There can’t be many churches in Britain where you can have your nails done, buy a bunch of flowers and a cappuccino and attend a Prayer Book communion service all in the same morning. If this sounds like a tempting combination, then St Paul’s Church at The Crossing in the centre of Walsall is the place for you.
Up and down the country, as congregations dwindle and financial problems grow ever more acute, churches are closing. Redundant buildings are turned into bars and supermarkets. But right in the heart of Walsall, the West Midlands, is an example of what can be done by a congregation with enough flair, vision and courage.
Built in 1892, St Paul’s is a great barn of a building. It was designed by the architect John Loughborough Pearson as a kind of dry run for Truro Cathedral. It is the grandiose dimensions of the building that have made possible the redevelopment with its three levels. On the ground floor are six retail units and a small day chapel still rigged out in high Victorian splendour — a sop to the Victorian Society. The mezzanine houses the Coffee Shop, as well as offices for the church, the vicar and Walsall Carers’ Charity. This still leaves space for a suite of large rooms on the top floor. The congregation meets there on Sundays, high among the arches. But on a Monday these rooms may be used by market research, bereavement support groups, the local council, or for concerts, conferences and exhibitions. In the summer, rows of little desks go up for students from Walsall College who sit their exams under the invigilation of stained-glass saints.
I first walked into The Crossing on a dull November morning seven years ago, when my husband was being interviewed for the job of vicar. My spirits soared; not simply at the sight of an airy vision of glass and chrome and pale marble but at the thought that if he got the job, nobody could possibly expect me to be a traditional vicar’s wife in a church like this. He was appointed to the post, and I was right.
But What Would Jesus Think? Shops? In the House of God? Isn’t this precisely the kind of place that would have had Him reaching for His whip and overturning tables? That is certainly the opinion of some visitors to The Crossing. Their objections are generally based on a misunderstanding about what churches are for. Archbishop William Temple once wrote that “the church is the only co-operative society that exists for the benefit of non-members”. If he was right, a congregation ought not to be a cosy club of like-minded people. The church exists to serve the community in which it finds itself.
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The second misunderstanding results from an innocence about the state of Anglican finances. It is no longer a question of whether dioceses will go bankrupt, but how soon? Churches are having to ask big questions: “What are we here for?” “What role ought this historic building play?” Not forgetting: “How on earth are we going to pay for it?” Faced with redundancy in 1990, this is the kind of issue that the congregation at St Paul’s, with the inspirational guidance of its then vicar, the Rev John Davis, had to tackle.
The church was built to serve the poorest part of the town. It was surrounded by slum housing and a population of 5,000 lived within the parish boundaries. Over the following 50 years, the slums were cleared and the church is now in the centre of the commercial district, with a tiny residential population. This is why it seemed right to turn the ground floor into a mall. The units are let at reasonable rates to small local businesses, often to people starting out in business for the first time.
The other key decision was to redevelop the building to the highest standards, not just to brick up the south aisle to make a chapel, stick a pool table in the rest and call it a community centre. A firm of architects was commissioned. The result has been described as “the jewel in the crown of Walsall’s regeneration” and could justly be described as spearheading the redevelopment of the town centre. This took serious money, and for the first couple of years the project plunged ever deeper into debt — a scary phase for all concerned, not least for the Diocese of Lichfield, which considered foreclosing. But grants from Europe, central and local government, and the Church Urban Fund among others, and good business decisions, turned the situation round and The Crossing is now within a few years of paying off the debt. St Paul ‘s will then be in the position of having to decide what to do with £50,000-£80,000 annual profits. My own pet proposal, “Embezzlement: The Way Forward”, has already been dismissed by the vicar.
So from being a building that was open a few hours a week and served the needs of maybe a hundred people, St Paul’s is now open daily and has a weekly footfall of 3,000. But challenges remain. Urban life doesn’t stand still. Since the redevelopment the town centre has re-invented itself once again. Within a stone’s throw of The Crossing there are eight bars. Do we need to respond somehow? — other than by letting the vicar put up a sign saying, “I don’t preach in your toilet. Please don’t pee on my church.”
Many are struck that at night, when the good folk of Walsall are out indulging in the national pastimes of binge drinking and vomit-skating, St Paul’s remains dark and closed. So it’s back to the old questions: What are we here for? What role does this building of ours play?
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