St Michael's c 1925

This is what St Michael's looked like soon after the major extension to the church built in 1913-15.

The painting is by Herbert Rollett and probably dates from the 1920s (which is when the single estate of farmland which made up most of the parish was auctioned in separate lots, after which housing development began).

It was loaned to us by a private collection for the centenary events last month marking the laying of the foundation stone of the tower. At first I’d hoped that it would turn out to be the painting of the church (‘A roadside church’) which was Rollett’s first painting exhibited at the Royal Academy, but it turns out not to be.

The photograph was taken with permission on private land (Grimsby Golf Course today) at about the point on which Rollett would have been painting.  The church tower is just visible in line with where it appears in the painting.

Rollett’s representation of the church looked strange to me on first sight. However, a careful look at the building from the correct angle revealed that the tower does actually have the profile he gives it. But he seems to have taken the imaginative liberty of eliminating the older, smaller, lower part of the church on this side of the new, larger, taller building.

Taking the photograph on the Golf Course, I also discovered that the curve in the treeline which marks Great Coates Road turns out to be more accurate than I first suspected.

The Bishop’s sermon at the laying of the foundation stone defended major expenditure on such building away from any significant population, and the context for this includes the substantial work which the Grimsby Church Extension Society in particular had had to do to provide new churches in the fast growing town over the previous twenty years.

Joseph Chapman’s legacies, which funded the work on St Michael’s, actually also included funding for the Grimsby Church Extension Society, but one can see why many people might have seen this work on St Michael’s as an unnecessary indulgence at the time.

Forgiveness

We ought to be thinking, talking and exploring much more around the issue of forgiveness. This is my first provisional – possibly premature – conclusion from a listening exercise which we have just begun.

We see in church fleetingly quite a number of people in their 20s, 30s and 40s who do not otherwise participate in church life. They bring children to be baptised in large numbers, bring young people to our youth group and to our alternative and family worship in much smaller numbers, and ask us to take their weddings.

We are talking about perhaps eighty such people coming through a church door in February alone.

The possible reason they and their families do not then become regular church attenders in a way they might have done a generation ago are well speculated upon, but we thought we might test some of these out.

We’ve put together a sheet with just seven quick response questions from ‘As far as you can remember, exactly where were you at 11.00 a.m. last Sunday?’ to a request to put ticks or crosses against statements ranging from ‘I pray from time to time’ to ‘I’ve visited a reiki practitioner in the last six months’.

A final question explores whether they think the church is likely to have something helpful or irrelevant to say about issues from euthanasia to sex outside marriage; both the role of women and gay marriage are included in the list because we wanted to see whether recent publicity about them affects people’s attitude to the church.

For the first forty respondents to this final question all but one of the topics score no more than 38%: perhaps one third of the people think the church may have something valuable to say about them, but twice as many are either unsure or are certain that what we would have to say is irrelevant.

But it is unexpectedly clear and striking that this is not the case for one topic which we had included in the list without much thought. This was forgiveness. Here just over two thirds of the respondents put a tick. The perception is that here at least the church might have something worth listening to.

It occurred to me when I noticed this that the only extra question I’d been asked at recent Baptism preparations was from a father who wanted to know whether the Lord’s Prayer ‘as we forgive those who trespass against us’ would leave us vulnerable to ‘being walked all over’.

So at the moment I am beginning to think how we might respond to this discovery. Perhaps this simply prompts what I'll say at Baptisms and Weddings this year, and how we handle the confession at alternative and family worship.  Perhaps I need to work with a group on what has been challenging, helpful and naïve in our teaching and our lives, and then find ways to share what we explore.

Meanwhile, a hundred years ago today the then Bishop of Lincoln laid the foundation stone for the major new building of St Michael’s, and yesterday we had the present Bishop of Lincoln with us to celebrate the centenary.

In the picture a more competent cake-cutter is laughing at the Bishop and I as we suddenly face the reality of the anniversary task we had been given.

St Michael's Church Hall

The ecclesiastical parish of Little Coates was divided in 1933. The northern half (with the Vicar Edward Fagan, most of the plant including the daughter church of the Good Shepherd, the village school and most of the population in houses built since the beginning of the century) formed a new parish. The southern half (with the ancient St Michael’s parish church greatly extended in 1913-15, and with housing beginning to develop following the auction of all the farm land in the 1920s) continued as the parish of Little Coates with a new Vicar (Ernest Clapton).

So, from 1933 the reduced St Michael’s parish needed both a Vicarage and a Church Hall. A house was bought on Great Coates Road to be the Vicarage; it was the nearest house to the church at the time, and it continued to house Vicars and then Team Rectors until my immediate predecessor left in 1997 by which time it and its 1960s extension were coming apart from each other. A site was bought on Little Coates Road on which to build the Church Hall, but the Second World War and its building restrictions intervened before it could be developed.

After the War, two army or RAF huts were acquired and re-erected on the site in 1948. I’m told that bricks bought before the War were re-discovered in the long grass as this was done. Then, in about 1960, a second more permanent hall was built in its place. A professional builder from the congregation put in the foundations and a self-build kit was used on top of these; the Memorial Hall at Cleethorpes is clearly a much larger version of the same design.

By the time I arrived in 1999, this second Hall was on its last legs. We looked at the possibility of a Lottery bid to do it up then, but the users didn’t rally around to form the sort of joint sponsorship the Lottery would have required and the electrics were condemned before we could get very far, so it was shut.

We sold the site to the diocese so that a new Rectory could be built - I’m typing this on the site now - and we ploughed the money into a project to put accessible toilets and a kitchen into St Michael’s itself to ensure the flexible use of the church.

Anyway, as St Michael’s prepares to mark later this month the centenary of the laying of the foundation stone of the major extension of the church, we have asked people to send us pictures as ‘a hundred postcards for a hundred years’. Among those which have come in during the last week, three inside the two church halls have struck me in particular.

The top picture shows the party after the first hall was opened; I hadn’t seen any pictures of this hall before. The bottom two show later parties in the second hall with its stage and its barrel-shaped roof; I’d award the ‘peas in a pod’ costume the fancy-dress prize in the earlier of these, and am told that it is an All Saints’ Day party in the later of these.

Red tower / big drill

When I arrived for Matins one day last week, I discovered that the angle and quality of the dawn sun was briefly doing this to St Nicolas' tower.

Meanwhile work was also beginning to enhance flood protection for the houses immediately north of St Michael's, and the little boy in me enjoyed the drill best.

Men on the roof

Mary and Joseph have been popping up in different forms and at different venues across North East Lincolnshire during Advent as part of an Advent Calendar organised by the local Churches Together.  Today they are models at the top of St Michael’s tower.  It took more work than I had imagined securing them in place in a high wind, and a police car ‘blue-lighted’ from the other side of town to see what was going on when someone dialled 999 to report men at work on the church roof possibly pinching the lead.  Happy Christmas.

Building in fields

There is a large and detailed mid-eighteenth century map showing the boundaries and names of all the fields in the single estate which was the parish of Little Coates. It is held in the North East Lincolnshire Council Archive behind Grimsby Town Hall. I’ve had a photocopy of it across several A3 sheets for some time. Recently I’ve tried to copy it across on to a contemporary map, and the picture above is an extract.

Although some fields had been divided and other united, the rural parish was substantially the same nearly two hundred years later in the 1920s when the estate was auctioned in separate lots. So it is not a surprise to see the way modern housing fits into the old field pattern. For example, at the south-western corner of the map, the present Laceby Acres estate occupies exactly the land which was High Field, Mill Close and Old Close.

Some of what I’ve drawn isn’t quite right, but there were an impressive number of places where careful measuring of where to draw a line took me to exactly the place where whole lines of properties back on to each other. For example, just east of St Michael’s, the way the parts of Church Meadows accessed from Laburnum Drive and the parts accessed from Cherry Tree Crescent back on to each other shows very neatly the old boundary between Chapel Field and Home Close.

The power of many old parish boundaries fascinates me. They may date back to patterns of land ownership in the Dark Ages formalised into larger territories as soon as any centralised forms of early English government arranged obligations or taxation by area. This is strikingly visible on this map. Little Coates became part of the Borough of Grimsby in the 1920s, Great Coates in 1970s, and building then took right up to but not across these ancient parish boundaries, so that suddenly they became visible to the naked eye. For example, travelling from Aylesby along Aylesby Road one can look across fields to the edge of Laceby Acres (which follows the ancient Little Coates – Laceby boundary) and the edge of Wybers Wood (which follows the ancient Great Coates – Aylesby boundary).

But the story is not yet over. Consultation is underway to create a new Local Plan for North East Lincolnshire. We are told that we need to build 9000 new homes in the next twenty years or so. Land owners have been asked to identify where they think these might be built, and something like 16000 sites have been offered. Planners now need to know which of these to include in the new Local Plan. Since so much recent building has been on the eastern side of Grimsby (from Scartho Top to New Waltham), and since access to the A180 and potential areas of employment growth are on the western side, there may be some presumption that much new building will be planned on the western edge of the built up area.

So I saw the map last week which shows potential development a field or so further west. Offers of sites exist for some 2868 houses. A new Aylesby Park could be built north-west of the present Aylesby Park across Aylesby Road. A new Wybers Wood could be built south-west of the present Wybers Wood. A new Laceby Acres could be built west of the present Laceby Acres north and west of Morrisons.

If any of this started to become real and immanent possibilities then we would need to have conversations with our neighbouring ecclesiastical parishes because the new Wybers Wood development would actually be in the present ecclesiastical parish of Aylesby, although the houses would all be much nearer St Nicolas’, Great Coates than the tiny village of Aylesby. And the new Laceby Acres development would be in the present ecclesiastical parish of Laceby; in the case, although separated from it by fields, the new houses would be as close to the larger village of Laceby as to St Michael’s, Little Coates.

Fresh eyes

We announced yesterday that the Revd David McCormick is coming in May to work with us as Team Vicar and with St Andrew’s Hospice as Chaplain. David was brought up in Grimsby and returned to be Team Vicar of St Hugh’s in our neighbouring Great Grimsby Team Ministry before moving ten years ago to work full-time in the diocese’s training team, so we are looking forward to welcoming him back.

In my twelve years or so here we haven’t worked with an external work consultant in this Team Ministry (at one point the Bishop offered to try to identify one for me, but nothing came of that, and it is a serious fault of mine that I haven’t ever pursued this), so it will be particularly interesting and valuable for me and us this summer and autumn to engage with what he will be observing about and reacting to my and our established approaches.

Meanwhile, last week the newish Priest-in-Charge of the Great Grimsby Team has very kindly sent his neighbours the terms of reference for the review of that Team parish, including a quite thorough assessment of the role of the Minster there and of his role as Area Dean both serving the whole of North East Lincolnshire including this Team parish. He won’t know that nine months earlier the Deputy Chief Executive of the diocese wrote to me on behalf of himself and the Archdeacon to say there would be consultation with the Deanery Pastoral Committee about these terms of reference, but even at the time we didn’t imagine that was actually going to happen.

So there will be fresh eyes in both neighbouring Team Ministries, and much opportunity to engage constructively rather than defensively with what they see.

The other over view of at least part of this parish at the weekend was provided by going up the towers of St Michael’s (which I do quite often) and of St Nicolas’ (which I have only done once before). There is a report and ten much better pictures at http://www.rodcollins.com/wordpress/inside-a-church-tower-and-the-view-from-the-top. The top picture here picks out a spiral of flowers on the north side of St Michael’s which wasn’t there last year. The bottom picture of two ships passing on the Humber hints at how unexpectedly close Yorkshire is to St Nicolas’.

Looking both ways

Pictures of Janus inspired the small group which gathered in St Michael's for the Last Saturday Thing on New Year's Eve to produce our own images of looking both back and forward, and in the dim lighting for our prayers at the end the processional cross appeared to be doing its best to join in.  By then I'd adapted my trite title for the evening ('Old Year Sorrow, New Year Hope') for us to have mixed views and mixed prayers about both past and future.

Drought and salt

The worst news is that there is the prospect of drought in south-western Zimbabwe. An e-mail yesterday from the parish we support there has this stark message. We have not received any significant rains and so we have not planted anything. Usually by this time of the year the maize crop should have grown up to 30 centimeters but this season there is absolute nothing. We hope the rains will come but now it seems like there is going to be a devastating drought.  We continue to pray for the rains.

Meanwhile, these deposits are appearing at an extraordinary rate on what were damp patches on the inside walls of St Michael’s. The encouraging suggestion (I hope it is true) is that, as the walls dry out following our recent work on the roof above them, these are salts which have until now been held in solution in the wall.

Roof work

The work is well under way on St Michael’s roof.

The first picture shows the valley gutter soon after the builders had begun to uncover the area on which they need to work. You can see how most of the rain which falls on the church’s roofs (including that brought down from the tower roof) is channelled into this space; it makes a six foot drop into it in doing so. What you can’t see is that the water which accumulates here only has one exit which (because it makes a quick and narrow dog leg movement around a buttress) is easily blocked; when there is a blockage water rises in this valley as if it was a retaining tank, and, once above the flashings (which had been removed by the time this picture was taken), gets under the tiles and seeps into the church. This was a bad bit of design when the main part of the church (on the right) was built in 1913-15. At last we are doing something about it.

Incidently, this picture also shows a hint of the older shallower roof line on the gable of the mediaeval part of the church (on the left) which I had not seen before; creating a new much higher pitch was part of the 1913-15 work, which, I guess, reused stone from the north wall of the old church (which was being taken down at the time to allow the new church to be sliced on to it). You can also notice that the new part of the church simply has a brick wall at this point: this wall is invisible from ground level so they never bothered putting a stone face on it.

The second picture shows the valley gutter yesterday half way through re-modelling it; the new woodwork and the areas either side of it are yet to be covered. The water which comes into this area will now drop a much shorter distance and flow across this much broader platform. What you can’t see is that, because it is at such an increased height, it will then have a much more direct and simple exit (above the troublesome buttress), and the hopper on the new downpipe will even have a weir at the top so that water could still shoot out if it ever got blocked.

Palm Sunday

Less easy than I'd thought

Before the repair to the south aisle wall in St Nicolas’ (8 December, 27 December and 1 March) was completed serious questions arose about the state of some of the trees in the churchyard (10 February); a colleague has obtained a detailed report on all the trees and was talking again this morning about the process of quotations, Archdeacon’s approval and consultation with the local authority for varieties of work (the removal of those which have died, important work where there might be a danger, and other recommended work).

Meanwhile, the first complaint of the season about our not doing more to make the churchyard neater has come in (much earlier in the year than usual) so we’ve been back to those who’ve promised to give us a hand with such things to see what else we need to be planning to do.

Still at St Nicolas’, we had a helpful visit last week from the Open Churches Officer from the diocese looking at the plans we have for the development of the building for wider community use (16 February), but the Working Group has not really been able to progress things. First, both Parish Councillor and Ward Councillor elections come up in the next few weeks. Secondly, a group in Great Coates believe that a letter to our MP from the owner of the closed hall in the village saying that it will in due course be on the open market (at a value enhanced by planning permission for conversion into a dwelling) is a generously given opportunity to work for its re-opening. We’ll probably have to sit back and see how these two things work through before picking up the Working Group again.

Down at the Little Coates Community Centre (4 January) we had been hopeful that a newly established community group would take on formal responsibility for it; individual members of the group have done remarkable work getting it open again after the water damage at the beginning of the year and encouraging lettings. However, I’d rather over looked the costs involved in a formal lease (the diocese estimates up to £1 500) so we’re just beginning to look at where that might be found.

St Michael’s, which would be glad to be relieved of the anxieties involved in running this Centre if this could be achieved, is itself about to spend £12 000 or so on remodelling the valley gutter in the church in the hope this will finally eliminate the problem of water coming in there, although having completed all the necessary application and public notice we’ve now waited seven weeks for the diocese to issue the Faculty which would allow us to get started on this.

The window is a memorial to William Cowper in Berkhamsted Parish Church where his father was the Rector.

George Skelton painting

There is a painting of St Michael's in an upstairs room in the Fishing Heritage Centre. It isn't one I remembering coming across before.

I noticed it when at a meeting last week and took this photograph of it (or rather, of me taking a photograph of it). It was simply labelled 'Church - George Skelton'. It appears to be part of the local authority's collection; a couple of pictures by Herbert Rollett (see a post here on 14th February 2010) were also hanging in the same room.

It must have been painted at about the same time as the picture posted here on 13th October 2010. The identifiable gravestones and the absence of others pins the date down to about 1890. The huge bush growing in the space between aisle and nave also looks like being at the same stage of growth as in the other picture.

The view from this angle helps bring out how the roof of the nave of the old church was heightened when the new part of the church was built in 1913-5; before this change in pitch the line of the roof of the anve and of the aisle was continuous.

Brisbane news

‘It has not stopped raining for weeks - torrential rain every day,’ is the word from the Revd Linda Kologaras sixty miles north of Brisbane, but she is in a much better place than many others across Queensland.

Linda was a member of St Michael’s and was ordained to serve as a Non-Stipendiary Minister here in the 1990s. She moved into stipendiary ministry first as a Curate in Immingham and the as the Rector of a parish in Australia. She is now in retirement helping out in the parish of Cooroora. We sent her a message when a member of the congregation here was concerned about how she might be being affected by the floods, and she has e-mailed a reply earlier this week.

Thank you for your concern re-floods. It started many weeks ago about the end of November. Unusual amounts of rain coming from the monsoon in the Northern Territory. For some reason the monsoon came further south which has affected us all over the past weeks - soaking the ground and filling the dams to capacity.

We live on the Sunshine Coast near Noosa - 100ks north of Brisbane. It has not stopped raining for weeks - torrential rain everyday and causing wide spread flooding. Fortunately we built our house very high up and, although we have had times when we were a bit worried it would rise and cause problems, it hasn’t come into the house.

We are so much better off than so many people throughout the state who have lost their lives, their animals, their property, everything. It really is devastating. Please keep us all in your prayers as its not over yet as the floods head for Brisbane itself.

I have been helping out in our parish (four churches) especially since our Priest in Charge has been very ill and then away on holidays to recover. I enjoy keeping my hand in and being part of the community. I would like to do more but I still get quite tired and Alex makes sure I dont overdo things. Give my very best wishes to everyone at St. Michael`s

I’ve just looked at the parish website (http://www.cooroora.com/) and see that periodic flooding is not the only weather danger they face - there are historic pictures of the churches ‘blown off their stumps’ by hurricanes. Among other things, I also notice that the parish has an imaginative project offering rowing training and experience to disadvantaged teenagers.

The picture is another left over from my Retreat last year.

Burst pipes

The first real challenge in 2011 may be keeping open the two community buildings which St Michael’s owns (last outlined here on 4th July 2008).

The photograph shows one result of the water pipe which burst over the New Year at the Littlecoates Community Centre (on the site of what was St Alban’s Church between the 1950s and 1970s). For years, the Centre has always seemed to be six months away from closure, but things like the support of the Ward Councillors has usually staved this off. A new community group has just registered itself as a limited company in the hope of making a viable business plan and taking on a peppercorn lease in 2011, but there is almost nothing in the Centre’s bank account at the moment and the flood does make it look all the more like an up hill struggle.

Meanwhile what was Bishop Edward King Church between the 1960s and the beginning of this century is safely let to the Grimsby Institute of HE and FE on terms which include allowing use by community groups. I have no specific reason to think this will come to an end soon, but a silent alarm goes off under a different hat in the back of my head each time mention is made of the need in the current economic climate for FE Colleges to rationalise budget and plant.

St Michael's old and new

The painting of St Michael’s, Little Coates belonged to Joseph Chapman and is from about 1890, and the photograph is (obviously) an attempt to picture it from the same spot today. Standing on exactly the same spot proved impossible (it would mean climbing into a neighbour’s garden and photographing his fence) but this is close, and I’ve been glad to get the two churches roughly the same size to aid comparison. I’ve just stuck the pair up in the church near where the painting hangs.

The churchyard has clearly been extended since the painting was made, and the substantial 1913-15 additions to the church paid for from Chapman's legacy make quite a difference too. The huge angel on Chapman's memorial for his wife can be seen on left of the new picture, and a comparison with the painting shows that it was erected quite close to what was then the gate (which is what one sees in the postcard image of it posted on 13th March). The path from the south door to this old gate would have been roughly straight, which explains why it sets off in that direction today before diverting sharp right to where the modern gate is.