Revd Joe Knight joined us for the Rural Mission and Ministry Course in May 2025. These reflections were shaped by the conversations and themes that emerged during those days, and offer a timely and hopeful contribution to the wider thinking around rural buildings and ministry. We’re grateful to Joe for his generosity in sharing this with us.
The Matter with Buildings
I don’t know how long it has been there, but there is a wonderful stone step in the church of St Lawrence in the village of Sandhurst, Gloucestershire. It must have been there for hundreds of years, and hundreds of people must have trodden upon it. The stone itself leads to and from the vestry, from one space to another, but it is also a stepping stone for the imagination, inviting it to wander in times gone before, and time yet to come. It is a portal for pilgrims into the story and meaning of the place.
The step has this peculiar quality not only because it is set at the threshold of holy places, but because over time the feet of the faithful have worn the stone into a deep bowl-like curve. It has become, in one sense, a living stone, continually sculpted by the comings and goings of prayer, worship and the chain of community. That shaping continues even today.
Faith is not limited to the countryside, but I have found, particularly in rural communities, the story of faith is an inheritance that is both a great privilege and a great responsibility. It is written in the hearts of local people, going back generations, and it is quite literally carved in the stone of our local church buildings. The story is woven with the threads of meaning and memory and characterises the people and the places where we belong.
But we live in a time when the story is at risk of being lost in translation.
The Rectory here is beside a church building that closed before I arrived in post. It remains closed, gated, and a huge ‘For Sale’ sign dazzles and baffles oncoming drivers as they commute for work (and, of course, everything else). I can understand why. Ironically, in our family of parishes it is the most recent building to be built but the first to close! But built of porous stone, standing (with no foundations) on an undulating and shifting flood plain, it was never going to last long. That, on top of very small numbers and huge bills, meant its inevitable closure.
Some six years later, a new housing development as brought another 700 dwellings to the neighbourhood, quadrupling the population and the empty building is felt keenly. My neighbours, both old and new, speak of feeling abandoned by the church, even though I’m stood with them, wearing my collar, and living next door.
There is something that church buildings represent that goes beyond direct communication and connection. Speak to any minister who has closed, or is facing, the closure of a church building, and they will tell you of the same anguish that runs throughout the whole community, not least in those who have never stepped inside.
How are we to understand this strange allegiance?
And what might it mean for the use of our church buildings today and into the future?
When Words Fail
Ask anyone in your village if they care about the church building and they will likely reply, ‘yes’. Ask them why, and they will fumble around with ‘umms’ and ‘ahhs’ and vagaries. There may be some talk of personal connection, a wedding or baptism made the place special. Or it may be the ‘history’, or the fact that it is simply ‘there’ that gives a church building a unique presence in the landscape of the community’s heart.
If you ask a member of a PCC, then they may tell another story. Of course, all that prayer and worship and stillness is wonderful, but we really do need to sort out the carpet! Or the leaky roof. Or, the bats, God bless ‘em!
There are real challenges when looking after ancient buildings, and the discourse around them largely focusses, understandably, around finance and numbers. But finance and numbers are not the only factors that give buildings value. If we judged them on these criteria alone, we would, and should, be closing many more buildings than we are.
But I’ve come to believe that we should not close our church buildings. Even if there is no worshipping community present.
Why? Well, it goes back to those babbling, waffled, ‘umms’ and ‘ahhs’. The very reason why people struggle to express what church buildings mean to them is because the reason cannot be easily articulated. Their meaning cannot be reduced to graphs and numbers. And that is a good thing. In fact, that is the point.
The very best things in life are beyond our ability to speak about them. Think of values and experiences that have brought some kind of transformation in your life. It may be love, or wonder, or beauty, or a kindness – words are insufficient to describe them, that’s why poetry, art, and music are so important; we long to portray meaning in a meaningful way, in a way we can understand but cannot describe.
That is also why, when words are beyond us, we look for symbols to bestow meaning on, symbols that can represent the meaning and weight of feeling; they hold something of our sense of belonging and identity.
Iain McGilchrist, notes that such symbols speak of something ‘ancient and enduring … they enable us, just for a while, to contact aspects of reality that we recognise well, but cannot capture in words. It is precisely their multi-layered, sometimes paradoxical meaning, well beyond articulation, that gives them value, and makes them resonate with us at so many different levels and in so many different ways.’[i]
In his view, these mysteries are essential for our understanding of the world, how we perceive it, and therefore, how we act within it. It is no small wonder, then, that in a world of rapid change, rapidly depleted of meaning, that one of the enduring symbols of meaning, identity and belonging in the countryside is the church building.[ii] In fact, few symbols remain beyond the church building. That is why people can speak with such feeling of abandonment at a building’s closure, and why a stone step in the vestry can speak volumes.
Gifts of Living Memory
Wendell Berry writes, ‘what is inferior in power or in value may nevertheless be indispensable.’[iii]
If we are to shift our thinking about church buildings away from finance or numbers, we will need to do two things. First, embrace them as indispensable gifts. Second, tell the story well, and faithfully, which requires a practical reimagination of their use and care.[iv]
Without a church community, a church building stands as a memorial of loss. This, I believe, remains important as a prophetic symbol, and even in its silence a building can tell a story. A disused building remains a symbol of meaning, which is why the story needs to be told well.[v]
And yet, Wendell Berry also reflects that a landmark of a local culture will be a landmark to a dead culture unless there is, within the people, a commitment to neighbourliness in everyday life. He writes, ‘it does no good for historians, folklorists, and anthropologists to collect the songs and the stories and the lore that make up local culture and store them in books and archives. They cannot collect and store – because they cannot know – the pattern of reminding that can survive only in the living human community in its place.’[vi]
If our church buildings carry something of the meaning and identity of a community, they do so because they have staged, witnessed and absorbed the lived story of the people over generations. They are symbols of the local place only insofar as the local people have had their lives celebrated, illumined, and commemorated in them. And they remain living places only if the ‘pattern of reminding’ survives. Fidelity to their given purpose as a place of worship, prayer, and hospitality, is essential, and the community needs to understand that the building exists in service to those values, lest the building itself becomes an idol.[vii]
Hence, a fresh imagination of how a local church community can become story keepers and story tellers depends upon them putting it into practice, to enact, and further, the story in their shared life together. Past. Present. For the future.
For Celtic Missionaries, the idea of a space to worship and work in was a great gift. Celtic ‘colonies of heaven’ arose when missionaries set out and intentionally planted themselves in isolated places, with no building, few people and little resources.[viii] They went to these places and committed their lives to prayer and service, with Christ at the centre. Contemplation led to practice, and service led to growth, and soon enough, many English towns were established. If your village has any connection to Anglo-Saxon days, it’s likely that it was influenced by such a community.
I believe this missionary impulse may help us reimagine our present situation.
Restorer of Broken Walls
What are the biggest challenges the rural church faces? Well, there are many! But, in some of my parishes, they would say isolation, few people, and limited resources. But isolation, few people, and limited resources were the gifts of the Celtic church. They were opportunities.
The gift of limited resources was an opportunity for faith to grow; the gift of few people was an opportunity for real community, neighbourliness, and intentional living; the gift of isolation was an opportunity to focus on the things that matter, on rhythms of life founded on prayer and creativity.
And if I am right about the importance of our church buildings for our present culture, then their isolation, small numbers and dwindling resources should not discourage us. They can be seen as gifts, as opportunities for faith to grow, for real community, for prayer in the hope of a renewed rural life with Christ at the centre.
I do not believe I’m being superficial or foolishly optimistic. I believe I am being hopeful.[ix]
Many of us flail at the challenges we face. Optimism is not what the church needs right now. We need hope that is founded on reality and faith. And, quite seriously, a commitment to contemplation is something many rural parishes can do. Yes, our congregations are aging and declining. Yes, there is work to be done. Not all of us can start Messy Churches or turn our buildings into artisan coffee houses. But we can surely pray! And the result of real prayer is real life.
It may be that our church buildings need radical reimagination. I would love to replace our leaky tiles on St Mary’s with a glass roof, transforming the nave into a greenhouse of ferns and living green, evoking the story of Eden and our vocation to care for the earth. Some buildings may need to become a hub of local economic life, offering skills and livelihoods to young people. It may be that art classes, dance classes or bakeries need to begin, each place will have its own opportunity, following the Holy Spirit’s inspiration and empowering.
And, it may be, if we cannot establish a national approach to fund their care and maintenance (as in France, perhaps),[x] that some buildings will have to close. But we certainly should not pursue that as if it is a moral duty. The faithful stewardship of our financial resources is important, and building projects cost thousands and require energy and capacity that is sacrificial and at times, beyond reach. But a recent study found, on average, there is a social return on investment equivalent to over £3 for every £1 spent on a church building.[xi] There is even a financial incentive to keeping our buildings alive.
But what gets me excited is the idea that our rural church buildings hold a place in our common life that is irreplaceable and indispensable. They are the places of our common life, and they symbolise our identity and sense of belonging in a way that offers us a profound gift. The present challenges we face should awaken us to be attentive to this and call us once again to a life of prayer and service, with Christ at the centre, confident that our buildings are loud hailers of the good news. They are not memorials to a forgotten past, but can be places of living community, where the stones are sculpted still by the story of faith.
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ENDNOTES
[i] Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World. (United Kingdom: Perspectiva Press, 2021), 631.
[ii] Andrew Rumsey, Parish: An Anglican Theology of Place (London: SCM Press, 2017), 160–63.
[iii] Wendell Berry, ‘Poetry and Place’, in Standing By Words (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 1983), 149.
[iv] ‘A change of heart or of values without a practice is only another pointless luxury of a passively consumptive way of life.’ See Wendell Berry, ‘The Total Economy’, in The World-Ending Fire (UK: Penguin, 2018), 67.
[v] I am thinking here of the kind of restoration and stewardship of holy places, places of divine encounter, seen in the Old Testament. For example, the major renewal of the temple in Ezra and Nehemiah, but also Josiah’s restoration of Bethel (2 Chronicles 34; 2 Kings 23). For more on how Bethel can help us understand a theology of place, see Rumsey, Parish, 19-21;
[vi] Wendell Berry, ‘The Work of Local Culture’, in The World-Ending Fire (UK: Penguin, 2018), 115.
[vii] Note the developing relationship between habitation, settlement and place, and the potential ‘benefits and pitfalls.’ See Rumsey, Parish, 31–32.
[viii] Ian Bradley, Colonies of Heaven (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2000), 10-12, see also 25-26; This movement was quite different to the later development of parish church buildings financed by patrons, who may or may not have had good motives! See Nicholas Orme, Going to Church in Medieval England (London: Yale University Press, 2021), 23–26; 85–93.
[ix] I take seriously Andrew Rumsey’s warning that ‘idealised topography’ can reinforce a ‘fallacious view’ of both the church and rural life, doing justice to neither. See Rumsey, Parish, 162–67.
[x] Madeleine Davies, ‘Imitate President Macron’s National Fund for Village Churches, Say UK Charities’, Church Times, 22 September 2023, https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2023/22-september/news/uk/imitate-president-macron-s-national-fund-for-village-churches-say-uk-charities.
[xi] State of Life, ‘The House of Good’ (UK: The National Churches Trust, 2020), 7.
