pen, or make stained glass: these are all good things, and fun things, and the visitor feedback suggests enriching, educational things.Footnote ⁴⁰ They undoubtedly tell pupils a great deal how the cathedral was built and how it operated in the past. But, one might reasonably ask, do they really help children appreciate the work – the vocation, the meaning, the emotional charge and spiritual work – of the cathedral in the present?

The same is surely true of so many guides to parish churches, which play up the antiquity of the place, depicting it not so much as a living, breathing witness to God but as a museum: a collection of interesting architectural features, of monuments, of rare stained glass; the church as home to what Larkin described as ‘one of the crew/ That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were’. Again, there can be no harm in educating; again as a historian, I am delighted to see just how sophisticated, how alluring so many of the more recent tourist material is in churches – and I have been involved in producing some of it, not least at one of England’s most visited churches, the University Church of St Mary the Virgin in Oxford, where the educational material is visually very stunning.Footnote ⁴¹ The extent to which churches should stress their part as inheritors of thousands of years of worship and care is also worth considering. After all, just because we live in an age which puts a premium on novelty, it does not follow that the Church should not emphasize the importance, the validity of tradition.Footnote ⁴²

Nonetheless, it is hard not to feel that there is something theologically impoverished about those churches which have embraced the approach first developed by the heritage industry. Modelling itself on a museum or a country house may transform a church into a tourist attraction; but it also risks denaturing it. The line between ‘providing a ministry of welcome’ and being ‘an important part of England’s tourism product’ is blurred even within the most sympathetic projects, precisely because they begin with assumptions derived from heritage organizations and not with theological reflection.Footnote ⁴³

It needs to be stressed that this emphasis on the heritage of the Church’s built environment is the lesser of two evils. It is surely more faithful – faithful in every sense – than the sort of vandalism that has so often been committed by parishes and chapters who can see no real value in the art or architecture they have inherited. It was a scandal, for example, when, in 1965, Hereford Cathedral removed the magnificent Victorian screen which George Gilbert Scott had installed only a century earlier. Described as ‘the most noble work of modern times’ on its creation, its importance was such that it subsequently became the single most expensive piece of restoration work ever undertaken by the V&A, where it is now on permanent display. The cathedral’s decision to remove it was thus both philistine and short-sighted. Worse than that, though, it reflected the chapter’s unwillingness or inability to act as stewards of what they had been bequeathed.Footnote ⁴⁴

Similar, though less expensive, less monumental displays of philistinism are still being perpetrated. Indeed, as a recent symposium on ‘Piety in Peril’ at the Society of Antiquaries revealed, every diocese can provide glaring contemporary examples of this sort of wilful ignorance. As modern demands for projectors and screens, stages for worship groups, and – above all – facilities for coffee-making have ridden roughshod over the architectural inheritance of many churches. Stripped of their furnishings, fitted with stacking chairs and expensive electrical equipment, complete with kitchen and cosy sofas, many churches, to quote Richard Halsey of the Cambridge Historic Churches Trust, ‘are now indistinguishable from a doctor’s surgery or even a domestic space’.Footnote ⁴⁵ This does not just mean undoing, as he puts it, all the work of the Victorians, with their hope of making every church a truly sacred space. It also undoes their project of making every church a vehicle of holy writ. By making it more comfortable, they make it – I would argue – less legible, less distinctively ecclesial, less capable of evoking emotion, of generating what Larkin would have called ‘A hunger’ in oneself ‘to be more serious’.

In suggesting this I am certainly not arguing that churches or cathedrals should reject their past, or downplay the architectural heritage they possess. Quite the reverse. As I hope I have made clear, I believe that this history is meaningful, that it is capable of evoking emotions, and that as a consequence it has a theological – an evangelistic – value as well as an intellectual or antiquarian one. What I am rather trying to articulate is a call for the Church to rediscover this meaning – the meaning of the architecture it has inherited, and over which it has statutory responsibility and an emotional, theological commitment, as well as a more moral duty of care.

This is even true of those church buildings declared redundant and either sold for other uses or vested in some charity like the Churches Conservation Trust. As Robin Gill points out in his seminal study, The ‘Empty’ Church Revisited, churches do not cease to communicate when they stop being used for worship. Indeed, the empty or abandoned church, he argues, is such a powerful image that it does not just symbolize but may actively contribute to negative ideas about the Church. ‘Redundant urban churches – preserved for ever as listed buildings’, he writes, ‘stubbornly remain as visible reminders of a once religious past.’Footnote ⁴⁶ In that sense, these buildings encourage the sense that Christianity is something we have lost. Worse still, he goes on to claim that an empty church can make no converts, can have no positive role to play in attracting new adherents to Christianity. The redundant church, in Gill’s terms is a positive inhibition to church growth.

Now, this may be unduly reductive. Larkin’s sense that even an abandoned church may communicate something religious – however mysterious or intangible – is surely worth reflecting on here. But the question of what to do with the large number of churches that are now surplus to requirements, whether because of declining church attendance, or, more likely, as Robin Gill goes on to show, because of the fact that they were always far too many of them, remains a real one. The terrible temptation to historicize – to value the church for its form rather than its function – is never more present than when dealing with these sorts of churches: for, of course, as they become redundant, their form, in a sense, becomes their function, with the result that they are reduced to the status of museum pieces, surely rendering the faith for which they were erected apparently a similar anachronism.

This is a point brilliantly made in the architect Chris Miele’s reflections on Inglesham church in Wiltshire, a building often identified as one of the great success stories in church conservation and the protection of the historic built environment:

The same is true of many of our parish churches, whether officially redundant or not, and such a situation begs an important question: how can Anglicans care for their churches without either desacralizing them or turning them into tangible evidence of decline?

One way forward might simply be to start again: to abandon older buildings; to accept that what the contemporary Church needs is modern architecture; and to acquire or erect new churches. In one sense, this would be the ideal solution for many parishes. It would also, surely, in Robin Gill’s terms, speak of life. New church buildings would give many congregations the convenient, comfortable, and domestic environments they seem to want. It would also conform to current fashions in Anglican theology, typified in Richard Giles’ bestselling, modish, and hugely influential Re-pitching the Tent, which argues, ‘We need today, not buildings that make grandiose or pretentious statements, but buildings which make us feel at home.’Footnote ⁴⁸

Even were such a solution financially conceivable or theologically desirable – and both are surely questionable – establishment stands in the way of it. Establishment has given the Church of England statutory responsibility for many important buildings; it has also – more intangibly, though no less importantly – left Anglicans with a cultural commitment to geographical comprehensiveness and the concept of caring for their historic buildings. The collapse in the number of pubs, post offices, and local shops – especially, though not exclusively, in rural areas – has only intensified the Church’s inherited belief in the idea of the church building as the heart of the community and the Church of England as the social glue that holds the nation together. It is an attitude and a programme brilliantly exemplified by a recent publication outlining work done within the Diocese of Oxford. Entitled Churches for Communities, it describes the process whereby one in five churches has been turned into ‘community hub’ in the last decade, with old fittings removed to make way for ‘community space’, for kitchens, meeting rooms – and even pubs and post offices. ‘It is very clear that, rather than being set apart, the church is a civic building, belonging to all members of the community’, observes one incumbent. This is a view repeated across the Church of England.Footnote ⁴⁹

Disestablishment could, potentially, free the Church from this responsibility of caring for old and important buildings; certainly, if it involved disendowment, it would have to result in some shedding of numerous churches: they simply could no longer be afforded. Disestablishment might also, as Wesley Carr has argued, undermine some of the current enthusiasm for the Church to act – and to be seen to act – as a presence in every community, helping to constitute very community. A gathered Church rather than an established Church might well consider the time spent on either preservation work or the provision of ‘community hubs’ simply time wasted, time taken away from the work of evangelization.

But one does not have to frame this debate in terms of such a stark dichotomy: either the established status quo, with its unhappy collection of decaying or ill-adapted churches, on the one hand; or a gathered, disestablished church, moving on and happily abandoning its responsibility for hard to maintain and antiquated architecture, on the other. In truth, disestablishment seems very far away – not least because the state cannot afford to take on responsibility for these 16,000 buildings. By the same token, it is evident that the Church cannot continue as it is, not least because it is becoming increasingly apparent that it is simply failing in its duty to conserve what it has. Recent research on the world-class roodscreens of East Anglia, for example, reveals a shocking level of decay, with experts like the University of Cambridge’s Lucy Wrapson concluding, ‘I don’t think the current model for their maintenance is either working or sustainable in the long term.’Footnote ⁵⁰ Such a situation is a tragedy – and has pastoral, theological, and missiological consequences as well as purely aesthetic or historical ones.

The members of the Church of England cannot afford to shirk their responsibility to its buildings. They owe a duty of care to those who came before them and bequeathed them these treasures. They owe a duty of care to those who will succeed them. That is what tradition is about; that is surely what the Church is about: and church buildings are in every way as much a part of the inheritance of faith as anything else Christians inherit and then hand on in turn. More pragmatically, it is clear that closing churches has a consequence – and not just a symbolic one. Research conducted several decades ago showed that ‘a community which is deprived of its church feels that it has been devalued, and community life is itself weakened’.Footnote ⁵¹ As Larkin’s poem suggests, attendance on Sundays is not the only form of church-going, nor is measuring it necessarily the best way of assessing the reach of the Church. Indeed, in her path-breaking study of religion in early twentieth-century Southwark, the historian Sarah Williams showed that low levels of Sabbath attendance did not diminish her subjects’ commitment to the idea of the Church or loyalty to their local parish church; the building itself was a constant, visible reminder both of the Church’s place within their community and of their own, individual spiritual lives.Footnote ⁵²

As I hope I have established already, the church building is thus more than merely a container, a convenient location for gathering people, a worship space. It is also a place: a place freighted with meaning and feeling.Footnote ⁵³ It has the capacity to communicate deep spiritual truths and, still more importantly, perhaps, to facilitate the strong emotional experience of religion which is the seedbed of faith. For the Church itself, then, the church building can be an instrument of mission, a way of attracting, of educating, and of fostering potential disciples. It can surprise, in Larkin’s words, a hunger in oneself.

At the moment, the Church, and especially the Church of England, seems scarcely conscious of this.Footnote ⁵⁴ It needs to get beyond the antiquarian celebration of the church building as a thing of the past, a focus simply for ‘ruin-bibbers’. It needs to transcend the purely instrumental alterations made to provide domestic facilities, with little thought of how to integrate these within the longer story of the building and with apparently no thought as to the theological consequence of these changes. It needs to take seriously the ‘Bored, uninformed’ visitor of Larkin’s work, and seek to teach them why it is that they are pleased to ‘stand in silence here’; why it is that they might want to spend more time church-going.

To do this, the Church must devote more resources to the process of educating people – including regular church-goers and the clergy – about the theological truths that its homes were intended to convey. At the same time, members of the Church must learn to stop thinking of buildings, fundamentally, as a problem, and start conceiving of them as an opportunity: an opportunity to invite people in. Above all, the Church of England, as the custodian of thousands of important buildings, with a physical presence throughout the land, needs to start taking people’s emotional commitment to their churches seriously. It needs a theology of architecture – of church building and church closing – and it needs one now.