I shall start this month with the good news. On June 17th we heard that our major grant application to Heritage Lottery Fund for over £450,000 towards the cost of reordering the interior of St Andrew's Church Epworth has been successful. The total cost of the work will be in excess of £650,000 and we had to convince HLF that the other funding was in place.
The details of what we are planning have been widely discussed over the past few years, not without some controversy. It is the culmination of almost fifteen years of hard work that has seen the fabric of St Andrew's Church restored to possibly the soundest condition in its history. This final stage which we hope to achieve in 2011 is far from cosmetic; it will necessitate taking up the existing concrete floor which has been responsible for retaining the damp in the building and replacing it with a limestone floor with under floor heating. At the same time we are creating a meeting room in the base of the tower with a ringers’ gallery above and a new kitchen and toilets. The whole church will have complete rewiring with a new lighting scheme and this will include photo-voltaic cells hidden on the church roof which will reduce our carbon footprint not to mention our electricity bill.
Anyone visiting St Andrew's in two years time will notice the font in a different place and the replacement of the pews by high quality wooden chairs. I know that for some people, the idea of a medieval church without pews is almost unthinkable but in most cases the type of pews we are familiar with date back only to Victorian times. Those in St Andrew's are dated 1868 which is a long time ago but it means that they have only been there for about a fifth of the church’s total history.
We now have a once in a lifetime opportunity to transform the interior of St Andrew's enabling it to have a wider ministry to both the parish and to the many visitors who are attracted to Epworth because of its part in the history of Christianity. The next stage is to apply for a faculty (this is the Church’s planning permission) to do the work and we are still in discussion with the Diocesan Advisory Committee about the fine details (some very fine details). We hope to make our application in the next few weeks and this will be the chance for those who are unhappy about some aspects of the plans to make their representations.
We are at an important stage on the way; I am tempted to call this “The end of the beginning.” While we need to ensure that the work is done well we must now begin to shift our attention to the part St Andrew's can play in the Church’s witness in the next twenty or thirty years. There will soon be even fewer paid clergy than at present so we shall have to find new ways to make the Christian message known. We must all do our utmost to ensure that St Andrew's remains first and foremost a house of prayer and worship but we shall have new opportunities to reach more people. Nothing stays the same but I hope that we shall all work together to discover new opportunities for witness when the work is done. That will also be a new beginning and if we can embrace that we can truly say that the best is yet to be.
