Have you seen the historic churches slideshow yet?

St Peter’s Church in Congleton opened up their building recently as part of a National Heritage Day. To help them understand the symbolism of the architecture, visitors were given copies of Look Around You, SGM Lifewords‘ reflective tour of a church building. The words of the booklet were also re-printed on posters around the building. “People appreciated the meditative walk around the church,” said DCC secretary Pauline Drew, “many thanks for your help and the very attractive way in which the gospel is presented.”

Operation Noah has launched an advent initiative for 2008 calling for ‘reclaiming christmas‘. As a response to the increasing consumerism of the Christmas season, they are suggesting a series of events for the first weekend of December, all about sustainability, and simpler living. Activities will include special services, present-making workshops, and clean-up operations around shopping centres. Several cathedrals will be taking part, including Birmingham, who recently hosted SGM Lifewords‘ Space Encounters prayer stations.

For more about the project, click here. Resources include liturgy and prayers, and check back soon for their alternative Christmas play, described as ‘Dr Who meets Dickens’ A Christmas Carol’. The project will be launched formally on 11th November with a lecture from Abbot Christopher Jamison, best known for the BBC series ‘The Monastery’, and the book ‘Finding Sanctuary’ (a book a number of us at SGM Lifewords have read and enjoyed.) Jamison introduces the idea:

“Advent is the traditional month of preparation before Christmas, a time of fasting and intense prayer, a time of eager expectation. It is above all a time to celebrate waiting as a normal part of human experience, when the Christian tradition invites us to wait for the birth of a child. In Advent we rejoice that we are waiting, that there is still time to prepare a way for the Lord and we celebrate the virtue of patience. By contrast, the consumer world tells us not to wait but to ‘buy now.’ Greed cannot wait, so to learn to wait is a simple antidote to greed.”

Operation Noah is the climate change initiative from Christian Ecology Link and Churches Together’ Environmental Issues Network.

A church in Scotland hosted an exhibition this month on ‘The Church Past and Present’. For the past, Church of Scotland Tayport drew together items from its history, such as a 1920’s wedding dress and baptismal registers, and presented them to the public. For the present, visitors were invited to tour the building and explore the meaning of the architecture, and to respond to the spirituality of the space through interactive installations drawn from SGM Lifewords‘ Space Encounters resource.

“We set it up a ‘Prayer Pool’” said Rev Colin Dempster. “Visitors were encouraged to say a prayer and write it on the paper boats, which they then floated in the pool. We also set up a locked prayer box for people to put prayers in for our Prayer secretary; this was well used. Our prayer is that this will encourage others to not only think about prayer, but to get in touch themselves with the ‘Hearer of all our prayers’.” Visitors also toured the building using the Look Around You leaflet from SGM Lifewords.

Space Encounters is a series of four prayer stations designed for use in historic churches. You can download full instructions and resources here.

A recent report from the University of Warwick suggests cathedrals may serve Christian visitors better than non-Christian visitors. In a survey at St David’s Cathedral in Wales, the research team found that visitor experiences were quite different between those who professes Christian beliefs, and those who did not.

Visitor satisfaction was very high among regular church attenders - 97% said they found the cathedral inviting, 95% said it was uplifting, 87% ‘awe-inspiring’ and 77% said they felt a sense of God’s presence. Among those who did not attend church regularly, 88% found it inviting, 77% ‘inviting’, 68% ‘awe-inspiring’. Just 18% felt a sense of God’s presence.

This may not be particularly surprising, considering visitors pre-dispositions. For Christians, cathedrals can be a place of deep spiritual significance, whereas casual visitors may consider them buildings of primarily historic or architectural interest. However, the survey also covered the cathedral shop. Christian visitors were much more likely to purchase something, and to approve of the overall range. 74% appreciated the range on offer, and 55% made a purchase. Only 41% of non-Christian visitors thought the shop offered a good range, and just 31% bought something.

This is perhaps more telling, the researchers suggest, as it shows the cathedrals’ target market is skewed towards Christians, and positions the cathedral as serving Christian needs first. “This strategy,” says author Emyr Williams, “misses the great challenge held out by the Archbishops’ Commission on Cathedrals of engaging in their mission of teaching, evangelising and welcome among secular tourists. More problematic still is the implication of the finding that the focus of the cathedral shop is symptomatic of the positioning of the whole cathedral which seems to understand the secular visitor so much less adequately than it understands the pilgrim.”

As we have discovered in our own research for our Historic Churches programme, each cathedral has its own approach for reaching out to visitors. Some have produced audio tours, invested in multimedia elements, or commissioned new artworks. Others run regular, easily accessible services at various points in the day. Some have experimented with special events, from late night opening at the weekends to spirituality fairs or Narnia theme days. Whatever the individual response has been, most cathedrals recognise that the needs of pilgrims and tourists need to be held in balance. This was notable at the Mission Shaped Cathedral event, which saw dozens of cathedrals represented at a consultation in Coventry to discuss the unique role of their buildings in mission.

This is a conversation we are engaged in ourselves at SGM Lifewords. Our Historic Churches programme aims to help churches to think through the welcome offered to visitors, at whatever stage of faith they may be. Our prayer cards are designed to facilitate prayer for those who are perhaps unfamiliar with praying. The Look Around You card is a fold-out tour of any church building, that leads visitors around the building, using the architectural features as cues for reflection. Each title was developed in consultation with practitioners, and several cathedrals are using these materials already, including Manchester, Oxford and Coventry. We are also developing interactive prayer stations, offering visitors a point of response to what they see, hear and feel while in the ’sacred space’ of a church building. We are still exploring the many ways to use church buildings in mission, but we would hope that wherever the conversation takes us, secular tourists as well as pilgrims would encounter God in our historic churches.

• The full report is entitled Visitor experiences of St David’s Cathedral: the two worlds of pilgrims and secular tourists. It was first published in the Rural Theology journal.

Archbishop Rowan Williams gave an interesting lecture last week on The Spiritual and the Religious, articulating the differences between religion as “a matter of the collective mentality”, and the spiritual as that which “opens up and resources personal integrity at a new depth,” and allows “ordinary human activities to be understood afresh against a broader background of ’sacred’ meaning.”

The trend in our culture today is away from the structures and requirements of religion, to the more open territories of spirituality. It is a shift “away from the idea of a controlling narrative, a story about shared meanings and goals.”

Part of the problem, says Williams, is that religion is understood in power terms, as a matter of one truth over another. As a matter of thought, conviction and decision, this makes faith a private matter - a collection of personal conclusions that have little impact on public life. But this is not the way religion used to be viewed:

“Traditional styles of religious commitment were nothing much to do with resolving to think or do this or that: they were environments in which people were supplied with a set of possible roles within a comprehensive narrative, a set of possible projects shaped by the governing story. The aim of life was to act in a way that lets the story come through, that shows to the world what we believe is most real.”

Williams does not condemn the modern search for spiritual connection as a distraction. Neither does he seek to defend Christianity as a set of truths to be propagated. Rather, he advocates an understanding of ourselves as a community with a different story.

“The Christian alternative to the post-religious spirituality outlined earlier is not simply ‘religion’ as some sort of intellectual and moral system but the corporately experienced reality of the Kingdom, the space that has been cleared in human imagination and self-understanding by the revealing events of Jesus’ life.”

• You can read the whole lecture here, or watch a video here.

When we started our historic churches initiative, many practitioners suggested that we try and produce a generic church tour leaflet. Many churches have lots of visitors, but do not have the time or the expertise to create guides to the church building, or specific visitor materials.

Look Around You is our response - a guided walk around any church building on a pocket-sized fold-out card, using prayers and reflections to help visitors to engage with the spirituality of the place.

Look Around You is available to order now, and is already in use in a number of churches and cathedrals. To stock up before the summer season, visit our online ordering pages here.

The Church of England is recommending that people give up something a little more meaningful than chocolate this year, and go on a carbon fast.

In association with Tearfund, they have drawn up 40 actions for Lent, and you can see those here (pdf). You can also sign up for a daily email.

Bishop of Liverpool James Jones said: “Traditionally people have given up things for Lent. This year we are inviting people to join us in a carbon fast. It is the poor who are already suffering the effects of climate change. To carry on regardless of their plight is to fly in the face of Christian teaching. The tragedy is that those with the power to do something about it are least affected, whilst those who are most affected are powerless to bring about change. There’s a moral imperative on those of us who emit more than our fair share of carbon to rein in our consumption.”

I was at the Mission Shaped Cathedral consultation last week at Coventry Cathedral, and we heard a lot of good ideas shared between the different cathedrals. One that I thought I’d pass on here was the shopper’s carol services at Bath Abbey.

Every year Bath Christmas market sets up in the square in front of the abbey, and the market draws a huge number of visitors. The abbey opens its doors for ’short services for weary shoppers’, at 1,2,3 and 4 o’clock on saturdays. The services are just 20 minutes long, and they have proved very popular, especially on rainy days!

If you’d like to get along, the market runs from 29th of November to the 9th of December, with the shopper’s services running on saturdays the 1st and 9th.

Lincoln Cathedral do a very similar thing at the Lincoln Christmas market.

Have you tried carol services specifically for shoppers? Leave us a comment and tell us how it went.