All Saints' Church, Westbury

All Saints' Church at Westbury, Wiltshire, is a typically solid-looking parish church in a traditional English market town. It has stood proud for centuries and contains the usual array of ecclesial detritus: carvings, Tudor brasses, stained glass and tombs connecting it to the great and the good of England’s yesteryear. One might enter such a place and, marvelling at its age, trot out the usual clichés: “They don’t make them like this any more", or “They built them to last back then”. And so they did.

Yet online sources claim:

In 1968, it was found the stability of the entire building was at risk because an old culvert had broken, and water had saturated the clay into which the foundations of the church were built. Cracks in the stonework were appearing and the tower was leaning. 150 concrete piles were driven into the ground to a depth of up to 40 feet, and connected with new cross beams to stabilise the building…

For one broken culvert or pipe, an entire foundation was jeopardised and a whole building compromised! Whether the culvert had been ill-maintained, or whether it was just hidden away, I cannot tell. Yet a small thing nearly brought down a large church, and one that had hitherto stood time’s test. Thankfully, that generation in the sixties oversaw some drastic remedial work and saved the entire edifice.

‘Church’ can mean a denomination or a local body of believers as much as it can a building or structure. There is many a denomination or individual fellowship which, for want of correction on one or two apparently minor points, face a wobbly present and a future collapse. Little things matter; compromise on marriage, on creation, on substitutionary atonement, on male leadership, or on ecumenism, to posit just a few, is more dangerous than the toleration of a damaged culvert.