Living stones

For over 800 years people have worshipped in the church of St. Mary Magdalene in Horton. The well connected inhabitants of Horton House supported church and village, and filled the chancel with memorials, not least a large and fine alabaster memorial of two members of the Parr family lying in an attitude of prayer. Their one day to be royal niece may have visited, prayed there, worshipped there. Years later, when the Victorian era villagers wanted to make the Parr resting place even lovelier, they perhaps did not realise that they had employed what we would call cowboy builders. The builders did make the church look very fine, but proper working buttresses and proper tying of chancel to nave might have been a higher priority. The work they did outlived them; perhaps that is all that mattered to the ones wielding the chisels and the hammers.

Fourteen years ago the shortcuts taken by those builders began to show up. A sheet of plaster fell from the wall, cracks appeared in finials, stonework started to crumble. The church was closed, unsafe for public use. The hopes of many that it could be repaired and restored led to a fundraising campaign that drew people together. But it gradually became clear that you could never raise enough money to put right the many problems the building had collected. The annual spend to maintain the church would be exorbitant.

Today the story of worship at St Mary Magdalene's came to a quiet but loving close. As the church commissioners scheme to close the church came into effect, 49 people from the village and neighbouring villages gathered in windy, drizzly cold on the path near the front door. There they remembered that religious buildings do come down, but that the church is made from living stones, and the church goes on beyond buildings. They considered the pilgrimage that the living church is making and made a cairn, a way marker near the church door that will remind all who see it that pilgrims have passed this way on their journey. Each stone reminds those who placed them there of important moments and happy moments, when that church mattered to them as much as it did to the Parr family. But the journey doesn't end here, only the story of the building does.

Horton's worshippers travelled on to join their neighbours from Piddington and Hackleton. Their parish of Piddington came to an end too today, as they willingly brought to an end a part of their pilgrimage in order to journey forward together with their fellow pilgrims from Horton. Their church now belongs as much to the Horton worshippers as to those of Hackleton and Piddington. The new parish, Piddington with Horton, began as the pilgrim worshippers gathered in the church to renew their baptismal vows, to pray for their ongoing pilgrimage in Christ together, and to celebrate a new phase in the story of Christ's living stones in this place.

I hope never have to oversee the closure of a church again. Once in a lifetime is enough. But if I do, I hope that it will be with the same love, hope and grace that my brothers and sisters here came together today. May our Lord bless them as they move on together, living stones building his kingdom right here, right now.