I am a priest in the high church tradition of the Church of England. The technical term is Anglo-Catholicism, but I come from a very different Christian background. My heritage is non-conformist evangelical – I was baptised in a swimming pool in the summer of my first year of university.
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It’s a long story as to how I’ve ended up wearing a chasuble and celebrating ‘Mass’, but a big part of it has been to do with church architecture. After several years in the charismatic evangelical scene, I became fascinated with the beauty of medieval churches, particularly cathedrals. I began to think of the large white-cuboid former bingo hall owned by our church as soulless and empty. I thought it was a shame that it was rented out for conferences of police or social workers during the week. Wouldn’t it be rather nice if it were reserved exclusively for worship? I didn’t use the phrase ‘sacred space’ but, looking back, I can see that that is exactly what I was yearning for.
When I was transitioning to a high-church Anglo-Catholic, I got a job working as a verger in a cathedral that had excited my imagination some years before. The aesthetic was, of course, very different but I found that some of the issues that had exercised me in my low-church days were still present. It seemed that the building’s beauty and tranquillity were disturbed by the uses to which it was put. Part of my job was to erect and disassemble the huge staging apparatus for the hosting of classical concerts that took place on at least a weekly basis.
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