Articles - Book Reviews
 

"The Country Church". by Robert Van De Weyer. £6-95. ISBN 0-232-51946-3.

Ancient buildings that we can't afford to heat; overstretched clerics serving large groups of churches with widely differing needs; small congregations, struggling to feel relevant in a rapidly changing world. No, this isn't a dismal forecast of the church of the future, rather it's a reflection on the state of many rural churches today.

Robert Van De Weyer is both an economist and ordained Anglican serving a rural community. He's written a thoughtful and sometimes passionate book about the state and future of rural Christianity. In it he takes a look at the history of the village community and the place of the church within that community. He then traces the development of church buildings from being the focus of village worship, celebration and trade, to a position where they are rarely used and may be on the periphery of village life. After painting this rather grey picture he then adds splashes of colour by examining how new life can be breathed into rural churches.

I picked up his book whilst on placement in Kirkby Overblow earlier this year. Initially I read it so that I could better understand the issues I was encountering there. However, I soon felt that many of the themes Robert was describing as current problems for rural Christianity were also problems soon to be faced by urban Christianity. I wondered if given that the problems were similar, might there be some worth in us urbanites looking to the rural church for answers to the issues we will soon also be facing? This book will not contain all the answers, and there are real differences between urban and rural religion, but it may be somewhere to start from as we seek to build a church that will survive the new century.

© St Edmund's Church, Roundhay