St Michael’s Church, Kirkby Thore

St Michael’s Church at Kirkby Thore in Cumbria is a fine building which I admired within and without. It has an unusually high number of carved heads, though few look as old as the tower.

The pulpit might be the finest feature. The dark wood, the peculiar carved patterns and the strange figures are very mid-seventeenth-century. I’d wager a guinea that this piece of furniture is from the time of Cromwell and the puritans, which is remarkable considering the risqué nature of the figures’ clothing, or lack thereof. I imagine they represent Adam and Eve before they fell, unclothed and uncorrupted.

The duty of a preacher in a faithful Christian pulpit is to denude our pretensions of righteousness and expose our natural shame. Having lost our rude coverings of sewn fig leaves, we may then, though shivering, cold and dirty, seek the righteous robes of Christ, which He freely bestows on all who come to Him. Only then may we enjoy what our first parents lost: righteousness, harmony and fellowship with our Maker.

If this is not the meaning of Kirkby Thore’s pulpit, then it should be.

“These are the ones who come out of the great tribulation, and washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb”. Revelation 7:14