Oakham: Stuck in a Rutland

Submitted by Alan Marsden on Wed, 31/07/2024 - 00:00

Yesterday I called at the delightful town of Oakham in the little county of Rutland. It was about an hour’s journey, but my hosts possess a luxurious, Mercedes-Benz motorcar, so the travelling was a pleasure. Oakham seemed to possess all the essential ingredients for a quintessential English market town: a ruined castle, a grammar school, an ancient parish church, hospitable taverns from which fine fayre can be procured (which my party and I thoroughly enjoyed) and, of course, an actual market. The charity shops were stuffed with curious, if expensive, bric-a-bracs, and the high street boasts not one, but two, bookshops. Ladies walked around in elegant, printed frocks and gentlemen donning smart, straw hats were two-a-penny. It was just my kind of place. And if further proof of this were needed, there was a beautiful new statue of our late Queen replete with corgis which had been erected after her promotion to glory. This is clearly a town in which Her Majesty and the office to which she was called are held in high regard.

The parish church was historically interesting, though evidence of evangelical fervour (such as scripture texts, a tract stand or Biblical material for visitors) was not obvious, if it existed. Yet Oakham has another spiritual gem in its midst, a Congregational Chapel. Not only does it go back to that significant year of 1662, demonstrating its clear puritan heritage, but it evidently declined to join the URC, like ourselves, back in 1972. In one online search, it is described as an ‘evangelical church’, which I thought encouraging, though its website speaks nothing of the gospel, and cheerfully advertises its intended services for September, 2021. Similarly, the chapel’s physical noticeboard claims that it is a ‘military and veteran friendly church’, which I suppose to be commendable, while listing its services for June 2024 (it is now nearly August), while still lacking any explicit gospel testimony.

I guess Oakham is indeed an archetypal English town in the spiritual sense, too: the churches seem muted, their message understated, the possibility of the gospel offending the populace absolutely minimised. Of course, there may be other churches in the town, and the Sunday services of the two aforementioned might be full of godly fervour, of which a day visitor would remain ignorant. Nevertheless, even respectable, bourgeois Middle England with its polite children and smiling old folk is dying and dead; only Jesus Christ can offer redemption, only His gospel can bring peace, only His word can breathe life.