C is for CHURCH

My childhood church building stood on the top of a hill or drumlin, surveying the whole countryside around, a landmark in the area. The building was constructed just before the beginning of the nineteenth century, though the congregation had already been meeting at the site in the original house since the early seventeen hundreds. There are two plaques on the outer walls, one at the front entrance which signifies the start of worship on the hill in 1704 and another on a side wall above a window informing all that the house was rebuilt in 1791. This is indeed proof that an earlier building preceded the present one. Like many Presbyterian churches of the time it was a plain building, with a central pulpit, pews, no ceiling and a mud floor and could have held up to five hundred people though the attendance was rarely more than a fifth of that. Still standing at one end is a chimney stack that peeks above the far gable wall and is a sign of an earlier heating system, no doubt.

By the time, it had become my place of worship, the mud floor, was no more and a mixture of shiny tiles and red carpet, up the aisles and at the front, lay beneath our feet. The main body of the building was filled with box pews, varnished in a light brown shade and each with its own door and little fastener to keep it closed during the service. There were three rows of these pews from the back to the communion table with the three pews furthest from the front sitting about a foot higher than the rest. At the front on each side of the central pulpit were about six or seven more boxes, at right angles to the rest, though these only tended to be occupied during harvest, an Orange service or when a mission came to town. The pulpit itself was also a box affair with a little door / gate on the right side and reached by a series of three or four steps and directly underneath sat the choir, sometimes facing the congregation and other times facing the pulpit but sandwiched between it and the organ. The whole building has faced several renovations, most notably in the early seventies when a choir room and minister's room were added and the box pews had to be discarded because of woodworm infestations and, more recently, a total makeover inside and the addition of a new front porch and a vestibule renovation. I remember when I was just a nipper, our box was in the middle aisle about five or six rows from the back. Dad always sat at the door end and sister and I, until we were old enough to join mum in the choir, sat inside. It was the custom that after the offering, the organist would simply keep playing, dad would open the door and we would march out into the aisle and off to children's church. ON one particular Sunday, sure enough, dad opened the door and I marched out into the aisle, only to find myself all alone and then realised that he was up to his usual tricks for the broad grin across his face said it all. As they say, I had been 'well had'.

Two other church buildings have been my home. Before I was ten, we spent several years in another Presbyterian 'meeting house' which was an altogether more recent building in the grand scale of things and where the open pews and the electric organ gave it a more modern feel. For the last half a dozen years, our spiritual home has been Richhill Methodist, a quaint little church that only holds about one hundred and fifty people on a good day and, almost every Sunday, has to. Inside, the decor is traditional with two rows of dark wooden pews sandwiching a narrow central aisle leading to a slightly raised platform on which stands a communion rail and a pulpit. But looks can deceive, for this is anything but a traditional gathering on a Sunday morning. And of course that is the whole thrust of my writing, for up until now I have only talked about the church as most people see it, namely a building where people meet to worship. But when Jesus first called Simon by his new name, he said 'I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome.' he wasn't talking about any building being erected but about a body of believers that would for ever be known as 'the church.'

As Christians, we all have different ways in which we worship God within and between our denominations, from the traditional days of my youth to the less traditional approach of our present fellowship, but we are all part of God's church and no building could ever hold all those who believe in Jesus as our Saviour and Lord.

It has been my privilege to have visited so many different church buildings and to marvel at their grandeur or their simplicity but it is a greater privilege to know personally the God in whose name such structures have been erected and who is the foundation stone of the greatest church ever built. Tell me, to which church group do you belong?