It’s a cold, blandly overcast day and I stop, as I sometimes do, on the road out toward the wilds off Cranborne Chase in the east of Dorset, and wander around the site of Knowlton Church. For years I saw this hollowed out ruin set back from the road and ignored it. Now I can hardly stop myself for paying another visit. It’s late February and the verges and woodland clearings are streaked with flashes of snowdrops. The world is tilting into life again. The whirl and pull of stars and planets drawing life from the ground. Yet the ground feels dead. Cold, damp, lifeless. It remains a gift of faith to see the landscape green and productive once again.
I step inside the ring of fencing that marks this place as different, as protected space from cattle, the tractor and the plough. Within this protective orbit lie the rings of Knowlton. Two banks of mounded earth with entrances east and west circling a wide central space, in the middle of which stands the ruin of a church. The rings are thought to have been constructed around 2500BC and were probably for ceremonial use. Walking through the banks I am pulled to the centre and to the church. A Norman church stood here, was remodelled in the 14th century, before falling into disuse in the 17th century. It has all the familiar proportions and shape of any number of similar churches nearby. But time has not been kind. The tower and nave stand open to the sky. The east window has been cleaved and chewed, its shape and form lost to the attrition of the elements.
Entering the church through the arch of the old south door there is a tower to my left and the familiar shape of a sanctuary to my right. At the bottom of the tower someone has left a single rose and two red votive candles. There has been no official worship here for perhaps 400 years. Yet ‘buildings have a ministry’ of sorts. Perhaps a significant one, unseen, unheralded. Thin places in the landscape of time in which the significance of our lives and that others can be placed.
From the tower base I turn, look down the open nave to the vacant altar space and beyond the shattered window, to the Neolithic entrance out eastwards. There, two yew trees, those ancient, sacred trees, stand sentry. They draw me, as they always do. For they are no longer passed by as markers at the edge of things. No longer are they a gateway to the focus of the church. They are now an altar in themselves. Within the calm, deep green space at their base these trees now host a sacred space. Coloured streamers hang from the branches, candles and messages have been placed at their base. There are small soft toys, stones with prayers scrawled on them, flowers and other artefacts tucked into smooth hollows of the yew bark. I have been coming to Knowlton on and off for over 5 years and this place of worship has been renewed each time. It is a living focus for the desires of people in an age quietly rejecting the assumptions of the modern materialist world, to seek the spiritual. The future is meeting the past, and the past the future in the shade of these centuries’ old trees.
Its hard not to look back at the church from this viewpoint and not see it as peripheral, irrelevant even, its walls disappearing slowly into the soil, its place at the centre dislodged. The edge might be the centre now. Though what it is the centre of no-one is really quite sure. But where history, social change and human endeavour built a church that clearly placed Christianity as the world view of the land, making a solid centre of a porous circle, the centre hasn’t held. Spiritually we are galaxy of possibilities a ‘nova effect’[1] of searchings and questings into the wilds of the spiritual universe. Our buildings still inhabit the land, there are still flowers placed in the stillness of their sacred spaces, but on nearby trees the spirituality of secular Britain flutters in the breeze.
I come to Knowlton now as a kind of spiritual discipline. I come to pray for the church in the county of my birth, the county in which I have now spent the majority of my life. I come to pray in the context of the spiritual reality of our age. And I come to pray in the context of time, deep time. Prayers shaped in a place full of the relics of a pre-Christian past and the reality of a post-Christendom future. And I come to Knowlton to pray and to put my own human endeavours in the perspective of the fulness of time. Allowing the long turbulent view of history to refine my hopes and dreams for the church.
There are two reflections that walking and praying through the history of Knowlton bring to my ministry and to my thoughts on the place of the church. Firstly that church exists in liminality. Time is the milieu of the church. The experience of the people of God is an experience of pilgrimage, of always being between one time and one place and another, always leaving and always arriving. Always leaving the past and finding in its future the way to live hopefully in the present. The church is always walking, ‘walking backwards into the future’[2] perhaps. Deeply mindful and honouring of the wisdom and tradition of the past. And yet walking in the power of the Spirit that comes, as it were, from the future, from the end of the journey, inviting us to step confidentially and imaginatively in that direction. So the invitation to the church is to a be a people of the tent not the temple. Places like Knowlton and painful but important reminders that temples are a risk, or a misadventure in time. Temples are an attempt to ignore the arrow of time, to staunch the dynamic flow of history. And they place at risk that call to follow the Spirit into a world that has tilted once more around its temporary axis and where the gravity at work on people’s lives is drawing them away not toward what was once perceived to be the centre.
Secondly, and as a consequence of the first, the church, in the forms in which it takes, must always be regarded provisionally. We cannot take for granted that the form of the church that has nurtured us has some kind of sacred right to do the same for all time. The church has expressed its core truth and purpose in all manner of forms in time and place, in cultures and contexts since the day of Pentecost, each form emerging from that creative conversation that takes place between Scripture, tradition and the uniqueness of a cultural context. That is the nature of the church. These things we call churches ‘emerge from the interaction of their cultural assumptions, the special historical inheritances and their understanding of God’s revelation through Scripture’ [3]. Places like Knowlton in a sense help us attend to the implicit variety of the church as it responds to the flow of time in a given place. ‘Go back 600 years,’ argues Rowan William, ‘you’d have monasteries of different kinds. You’d have enclosed orders. You’d have friars, the preaching orders. You’d have local guild churches and parish churches and chantry chapels and cathedrals and minsters, not just the parish church. And we’ve airbrushed that variety out of the picture.”[4] They warn us against crystallising the church into any one form or expression. They keep us humble and yet hopeful. For where God by his Spirit has brought new expression to the form of the church he will do so again.
Knowlton, and places like it, also help me pray in the patient spirit of the early church. I am reminded, in this frantic, accelerating world, that the arc of God’s grace is long and bends toward the Kingdom. Slowly. And not only slowly, but mysteriously. There are few straight lines in the geometry of the church’s history. This is the nature of story. A story we inhabit has patient witnesses to the person of Jesus, who died and rose again, in place and time. A story we inhabit passionately but patiently, confident that God will fulfil his purposes ‘in the fullness of time.’
[1] A term borrowed from Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age. Taylor uses the term to…..Taylor, A Secular Age. For a shorter, ore accessible and highly readable take on Taylor’s work see Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular.
[2] A phrase used by Archbishop Justin Welby in a joint Presidential address to the General Synod the Church of England in July 2021. https://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/speaking-writing/speeches/general-synod-joint-presidential-address-archbishops
[3] Duerksen and Dyrness, Seeking Church – Emerging Witnesses to the Kingdom, ix.
[4] Rowan Williams quoted in Taylor, First Expressions – Innovation and the Mission of God.
His Light Material 