Holy Tall Church, Blackpool

Holy Trinity Church at Blackpool is a listed building, which means its architecture is of national or regional importance. Whatever fine features it possesses were lost on me, but then it was a grey, bleak day in later winter and I could only see it from without. From the mid-1890s, it just struck me as a typical, late-Victorian parish church. I also considered it too tall. I prefer slender buildings to ones that are squat, but Holy Trinity almost wishes to be an ecclesiastic Blackpool Tower, which was completed the year before its own construction.

Height and pride are sometimes pictures of each other. Indeed, Holy Trinity’s sister church enjoys the sound of Pride flags flapping in the breeze. To Ammon, the Lord speaks through Jeremiah the prophet:

“Your fierceness has deceived you, the pride of your heart, O you who dwell in the clefts of the rock, who hold the height of the hill! Though you make your nest as high as the eagle, I will bring you down from there,” says the Lord. 49:16

Churches and denominations that ride high are inevitably brought low. The Church of Scotland is shrivelling up, the Church of England will surely break to pieces, the Methodist Church is in terminal decline and the combined force of English Presbyterianism and Congregationalism (the United Reformed Church) is unlikely to survive the century. Steeples are falling, towers are swaying and proud denominations tumbling.

Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall. Proverbs 16:18