Friars Green, Warrington

Would you share my surprise when I say that I found an internet article which was posted over thirty years ago?! Being middle-aged, I still consider the web as ‘new’, its content ‘recent’. But sure enough, a chapel in Warrington which I was researching -Friars Green Independent Methodist- celebrated its bicentenary back in September 1996, and the Warrington Guardian gave due coverage. So that makes this church, if not its building, 230 years old.

Independent Methodism, ironically, is a denomination, and distinctive from mainline Methodism. This is why it has retained its evangelical character, and not succumbed to the heterodoxy of the contemporary Methodist Church of Britain. Its churches seem to be concentrated in the north, and I have preached in some of their pulpits: Addingham, Barnoldswick, Burnley, Nelson and Owlerton.

Although Friars Green Chapel appears a little forbidding in its architecture, and not unlike the gatehouse to some grim, Victorian gaol, gospel texts are displayed in its windows and even the noticeboard sharing the secretary’s and minister’s phone numbers concludes with ‘Seek and you will find’, a reference to Jesus Christ, surely, and not just those church officers. As one tours the land, inspecting churches and seeking chapels, let me tell you how rewarding and refreshing it is to find one which still preaches the gospel of Jesus Christ. Despite its austere exterior-

A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver.