World Cup Churches 8. Wales

It's World Cup year - taking place in November/December in Qatar instead of the Northern Hemisphere summer as it has always previously done.  Heading round the 32 qualifying countries I will pick out one church in each one.  I am not going to choose only churches that are to my liking.  This is a exploration not a recommendation! To see all in the series select the label 'World Cup Churches' below.

In my look at the USA (Previous blog click here) I referenced a Presbyterian Church that had closed.  As it turns out the next World Cup nation - Wales - also features a Presbyterian Church that has closed.  Let me take you deep into North West Wales beyond Snowdonia, and to Edern, a village that, together with its surrounding farms and hamlets, has had a population of 300-400 for the last 150 years.

It has a small parish (Anglican) church as befits an isolated rural community.  

It also has - or perhaps we must say had - Edern Chapel.

Look, it's not that there are no alive and interesting churches in Wales, but Edern Chapel, which closed in May this year, represents something profound about Christianity in Wales.  You may think that this is the sadness that all the chapels are closing down (many are).  But my reason for choosing Edern is not mainly that - it is the amazing testimony that it gives to what God has done in Wales.

Think about it for a moment.  From the moment it was built to the day it closed this chapel (in a village, remember, that also has a small parish church) could fit in the population of the village and surrounding area more than twice.  For the small London suburb where my current church is that would be the equivalent of a Stadium Church seating 55000.

If we had such a church it would certainly raise the question, 'Why?'.  The answer is Revival.  A community and area so saturated with the Gospel and desire for prayer and preaching that people would seek out opportunities to do it in vast numbers in their own and neighbouring areas on any or every free moment of a day or week (of which there wouldn't have been many).  

Just by being there this Chapel has continued to tell the story of great works, not of architects and builders (though it is stunningly beautiful inside), but great works of God.

Wales may not be encouraging now, but its monumental moments with God are still told in a thousand communities in impossible buildings like this.

World Cup Churches 7. United States of America

It's World Cup year - taking place in November/December in Qatar instead of the Northern Hemisphere summer as it has always previously done.  Heading round the 32 qualifying countries I will pick out one church in each one.  I am not going to choose only churches that are to my liking.  This is a exploration not a recommendation! To see all in the series select the label 'World Cup Churches' below.

Well, this is the biggie.  A vast country, a huge population and hundreds of thousands of churches.  Can we possibly find one that epitomises something American?  As with England I found selecting one church surprisingly easy.

Christ Cathedral is the Cathedral of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange in California.  As such it is a reminder of the hugeness of the Catholic Church in America (including of course the current President), not least in California (reference Sister Act) and its burgeoning Hispanic population.

For all that it is very glitzy in Californian-American style - and that is for a reason. Until not so long ago it was called the Crystal Cathedral and the home of Reverend Robert Schuller's Positive Thinking TV empire.  Technically a Presbyterian Church it was more accurately a Television Church and its Hour of Power, birthed out of a 1960s Drive-Thru church, was vastly popular across the English-speaking world and beyond.  You can't get much more American than all that.  I thought that one day as I walked through the glass building alongside the fountains gently spurting out water in the middle of the aisles as the sun beamed in.

'If you can dream it, you can do it.'

'Let your imagination release your imprisoned possibilities.'

'Problems are never real problems unless they cause you to take your eye off your goals.'

It's not necessarily straightforward to derive these maxims from the carpenter of Nazareth and his disciples, followers, martyrs, prisoners, missionaries and attendant Holy Spirit- inspired operatives.  But in sunny California they made a whole lot of sense.

Until they didn't.

Because for all the positivity stamped on the side of free pens, glasses, eagle ornaments and handkerchiefs - and written in an endless stream of best selling books - some of the problems WERE real problems, whether you thought about your goals beyond them or not.

This whole caboodle cost an awful lot of dollars - orchestras, high-level staffing and prime-time level programming don't come cheap.  And in a long story played out in court and public the ministry filed for bankruptcy.

Unfortunately there was a marked lack of positive thinking in the family.  Firings and hirings, Schuller himself suing the ministry he had founded and energetic divisiveness from an angry, diminishing, and now online congregation.  In many ways among the most negative decades in any church's story in America from a church that had steadfastly refused to countenance sin in the interests of thinking positively. That is one great irony.

Another irony is that a building christened a cathedral simply to make itself sound important (a Presbyterian Church remember) has now actually become a Cathedral - the seat of a Bishop - in the Roman Catholic Church.

It happened in America.

World Cup Churches 6. Iran

It's World Cup year - taking place in November/December in Qatar instead of the Northern Hemisphere summer as it has always previously done.  Heading round the 32 qualifying countries I will pick out one church in each one.  I am not going to choose only churches that are to my liking.  This is a exploration not a recommendation! To see all in the series select the label 'World Cup Churches' below.

Iran finds itself in World Cup Group B, in our context appearing the odd one out with three historically Christian nations - Wales, England, USA.  Wales is famous for Christian Revivals, England for endless Christian events and personalities and the USA for being a huge population that is mostly 'Christian' but Iran of all the 32 countries in this World Cup has the lowest proportion of Christians in its population (as far as these things can be estimated - and more about Saudi Arabia another blog).

To balance this perception of what is currently an Islamic Republic our Church from Iran is St Mary's Church in Urmia.

Ali Heidari - علی حیدری, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

St Mary's is very old - though the picture makes clear it is also quite new in parts.  I do mean very old.  It was many hundreds of years old when the explorer Marco Polo visited it in the 13th century and it has been suggested it is the second oldest Christian church of them all.  Christianity has been in this area for a very long time, and in this sense Iran far precedes England, Wales or the United States.

That this building exists peaceably in a nation not sympathetic - to say the least - to Christianity is down to its ethnic status as part of the Assyrian minority group.  It is an Assyrian Church of the East and is allowed but only for its own Assyrian minority.  (The Church of the East is related to Orthodox Churches, sort of, but with (arguably) heretical variations).

In fact Iranians are coming to faith in Jesus in great numbers (not least here in North London) but in Iran that is officially illegal - and dangerous.  So this church represents the ancient faith of Christ but sits in a land and among a people that are also in the midst of a movement of the Holy Spirit which, in the 21st Century, Wales and England and the USA have not seen.  It is indeed the odd one out. 

World Cup Churches 5. England

It's World Cup year - taking place in November/December in Qatar instead of the Northern Hemisphere summer as it has always previously done.  Heading round the 32 qualifying countries I will pick out one church in each one.  I am not going to choose only churches that are to my liking.  This is a exploration not a recommendation! To see all in the series select the label 'World Cup Churches' below.

Moving into World Cup Group B we are on familiar territory with England.  

How can I choose a church in a place where I have visited and perhaps even taken some part in hundreds?  I found it surprisingly easy because one church epitomises more about England and churches than any other I know.

Westminster Abbey was an obvious kind of choice.  

But this is not Westminster Abbey - though it is consciously almost exactly the same as one end of the Abbey.

At least it is obviously a Church of England building.

But this is not a Church of England building.  Or a Roman Catholic one.  Nor has it ever been - although in another way it has been several Church of England buildings . . .

Welcome to Christ the King Church, Bloomsbury, London, a building so monumental that any first time passer-by will inevitably look at it - though it is far harder to see inside.  It is/was/is a Catholic Apostolic Church (building).

English church life has never been simple and full of quirks - but this is a church that almost defies description in that regard.

Although it is my choice of English church it does owe a great deal to Scotland - more specifically to Edward Irving.  He was a Church of Scotland Minister who developed what might now be called Pentecostal theology.  Irving was part of a great 19th century revival.  As a Church of Scotland minister in London he was thrown out of his church.  In a long story which I tell in one sentence his story inspired followers who brought the Catholic Apostolic Church into being.  As you can see from the picture (you could also hear it from the organ at a recital or see it in the ceiling vaulting) his followers were not poor.

After various splits the tradition lives on in derived denominations in America and Germany in particular.  But the original thinking was based on the Apostles, Angels (as per the Book of Revelation), of the End-Time church preparing for the Return of Christ.  It represented one of the countless Christian movements birthed in England - and indeed in London.

As such no provision for succession was made and eventually the church died out through lack of key leaders.

The building is set in the middle of London University - by far and away the largest university in the UK.  The Church of England University Chaplaincy eventually took over the use of the building for its work.  Many former London University graduates will remember the building (without probably ever realising it was not, in fact, an Anglican church).  

Then the Chaplaincy moved out.

All of us in church life in England know that the Church of England is a fantasmagorical mix of Catholicism that is almost too Catholic for the Pope and Evangelicalism that is indistinguishable from an independent Charismatic Congregation, or a sturdy Bible Teaching Centre.

Forward in Faith, representing Catholic Anglicans looking to stem non-traditionalism  (including feminine leaders) has its home - you've guessed it - here.  In the shut-off end where the altar is, they hold mass on weekdays.  It is a building that epitomises the grandeur of a Catholic-minded liturgical incense-fest.

On Sundays Euston Church meets here.  Euston Church is an Evangelical Anglican mission aimed at the international students, dynamic, biblical, young.

If you've read all that, you are now bewildered.  You are asking of this monumental building, "Yes but what is it then?".

And the answer is, it's English.