“Behold, I make all things new.”

An appropriate text for the opening of a new Church which replaced one that had been inadequate since it was built in 1832.

In a history of the ‘Ancient Chapel .. at Epping’, the local historian Benjamin Winstone wrote of the old church:  Most visitors to the town pronounce it to be an ugly building and unworthy of the commanding position it occupies.  Universally disliked from the moment of its birth, the poor old chapel had tried to serve the people of Epping as indeed had other chapels on the site stretching back to the time of King Henry II, but had clearly failed.  The new Church was built after a lot of hard work and set backs. The Revd Edward Buckmaster, Vicar of Epping, whose vision brought about this Church, spoke at the opening of frequent and numerous difficulties and quoted the Bishop of St. Albans (in whose Diocese we then were) who felt that Epping would never get a new church.  Epping, the Bishop said, must remain a blot on the ecclesiastical face of the earth. !  With the building of this Church, that blot was removed. Epping got a church worthy of praise.

Of course it took until 1910, when the Tower was completed, for the full vision to be realised and sadly, that was some time after the death of its architect, George Frederick Bodley, whose centenary of death falls today.  Bodley is rightly regarded as one of the most influential of Victorian architects, who quarried the past as a source of inspiration for the present and no tradition spoke more clearly to them than medieval gothic, characterised by soaring pointed arches which carry the worshipper upwards towards God and turn the Church itself into a living icon of a vibrant and majestic God.

For Bodley the architecture of the building must be matched by the quality of its furnishings because God is worthy of excellence in all things. Everything must both speak of God and lead the worshipper closer to Him. Bodley maintained that the highest art has its spring in religion and his attention to detail is not simply because he was a painstaking architect but because his art sprang out of his faith. Every Church building he designed is a physical interpretation of a living faith.  Bodley turned round the phrase The Beauty of Holiness and created The Holiness of Beauty, in that art and craft served to lead the worshipper through its beauty to the holy God in whose beauty it sought to reflect.

What Bodley gave, in all his churches, was a beautiful Sacred Space in which the soul of the worshipper can soar towards God.  This naturally leads to prayer and even the casual visitor to a church such as ours cannot fail to be touched by the prayerfulness with which it was both built and subsequently maintained.  There are always places where, to quote the poet T.S. Eliot, prayer has been valid and St. John’s, Epping is one such place.

Of course we know that the individual soul can approach God without the help of buildings and other forms of beauty often speak loudly of God. As a lover of Celtic Christianity, I can be thrilled, as the Celts were, by the stupendous beauty of nature and creation.  However, not all for whom the Victorian architects built many of their churches, had that opportunity. As the Industrial Revolution brought people from the rural areas into the towns and cities, their homes were often in mean streets and deprived areas, from which they ventured rarely. There was little of the beauty of creation to be found in the east end of London, for example, and it was often only the Church which was a custodian of the beauty of holiness and the holiness of beauty for lives that were often drab and miserable.

And even if that was not true of Epping, our local worthies thought that it was important for the community to have a building wherein all could gather for worship together because individual piety is fostered best in a community setting. Jesus built his church on a community of disciples and it has always been central that Christians should meet together to fulfil the blueprint of the Church’s life found in Acts 2:42 – where the early Christian believers met to devote themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.  Bodley then gave us a ‘Sacred Space’ in which to do this and we rightly honour the man today who saw the marriage of architecture with the aspirations of the worshipper as essential if the one was to serve the other in bringing the beauty of God to enlighten and enliven the soul.

Fortunately for Epping, Bodley’s vision has taken hold and this Sacred Space has been preserved by succeeding generations and enhanced so that it speaks to us still of God whilst allowing us to develop those four elements of the Apostolic Church – Teaching, Fellowship, Spiritual Feeding and Prayer.  It is in the pursuit of these Four things that we now seek to add to Bodley’s Vision in the 21st century.

For many, many years there has been a desire to develop the St John’s House so that we can enhance our ministry and mission. We now have the opportunity to do this in the Development Project we have recently embarked upon.  The plan is to create a space in which we can Teach the faith; share real holy fellowship (called Kononia in the New Testament); Feed and care for each other and those who come to us and pray together – though the latter will also be helped by the Chapel of the Transfiguration currently being made. 

As our ministry and mission have expanded we have made good use of this building and its versatility but we recognise that if we want to expand and develop we need more space – to teach the young; to learn and share our faith; to care for those in need including the provision of facilities for the disabled; to increase of our fellowship so that we develop a real sense of belonging to each other in Christ. Fellowship made strong develops our common purpose to be the Church. Part of that development must always include reaching out to others and sharing hospitality.

One of the most important functions of religious houses in the past, be they monasteries or hospices was to welcome the visitor and the stranger as if they were Christ.  The Rule of St. Benedict which governed how monasteries should be run is also a spiritual document which has been formative in the development of English Spirituality and in it we read:

Let all guests who arrive be received like Christ, for He is going to say, ‘I came as a guest and you received me’ and to all let due honour be shown…

As hopefully, our church is now, so will our development be a place where people will feel welcomed, valued and cared for.  Even something so simple as a Welcome area or a well proportioned kitchen are part of this ministry.

Translating that vision we have into a reality is going to be costly and it is only through commitment that we are going to achieve it.  It took Forty years of longing to get us this building but the vision took a lot less because a vision must include a passionate desire to see it completed. If Edward Buckmaster, Ernest Wythes, Miss Whiteman and the others involved in the building of St. John’s had been half-hearted and lukewarm, we would not have heard of Mr Bodley in Epping nor would we be worshipping in the Church he provided. We would still be gathered in the universally disliked and ugly building of 1832.  Only through passionate desire and determination was it possible to raise the money to build the vision.

If we are to translate our own 21st century vision into reality and create the Sacred Space we believe we need for our modern ministry and mission we are going to need the same passionate desire and sense of purpose that our Victorian forebears had.  If we do not have that we shall simply trundle along for years and years hoping that somewhere down the line we might have enough to build more than a portacabin!  To get this off the ground (literally) we have to both believe in it and believe we can do it.

And that is going to need attention to the fourth of the reasons why a Church exists – that of Prayer.  Only if we are prayerfully engaged in the mission and ministry of the Church will we be guided by God to provide what is needed for the work of Christ in Epping in the coming decades.  But Prayer also catches us up in the building of another, equally important Sacred Space – that of our own soul because for a soul to grow towards God it must have space in which to grow – space in which to find God within.

Bodley understood that all good buildings arise from faith – that religious belief is the key to all our endeavours.  It was this which drove him to provide places where the soul can meet its God and be enriched by God’s love and desire for our eternal well-being.  Many people who come into this Church to sit, look around, pray, light a candle are touched by God in a personal way. We cannot know how many have found God here but the fact that this Church is here makes it possible for God to reach out to them as he does to us.

Ultimately this is a House of Prayer and Worship and everything flows from that.   Our Vision, like Bodley’s, must always be centred on that. If it is, then everything is possible.  Whilst we may be caught up in providing more facilities and therefore more opportunities to serve Him in serving others, we must never forget that this is a place of Prayer and it is where we meet together prayerfully as God seeks to shape us into his holy community. God takes the beauty of our lives – (and because He is created us we really are beautiful) - and makes us holy.