St Mary's, Woolwich

The Church of St Mary Magdalene in Woolwich by the Thames I inspected this spring. It was closed sadly, but the externals were not unpleasant, and it is situated in some leafy parkland. Sadly, idle folk with criminal-looking dispositions also found the little park to be attractive, and may account for the church wardens’ decision to keep locked the doors.

It was built in the 1730s to replace an earlier building, though its style would have been a little old fashioned even for then, seeing as it could pass for late seventeenth-century. Its sign includes the following observation, in parentheses:

(A place of worship for 1000 years!)

I understand that the former building was located a little distance away, but I concede the point. The Georgians did not simply build a church here three hundred years ago; the Anglo-Saxon English had worshipped God at this place long before William of Normandy subjected them to his yoke. Yet, by Creationists’ reckoning (longer, if one manages to be an evolutionist), there were five thousand years when this was not a place whereat the Living God was honoured. And the way things are going in the Church of England, especially in Woolwich with its infamously heterdox former bishop, it is unlikely to survive the rest of this century, notwithstanding God’s ability to revive. The churches of Great Britain have no ‘right’ to exist and continue. Our long heritage is no passport to the twenty-second century, and our God has a record of walking away from apostasy and compromise. He would sooner see Solomon’s Temple destroyed than its hosting pagan idols. While churches fail to preach the gospel, the Spirit of God writes

אִיכָבוֹד (Ichobod)

-above their decayed doors and rotting pulpits, despite the elegance of the structure.