All Saints' Church, Newcastle

One of the grandest churches in grandest Newcastle-upon-Tyne is All Saints'. To my surprise, I learned that this elegant, playful and extravagant building is home to the city’s Presbyterians, a denomination traditionally associated with all that is sombre and plain. Much of Britain’s original Presbyterianism drifted into pallid Unitarianism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but All Saints' houses an evangelical congregation. These, therefore, are authentic Presbos: faithful to scripture, reformed in doctrine, reverential in worship. There were a brief few years when their brand of Christianity actually became the state church back in 1640s with the abolition of bishops, but they were bitterly persecuted along with Independents and Baptists at the Restoration. To see an apparently thriving congregation of these brethren is pleasure indeed.

Their building is slightly incongruous with their style of worship, but then those sections of eighteenth-century Presbyterianism which did not imbibe drab liberalism were vibrant and influential, known for their culture and education. Indeed, the present minister, one Reverend Benjamin Wontrop, sounds like he might have just stepped out of that century.

The current All Saints' building was constructed in the late 1780s (the spire was added in 1796) to replace a decaying medieval structure already on the site. This ceased functioning as an Anglican parish church in 1961 when it was duly deconsecrated. Later, the Presbyterians moved in, leasing it for 150 years and restoring again the fabric and the message. Just as church buildings require frequent attention and seemingly endless repairs, so a church’s spiritual ministry needs grounding and then re-grounding in the Bible. Apt we are to wander, going after this or that, neglecting and bypassing the essential gospel. So may the current occupants of this grandiose structure overlooking old Newcastle consistently resemble their Lord and Saviour, being faithful and true.