Zion Chapel, Padiham

I called at Padiham last week in order to visit a family who attend our chapel. Getting off the bus ahead of schedule, but allowing enough time for the father to return from work, I had a small wander about the area. Those Victorian, gridiron streets are named after eminent nineteenth-century politicians: Peel Street, Palmerston Street, Canning Street, etc. My first home was a rented terraced house on Bright Street. The memories are not happy ones, for the grandmother who raised me died two weeks after moving there, which was 25 years ago yesterday. All of this was on top of the regular pressures and challenges of beginning a teaching career in a local school, establishing a home and trying to make some new friends. Although I bemoan the scale of social media today, it would have proved quite helpful, then; I knew no-one in the area and had no social life. I would walk to work at 6am and leave when the caretaker locked up. I felt very much alone and missed the large churches in Leeds and Lancaster of which I had been part.

Just around the corner was a Baptist chapel which was called Mount Zion. The pastor and his wife were friendly but it all seemed very small and I recall speaking to a couple of the regulars whom I thought talked rather a lot about themselves and not about the Saviour. Perhaps I should not have made such a judgement on such scanty evidence, but I struggled to feel at home there. I should have given it longer than a few Sundays but, mainly because of the grief, I stopped going to church. With hindsight, I might have continued; then again, the spirit of the Baptist Union would have frustrated me before long. In the end, of course, I moved out of my mourning and the Lord found a role for me at a church in Blackburn. In the meantime, Padiham’s Zion Chapel closed, and appears now to be flats.

Padiham in the mid-2020s has an even greater need for gospel witness than ever before, but Zion, sadly, is long closed and not likely to re-open as a place of worship. There are whole swathes of Britain without Biblical, evangelical Christian assemblies; they used to be there, but diluted their doctrines and compromised their witness, so they inevitably closed. May God keep our lampstand in His hand, and may new ones be kindled.