St Mary's, Scarborough

Getting into to St Mary’s Church at Scarborough is no easy feat, unless one attends for a mid-week concert or Sunday morning worship. Nevertheless, perusing its externals is no waste of time. It is clearly smaller than once it was, and some of it has been subjected to rebuilding.

During the siege of Scarborough Castle by Sir John Meldrum of the Parliament in 1645, the churchyard was the place from which his cannon battered the walls of the old fortress, and its towers from where musket fire was offered. Sir Hugh Cholmeley, the Royalist governor of the castle, gave as good back, and the churchyard and much of the building were obliterated.

Civil wars are always tragic, though their legacy at Scarborough makes the place even more interesting. To what extent, I pondered, as I walked the battlements and inspected the church, do we Christians take on the secular power and challenge its pretensions? Are we right to protest about abortion clinics and wars? Should we tolerate the state’s new sexual morality, or accept its consequences when to court we are summonsed? Quietism (the belief that we should meekly acquiesce in the state’s evil and receive its persecutions) can be justified from scripture, and so, too its opposite, activism. Using this approach, we do not lie down silently, but play an active part in national affairs, speaking up for Jesus Christ and His values in a typically indifferent or even hostile environment.

Ironically, both approaches see the church battered and harassed. My own view is that it is better to go down standing up for truth that sitting down for it. Our leaseholds on earth are short and our voices will one day be silent. Let us use them, therefore, to speak truth to power, and speak life to a dying land.