SANCTUARY UK
A concept paper – January 2006

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Imagine a National Trust for the Church.
The National Trust has 300 buildings in its care; the Church of England has 12,000 listed buildings, including nearly half of England’s Grade I list.
Imagine, then, something bigger than the National Trust, if different in many particulars.
Imagine Sanctuary UK and its SAfE houses.


A new lease of life has been given to countless ancient churches over the past half-century through restoration and reordering projects funded almost entirely by local parishioners. In spite of that, the future of Britain’s ecclesiastical heritage is bleak. With the Church of England focused on how it might transform its declining church-based congregations into missionary pioneers in an all but hostile culture, the parish church is in danger of becoming marginalized by its most loyal supporters.

The glossy 2004 Church of England report Building faith in our future tackles the challenge with flair. It hopes that new partnership funding might be found through the regional structures of government. Such optimism finds its basis in the undeniable energy and community initiative that is generated around the local church. The report rejoices in interdisciplinary, often cross-cultural, programmes, which exemplify a diversity of use for church buildings far beyond Christian worship. The report urges all interested parties (and part of the achievement of the report is that it names them) to get their heads together and ensure through such initiatives the long-term viability of this unique heritage stock. This is an ambitious attempt to make church buildings a political issue in a country where the Church could be said to be the least established of any in Europe.

Since the report, there has indeed been some early political positioning on the matter, but not surprisingly given the scale of the problem, a global solution seems ruled out from the start. The only place where an expensive parish church is going to be paid for adequately remains its own locality, where it serves as a potent symbol of the community’s own identity. The parish church somehow embodies the parish, even if only through its architectural or historical dominance. But more than that, things happen there (still) which mark significant moments of many individual lives.

Sanctuary UK is the concept of harnessing this local loyalty and energy in the cause of a national strategy.
It offers a ‘brand’ to churches willing to participate, who recognise that between them they are happily reinventing the wheel a thousand times over, allowing building projects and maintenance to monopolize Church Council time, and confirming the caricature that ingenious fund-raising is what church people do best. With Sanctuary UK, this parochial energy becomes part of a national heritage movement, whose resources at present are effectively a black economy within the Church of England.

Sanctuary UK invites Church Councils to delegate that part of their agenda which is to do with heritage and related fund-raising to a local association of Sanctuary UK operating under the acronym SAfE – a Sanctuary for England. (The concept-to-feasibility study will limit itself to Church of England churches; later studies will need to take into account not only the other UK provinces but other Church denominations as well).

As a SAfE church, the PCC can concentrate on its increasingly unsafe Christian mission and the possibility of new expressions of Christian community and worship. Many PCCs already have an affiliate structure in the form of a ‘Friends’ group or a specific Building Trust, and most others have Fabric or Appeal Committees which serve much the same purpose. The trick in establishing a SAfE group is to ensure that it attracts a membership from the wider community, offering a variety of skills and experience. The SAfE group is ultimately answerable to the PCC and the Churchwardens who have legal responsibility for the parish church; but Sanctuary UK (itself a charitable Trust along with its SAfE associations) provides model guidelines on how this actually works, affirming legal safety-nets but nonetheless encouraging creative thinking and action. The PCC naturally has significant representation on SAfE.

The task of SAfE in any participating parish is to be primarily the fund-raising agent of the PCC: in this, it enjoys the equivalent relationship of the PTA to a school’s senior staff. It fulfils this function first by recruiting new members to Sanctuary UK, so that there is a strong local membership base of those who identify with Sanctuary UK’s aims and objectives*. The brand taps the same pragmatism from which the National Trust benefits, namely, “I probably won’t visit these places myself, but I’m glad someone’s looking after them in case I do”. This especially applies at the local level where achieving a regular financial commitment from those outside the church is almost impossible, but where occasional donations (“in case”) are often surprisingly generous. An annual subscription to an attractive ‘product’ appeals to this sympathetic grouping, for whom there is an understanding that a proportion of their subscription comes back to benefit their nominated church building. But the real purpose of such recruitment is to establish a membership which generates more substantial returns through its participation in the local fund-raising programme. Sanctuary UK has plenty of ideas and resources for those.

SAfE is also well placed to identify new uses for the church building. With the community as well as the congregation onside, the potential of the building becomes a matter of more general concern. In this connection, SAfE has a brainstorming function which literally opens up the church as a local resource. It can also be the appropriate body to have oversight of a new use (like a play group or post office). The PCC needs to be ready for such eventualities, as proposals will eventually have to come back to it for approval and for referral on to the Diocesan Advisory Committee.

The PCC, having bought into the system, is resourced by Sanctuary UK as well as its local SAfE. As the umbrella body of a network of communities making sense of their sanctuaries, Sanctuary UK provides a regular publication and a website offering ideas about how connections might be made across the sacred-secular divide. Such material emanates from different strands of society, not just the Church. There are templates for worship/ spirituality events which the PCC can either accept or reject. Sanctuary UK encourages and facilitates participating churches in the use of technology to offer multimedia experiences for pilgrims and students, manage a tourist strategy, improve security, benefit from credit card donations, access databases, build websites and so on.

Sanctuary UK itself is, like its SAfE associations, more independent in spirit than law.
It is a quango of the Church Commissioners, who have final responsibility for the country’s ecclesiastical heritage. Nonetheless, this serves as an advantage when it comes to negotiating reluctant government investment in church buildings. As is the case with English Heritage grant-funding, local involvement and resourcefulness are rewarded, and where better can that be seen than in any SAfE, promoted by a publicly very visible, so politically very attractive, Sanctuary UK.

*Aims:
To encourage the use of Britain’s holy places without the precondition of religious commitment
To provide a wider support base for the conservation and appropriate development of Britain’s ancient church buildings
To create a context for imaginative and informed spiritual exploration

Objectives:
To establish a National Trust model of membership
To establish a brand for participating churches
To establish a digital methodology


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