Kendal's Zion

I called in at Kendal’s Zion Chapel this summer, now its United Reformed Church. Outside, there was a string of sagging Pride flags trailing in the soil of some overgrown planters. Inside, which was well apportioned and maintained, there was a Christian book shop, but the glass door was closed and someone inside was packing boxes. A quick online search clarified that this was the Marketplace Christian Bookshop, which was sadly closing on 30th June. Although I lament the loss of any Christian retailer, I cannot imagine that the little rainbow flags fluttering in the wind outside its entrance would have inspired many serious Christian readers to darken its door and empty their pockets. Not wishing to disturb the remaining employee removing the remaining stock, I proceeded to the meeting room, past a grand staircase, upon whose banisters yet more little Pride flags were draped. There is much larger room in the main chapel, but a smaller room on that ground floor was where the congregation evidently now met. It was perfectly pleasant and beautifully furnished with comfortable, modern chairs and a thick pile carpet.

There was yet another rainbow-themed poster, framed, hanging upon the wall:

Always wanted to get married in church?

YOU CAN!

Doubtless, Kendal’s homosexual community were thrilled by the prospect, and formed an orderly queue. Ironically, it seems that churches and denominations which carefully align themselves with popular worldly opinions seem to shrink and shrivel. In the early 1900s, chapels and pulpits denied miracles and scriptural history; mid-century, they denied Christ’s deity and His death and resurrection’s salvific work; in the early twenty-first, they gleefully redefined marriage away from its millennia-old basis. Where are these denominations now? Where are the fashionable crowds which thronged to hear such radical and electrifying pronouncements? -dead and dying, church and congregant alike.

Zion Chapel, apart from its diminished sanctuary, seems to be prospering, with its impressive website, comfortable soft furnishings, its smiling pair of ministers, and its intelligent-looking elders. Yet liberal denominations continue to cough and splutter, and expire. The United Reformed Church, of which Kendal’s Zion is part, regularly reports its ever-expanding lists of closed congregations: here is 2020 and 2021’s: 2022’s and 2023’s are still being calculated, but a search for United Reform Church final service will yield results at Luton, Brentwood, Didsbury, and Bourne, and many others. Foreign websites even cite the British URC as an object lesson for their own denominations, observing its decline and predicting its extinction.

Those fluttering Pride flags give the impression of being contemporary and cutting edge, keeping pace with the culture and including everybody. In reality, they are little more than an application of lipstick to a dying woman, or sticking a blonde wig onto the scalp of a corpse.