St Herbert’s Church, Braithwaite

St Herbert’s in Braithwaite, Cumberland, is a late Victorian Anglican church which seems to have undergone a recent and tasteful modernisation. It has an unusual dedication, even to us at Salem Chapel who are used to having a saint called Herbert. Braithwaite’s was a hermit who lived on the island in Derwentwater, leaving it only once a year to seek counsel from Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, an unusually long journey for one to take in Saxon times. According to the legend, it was Cuthbert who urged Herbert to that life of solitude, a calling which many medieval minds romanticised and idealised. Even today, people long to go ‘off grid’ and buy cabins in the woods where they can be self-sufficient and mind their own business. Yet this monastic ideal is not biblical. The early Christians modelled themselves on the synagogues, their theology more closely mirroring the Pharisees’ than the world-denying, town-avoiding Essenes. We are not to be of the world, but we are called to be in it. As I see our cities decline into mires of godlessness, and whole districts dominated by devotion to false gods, I too detect the allure of the wilderness. But how do we serve people if we avoid them? How do we show them Christ if we never meet them? Look for paradise in the next world, not this.

St Herbert’s Church, despite its dedication, is in the centre of its village and adapts itself to contemporary needs, like creating a coffee area and replacing hard benches with upholstered, moveable chairs. I rather liked it.

For I am with thee, and no man shall set on thee to hurt thee: for I have much people in this city. Acts 18:10

A. D