St. Martin-in-the-Fields, the Anglican Church on Trafalgar Square, traces its history back to 1222. From the official web site:
St Martin-in-the-Fields is a landmark church in the heart of London and is well known for its welcoming atmosphere, award-winning Café, popular classical 
and jazz concerts and historic James Gibbs architecture. It aims to be the “Church of the Ever Open Door” and has at its heart a practical and hospitable Christianity that seeks to “comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable”.
The current structure, completed in 1726, has just undergone a £36m restoration. Simon Jenkins writes that “Even an atheist can marvel at this exquisite refuge for the urban poor.”
The exterior of St Martin’s must be the most famous of any parish church in the world. This is despite, or perhaps because of, James Gibbs’s architectural solecism of putting the gothic form of a tapering steeple on the classical form of a portico. The steeple was called by Nikolaus Pevsner a “doubtful blessing” and by David Piper a “misplaced eyetooth”.
From the moment it opened in 1726, with George I “of this parish” as its first churchwarden, St Martin’s was the definitive symbol of Anglican worship, repeated a thousand times across America, Africa and Asia. In New England, the steeple-on-portico is synonymous with Episcopalian. Even the tiny church that overlooks Antarctica’s McMurdo Sound is of this form.
Jenkins focuses also on the benevolent work of the church, and, from his perspective as an atheist, seems rather astonished that some entity might rival government in looking after the poor. He contends that redistributing wealth through taxes could be as efficient if only the government had chosen to do it on a more local level. Instead, Britain “removed the link between giver and receiver” and “reduced welfare to an alien and bureaucratic wasteland.” Still, Jenkins can conceive of “no reason why voluntary social service need be motivated by religion” and suggests that secular relief organizations take possession of failing churches.
But St Martin’s is emphatically a church, and its revival is a salutary tale of our times. It has raised its own money to beautify the city as well as to assist the homeless. We may choose to leave the faith out of it, but we can yet marvel at the mission.
Jenkins works hard to wring faith out of the equation, although without it, St. Martin’s would not be “emphatically a church.” And state-coerced welfare seems to be Jenkin’s only alternative. So as he marvels at St. Martin’s – the history, the building, the mission – he might give just a little more credit to the faith that motivated it all.
When the bureaucratic wasteland produces a St. Martin-in-the-Fields, we should all listen respectfully as Jenkins explains how those without faith accomplished it.
May 19th, 2008
Posted by
Fitzroy |
Politics, Religion |
no comments
No comments yet.
