Green Congregational Acres

I attended Greenacres Congregational Church at Oldham this month. There was a meeting of those in Congregational ministry as well as a talk on children’s work. The church cannot be described as a chapel: with its big, high walls and be-crowned belltower, it was built at the apogee of Victorian nonconformity in a style to rival any parish church. The old dissenters had survived the years of persecution, and despite their need to fund themselves and the social disadvantages which worshipping outside the state church still imposed, they were truly thriving under Victoria. And well might this congregation have felt this way: it was forged in those white flames of persecution.

A sign to the church said it has been ‘serving this community since 1672’. Those terrible days of Charles II’s reign saw nonconforming ministers gaoled, fined and pilloried, their goods impounded, their liberties curtailed. Three hundred years after its official birth, and it voted to retain its original independency by not joining the United Reformed Church, much like our Salem. Few of its current members will remember the heady days of that vote, and none of them will remember the days of persecution. Yet Christians in Britain must not take their freedoms and rights for granted. Intolerance and hostility to the gospel seem to be lurking beneath the glassy stare of contemporary secularism.