A post from our President, Moira Ackers:

 I recently attended the Mission and Pastoral Measure Revision Committee as a representative of the Church Monuments Society. The committee was discussing changes in the rules about making churches redundant. I was allowed a 3 minute slot. This is what I read out.

Thank you for inviting me to observe this meeting. It has been an enlightening experience.

The Church Monuments Society recognises that there are huge challenges facing the Church of England and that there will always be a need for change, but we all have a responsibility to protect our heritage.

This committee needs to recognise that the disposal of churches is not a private matter but is of public interest. Churches are repositories of our sculptural heritage: they house nearly 90% of our medieval and early-modern sculpture most of which takes the form of memorials. These monuments are not only of art-historical value but also important social documents. They are part of this country’s cultural capital and should be available to all.

Churches and the objects within them are witness to local, national and international history: the good, the bad and — if truth be told — the sometimes shameful. Historical awareness is important and these visual reminders should remain accessible to all. We should be using our cultural capital and, by doing so, we should be protecting it.

There are experts happy to be called on to help understand the value of what we have and how to make it relevant. History tourism is huge: we need to develop and promote this. Yet we also need to see how churches under threat can be saved by becoming a local resource for the community. At the same time, we must also accept that some churches should be preserved as they are in their entirety, and untouched.

When we close a church, we prevent access to so much. Moving monuments and other objects from churches is a poor solution. It is expensive and risky, and raises an important question: who can house them? Truly important monuments may find new homes, but access to them may then not be guaranteed. However,  it is the loss of all those smaller memorials placed cheek by jowl on walls next to stained-glass windows, and other precious objects that record the lives of local people and display the work of local craftspeople, that will be mourned by future generations if they are lost forever. It is at this point that we need to remember that these monuments do not belong to the church: they belong to the local community.

We need a plurality of approaches. Some churches can be given a new purpose whilst their heritage is still protected, but that may not apply to other churches. Even so, this should not mean that we can just abandon them to private developers and domestic conversion. Churches and all that they contain are for all of us.