Address given by John Bradbury, URC General Secretary at the April 19th Online Conference

“Come to him, a living stone, though rejected by mortals yet chosen and precious in God’s sight, and like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ”. (1 Peter 2: 4-5).

The epistle writer uses the metaphor of a building for the church. The church, of course, is not a building. It is it’s people, bound together as more than the sum total of the individuals, the body of Christ, the People of God, the event of the act of the Holy Spirit. And, of course we’re very, very used to the mantra ‘the church is the people, not the building’. And it is true, and we lose sight of it at our peril.

Some of our most exciting churches in the URC don’t have their own building. They meet in borrowed spaces to worship, witness and serve. I suspect we have many congregations within the URC who might well be better off without a building – but of course we get very attached to them, don’t we?

So, buildings are always secondary to the community of the church, and the communities within which congregations are situated. In fact, the whole reformed tradition can be a little sceptical of buildings – for they tempt us too easily either to idolatry (and I fear we do idolise some of our buildings – however unadorned!) or alternatively, they tempt us to lock God up in them. Not of course that that is ever very successful – but it is not for nothing that Calvin locked the doors of the Church in Geneva outside the times of public worship. He did not wish to encourage the thought that you had to be in church to pray – rather than praying wherever one was in daily life. Creation as a whole is the theatre of God’s glory. For that reason, the reformed tradition is deeply sceptical of any kind of ‘sacred-secular’ divide. We do not consecrate our buildings – they are no more sacred than our homes, or public space.

All of which might not seem a terribly up-beat beginning to a talk about church buildings! It is vital, though, that buildings do not make the church. Congregations function very well without them, thank you very much. But – at the same time they are one of the most amazing resources that we have. Our forebears in the faith have bequeathed us a rich inheritance in terms of our buildings. How we steward them is a matter of how we exercise our lives of discipleship and those who come after us may well judge us on the basis of what vision we have for our buildings now.

I often think of there being four dimensions to the life of the church. It’s worship, it’s witness, it’s service and it’s evangelism. Our buildings can be the most fantastic resource in enabling all of that. But more than that, buildings also shape the communities that live within them. It was Winston Churchill who famously said ‘we shape our buildings, and thereafter they shape us’. In the pastorate I was serving until recently, part of that ministry was working with two congregation who had united in the city centre of Cambridge. One building was sold, the other entirely redeveloped. The architects we were working with, Archangel, were very keen to help us see the building as that which was shaped by our sense of our vocation to worship, witness, service and evangelism – for the building would then shape us in the years to come. The building we inherited was remarkable for its shear size, and its location. It had been well tended and was a remarkable gift from those who had gone before us. But it was a building of shear stone walls straight onto the street. It was a building you could not see into at all. The sanctuary and the halls were separated by a dark dingy corridor. It embodied a sense of the sacred/secular divide between the sanctuary and the halls – something we have, as for so much, to thank the Victorians for. In a memorable church meeting which raised a few eyebrows to say the least, the architect said, looking at our beloved building, ‘it might as well be call St. Buggeroffs, for how inviting it looks’. £5 million pounds later the place is transformed. Large windows allow one to see in and through the building from the street. A large glass entrance invites that transition from outside to in, the flow around the building now makes for easy transitions between all the available spaces, gone are the two large Victorian halls, replaced with one good-sized hall and a series of small meeting rooms, one of our partners, a group therapy centre, how has purpose designed space and so on. All after a remarkable amount of work from the buildings group of the church, the architects and the contractors, who have all worked together in the most extraordinarily positive working relationship (which, for those interested in such things, we conclude was wonderfully aided by a single contractor open-book tendering process which inculcated a relationship of trust from the outset, rather than a competitive relationship). But also, all after a remarkable amount of reflection on what we were called to in terms of our worship, witness, service and evangelism. Our vision of being a ‘community of communities’ – which united differing worship communities, different pieces of evangelism and service that sought to reach out to the multi-layered and often quite desperate communities of the city centre, a plan for pioneer ministry to the night-life of the city in which we were slap bang in the middle, and so on. The building will now, I pray, shape the community of Downing Place Church as it responds to that vocation.

Part of our vision there was to be a piece of public space within the city that was accessible for those who are often denied access to public space. In a city noted both for its wealth is also noted for its radical divide between rich and poor, the city centre was becoming the playground of the rich, the literal home of the street homeless, but a large hinterland of Cambridge society has effectively lost touch with its city centre. Going back many years to when I was in Liverpool as the city centre was undergoing massive redevelopment the same phenomena was happening. Folk in the inner-city congregation I served felt totally disconnected from the city centre that had always been ‘their city’. At the same time in the inner-city shared public space was disappearing rapidly. Shops shut. Post-offices closed. Even the pubs closed. Spaces in which, pre-Covid, and  as life is meant to be and will be again, where people rub shoulder by shoulder in community were rapidly disappearing.

Church buildings provide a remarkable opportunity for shaping a bit of public, shared space in the heart of communities up and down the land. If we resist the urge to turn them into sanctuaries of the sacred they can help us to manifest the reality that the whole of creation is the theatre of God’s glory. They allow us to witness to the reality that Christ’s life, death and resurrection is indeed for all, that God wills the flourishing of all human beings and calls us as God’s people to witness to that hope and that reality.

So where is the URC at the moment on the question of buildings? Well, that is a good question, and one we need to ponder with care as we begin to review out church life in the way that Mission Council agreed at its last meeting. Talk of a URC ‘strategy for buildings’ is extremely difficult at the moment. We are by no means without resources. We have probably around 1200 church buildings. That is probably rather more than we might need. The assets we sit on as a result of the sale of buildings are not inconsiderable. In the 5 year period to 2018 (I’ve not done the sums since then-  it is on my ‘to-do’ list) the cash assets of our Synods had risen from £100 million to £150 million. So we have the land, the buildings, and are not without money. But each building is held in trust for the purposes of one congregation, which has a great deal of autonomy over the management of that building. Our buildings are held, largely, in 13 different Trust companies – some of which curtesy of property values in their part of the country, sit on very large assets, others sit on almost nothing. The United Reformed Church Trust itself owns very little property, Church House, Moderators and church house ministers’ manses. That is about it. Many Synods struggle with the human resources to mount genuinely ground-breaking buildings strategies – and no Synod has the authority over local church buildings to do anything much other than ‘nudge’. The General Assembly is yet further removed from being able to do anything other than ‘nudge’.

I say all of that not to be despondent. But to point out, in part, as perhaps a General Secretary must, that considering matters of our structures, our resources, where they are, and how they are best organised such that they can be stewarded to best serve the worship, witness, service and evangelism of our congregations is actually vitally important to our ability to do exciting things on the front line of church life, in communities up and down the country. That kind of reform is not, I would suggest, fiddling whilst Rome burns! If we turn our backs on that kind of difficult reform of our structures and our assets, we will fail in faithfulness, I believe.

Clearly, life after this pandemic is not going to be as it was before. Some Synods are estimating that between 30 and 50% of their congregations will close in the next couple of years. Many simply will not reopen. Decline as we’ve lived with it for a long time, and a quick survey of the hair-colour at any URC event will tell you that pure demographics mean that is not going to change quickly.

But in the midst of that, there are possibilities. What if, just to dream wild and possibly totally unrealistic dreams for a moment, what if in 10 years time we did not have 1200 buildings any more, but 600? What is some congregations saw that they might release themselves from the burden of  impossible buildings, and engage in their worship, witness, service and evangelism best in borrowed spaces or become house churches? What if some, as the congregations in Cambridge caught the vision to do, merge – preferably before they absolutely have to and whilst they’ve still got some life to make something of it? If we released the capital from 600 buildings, what, I wonder, might we do with it? What new places might we be able to initiate congregations and buildings, perhaps in places where public space has increasingly disappeared and where people feel marginalised from their own localities? What if we were able to effectively ‘church-plant’, into places where we have buildings in communities that desperately need them, but the congregation has dwindled. What if, instead of 1200 buildings, many much loved, but a bit crumbly around the edges and no longer serving the needs of their communities, we had 600 buildings that were redeveloped to be up-to-date, environmentally of the highest quality so we do out bit to get to 0% emissions, were places and spaces of hope and renewed life, were places and spaces that indeed shaped the communities they were home to to be vibrant and flourishing in their worship, witness, service and evangelism? Just what might that look like? Just might, perhaps, something as mad as this, in the power of the Holy Spirit, be our vocation? It would take lots of boring constitutional amendments, lots of complicated conversations with the Charity Commission, who knows, possibly even at new Act of Parliament. But if we could end up in a place like that might it just, possibly, be what faithfulness to God’s call to be the church for the mid 21^st century looks like?