What Would You Do with an Empty Church…?
On the day when I watched the Pantherian rollercoaster on video
and remembered the log flume at Alton towers in the eighties
— and how I resented the secret speed in the dark they hadn't warned me about —
I recalled a man who liked trampolines,
who I once taught in a college class on music for students with learning disabilities;
he was wheelchair-bound, with hardly any communication,
but he responded (according to a grateful letter I later received from his parents) in all kinds of ways he hadn’t before, after I made him a video of bouncy castles.
On that same day
A circus.
Oh my.
This inspires something in me but I'm sure it's not what you think.
(I mean, if you think I’m happy a church has been repurposed for the arts, no, no. Nothing that straightforward or cynical.)
And, yes I know that this has happened before.
Churches to circus schools, I mean.
And I also know that some circuses are full of innocent joy, while others push boundaries in ways that don't fit what I'm talking about at all.
(Don't go searching about that on my account because there's no need. This isn’t about pushing things into the grotesque or offensive for fun.)
This is different.
The voices in this news report were local methodists explaining that this is another example of what often happens when a congregation like theirs grows old and the beautiful building cannot be maintained.
Their words got framed by the news — who could hardly avoid it — as something about the demise of Christian faith.
Sign of the times.
That's not what this was though.
Not entirely.
For a start, I understand the current plans make space for a church congregation to meet there still!
Wonderful. The juxtaposition.
And, wow, the cupola ceiling — just like a circus dome
— was already part of the architecture.
Imagine.
Well, all this stirred me.
I started thinking of the very church I first went to in my early childhood.
That church experience during my first decade or more supplied an infinity of architecture for my early brain development.
The spatial and the spiritual
Meeting together in one place.
Inside and out. For example:
High places.
On the platform. But higher than that the cross on the wall, and higher still in glo-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-ria in excelsis Deo and all the hymns that — well, unless you're a hymn singer it's hard to explain.
And low places.
Under the platform, with the aroma of — props — not greasepaint, but—
oh, and a plaque on the wall noting a congregation member went down with the Titanic.
And Jonah, of course. Sunday school told me about him.
Secrets too.
Locked doors. Like the band room. And open ones like the vestry.
You know, on whitsunday every year we decorated a lorry and joined what felt like a carnival procession with banners and flag and people on board and following behind as the band played in front and we led ten or more other churches all the way up the High Street and back like it was…
Yeah.
(I wrote all about this in a book project of mine — Stay With Me. Even a poem about walking a tightrope…)
And here's some history too about it, all wrapped up with Chapter Seventeen, my current project.
And so the phrase —
"What would you do with an empty church building."
That resonates.
Hmm. Memories.
And all that to say —
wait, before I do I need to mention Peter Brook. Edward Bullough. I must write more about that so you know exactly why I've been building an Empty Theatre.
Hmm. All that to say, yes, I wish a vibrant congregation was still singing hymns in that methodist church building for years to come, of course.
Yet, in non-superficial ways, the idea of it as a circus (too?) throws up theological possibilities and thinking that I can hardly contain.
Theopoetic ones. Adventurous ones.
(Awe and wonder —
with vantage points.)
And try this post: As If By Magic.
Because a circus, like a theatre, DOES something to us.
Like a rollercoaster.
(Exactly what I first wished for a chance to go on, the very moment my sister passed away. That had been a rollercoaster too.)
Or a trampoline, or bouncy castle, even when you find it hard to say anything at all that anyone understands.
And it's those places that God meets us.
(Another of my themes.)
But it would take me ages to explain that one…
And extra scaffolding.
