Selling Baptist Life: Part 3. Making a Mockery

Having forked out £19 million for a very interesting old religious building, an upscale hotel franchise has to decide what to do with it.  One option is to ignore its history.  Another is to embrace it a little (Bunyan's pristine restored statue - see Part 1).  In the end though, whether we are standing by Noah's half-built ark, by Jeremiah prophesying in encircled Jerusalem or at the foot of the Son of God's cross at Golgotha the unchanging inclination of an unbelieving world is to resort to mockery.

Over the years my sense of humour, not least in churches, has irked some primpy souls so it is from such a personality that I write that the way the hotel has appropriated Biblical themes in the old Baptist House is not funny at all.

I'm OK with The Baptist Grill conjuring memories of several church interviews.  Or even that person who doesn't leave after church with the others but lurks, waiting for the pleasantries to be over so that they can deliver their unpleasantry!

But hereon you may like to refer to the hotel's website (click here), a venue 'Devoted to the Divine.'

'Chef Tony Fleming will preach the gospel for seasonal British ingredients'

'In an irony Oscar Wilde would have appreciated a place of piety has been transformed into a place of decadence'

'The business of L'Oscar is to put every temptation in front of its guests'

'The Baptist Bar: Succumb to Temptation . . . sip on a 'New Testament' cocktail.'

'Perfect for a late night pilgrimage'

All in all it shows up the problem of building religion into stone and not into souls.  For while those who served the Lord they loved in that place are largely gone into His nearer presence where they cannot be mocked, their building and heritage in stone has fallen victim to the mercilessness of a secular age.

Selling Baptist Life - Part 1: The Statue

Years ago, in the heart of one of the world's greatest cities, there was a building that was used by Baptist Christians.  I could have found that out by research, but the actual reason that I know is that I went there.

It was not a building that was especially encouraging.  It looked and smelled as though the maintenance level was determined by the needs of the budget more than the needs of the premises.  Nevertheless it represented the Great Baptist Headquarters and it was in Central London.  (To be technical it is not in London at all but in Holborn aka London Borough of Camden - the Free Churches have always been and remain almost entirely outside the City of London).

The Grand Vision that bequeathed the building to the current generations of British Baptists was that of early 20th Century Free Churchmanship, the same sense of Grand Vision that bequeathed a beautiful Edwardian church in Muswell Hill where I serve - complete with its galleries that imitate the old Langham Hall where the Promenade Concerts first began.

No Baptist congregation today would build such a chapel, and neither would the Baptist Union of today build the building in Southampton Row.  And so, in 1989, the building was sold. Today it is a hotel. Yet these old buildings are hugely instructive and symbolic and Baptist House is the more so for having been sold.

Here's the outside:

Yes, that's right.  A statue.

It is not very easy to understand a statue on Baptist House.  Baptists, after all, have scant love of statues and even at the height of ecumenism (the movement that blurred some lines between denominations in the hope of a visible unity) Baptists rarely had much positivity toward statuary.

Given the Biblicist nature of Baptists we might have expected a Biblical figure - John the Baptist perhaps?  Instead, leaving Biblical figures to the Catholics and High Anglicans the Biblical Baptists resorted to congregationalist John Bunyan.  He was probably, but not certainly, a Baptist too.  And famous.  But quite what a passer by is supposed to do with him remains a mystery.  Surely not a slight bow?  Not a garland on a saints day?  What, then?

Anyhow, fascinatingly the renovation of the building to an upscale hotel included bringing the statue into pristine condition, such as had not been seen since, perhaps, about 1905/6 as the London grime took hold.

Statues, you see, pose no threat.  Whereas the real John Bunyan was put in gaol, his statue can be secularly renovated without fear that it will ever do harm.  That's why we need living faith and not stonework.