In his book, If Stones Could Talk, Peter Stanford journeys through England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland choosing twenty churches, one for each century, to chronicle how religion has defined our past and shaped our present.
Peter Stanford summed up his talk thus:
“In the middle of all our communities we have all these wonderful buildings (churches). They are free to go in, it’s not like a museum where people tell you what to do, you can wander around at your leisure. Often, they are empty, which is sad in some ways, but good if you want to look round, and they tell you three things. First, they tell you the history of belief in the place, in that particular community, and you discover all the things that people thought, a hundred years before, a thousand years before. Secondly you see the bigger picture of reformations and popes and bishops and all those things that take you onto that wider scale.
“The sub-title of my book is The History of Christianity in Britain and Ireland. So, it shows you how we have ended up as this officially Anglican, multi-faith country and where that has all come from. And the third thing it tells us, is something about us, because the fact that people wanted to build churches, wanted to put objects of beauty in churches like this church, it was something about a need in ourselves. One of the things we think in the 21st century is that we are very clever, and we have invented everything ourselves and we are the first people to think about it. People have been thinking the same things that we think about for the past twenty-one hundred years. So, let’s link up with all of them, and the then we will have a collective wisdom. I suppose what I really want people to do is to come into churches and look round them and enjoy them more.”
Peter talked without notes and with such passion for his subject you could not help but get drawn in. I think most people left with the desire to discover more and to look more closely next time they would visit a church to see what stories they could discover.
Image Credits: Kt bruce .