Inglewhite Chapel

I visited the outside of Inglewhite Chapel nearly ten years ago but I was able to see the insides at a meeting of North West Congregationalists which was gathering there this spring. In some respects, it is like Salem: a rural location and a beautiful setting. On the other hand, it is located in an actual village within easy distance of the city of Preston, from which some of its regulars are drawn. A little younger, it is celebrating its building’s 200th anniversary this year (the congregation was founded in 1819), though its nineteenth-century construction belies the wonderfully modern interior within.

Either as a sympathetic nod to its heritage, or as part of some carefully negotiated Planning requirement, the remains of an old pulpit (bottom photograph) are fixed to a wall, a reminder of the chapel's past and the gospel’s timelessness. That said, those comfortable chairs will be the envy of the benumbed posteriors more familiar with the pews of Salem Chapel.

The church warrants a Wikipedia page which Salem lacks, though it also has some peculiar, past associations with evangelist Robby Dawkins, author of the snappily titled Do What Jesus Did: A Real-Life Field Guide to Healing the Sick, Routing Demons and Changing Lives Forever, who is said to have raised a man from the dead at this very chapel. He claims:

“As I continued to pray I began to bind the spirit of death and say, ‘You can’t have him!’ I began to declare the resurrection life of Jesus Christ over him. People were beginning to get a bit restless but then I could hear his breathing start to recover and his color (sic) started to return,” Dawkins says. “His lips that were purplish black started to get less dark. His eyes stopped being fixed and dilated and started to move. We rolled him onto his side at that point to allow his tongue to fall forward, but he was starting to come round.”

One doubts if demons truly have the power to kill people in defiance of God’s will. He goes on:

“I turned him towards me and pulled him into my chest—like a hug—and declared a full impartation of life. He let go and then embraced me again,” Dawkins says. “I did this because I had a friend who had raised the dead and said there is something about the chest-to-chest connection—like in the Bible—that seems to impart life. I continued to pray and break off the enemy’s assignment against him. Some men helped him to the back of the church to wait for the ambulance.”

Dawkins, like his namesake, is not someone with whom I would get along with beyond introductory pleasantries. I was not present at the great resurrection of 2015, and the church declined to comment according to various online articles. Let us go back to that old pulpit attached to the wall, or the new stand from which the preacher looks out at his comfortably seated congregation. If the gospel of Jesus Christ is preached here -and I believe that it is, then resurrection of the spirit takes place each time a sinner who is dead in his trespasses believes the gospel and is wonderfully regenerated. This will make no headlines, nor warrant much discussion in the various online gossip shops and debating societies, but it will always be of greater consequence, for the body will die again but

…whoever lives and believes in Me shall never die. Do you believe this?” John 11:26 (NKJV). The bodily resurrection of 2015 may be questionable to say the least, but the many hundreds or thousands who have found new life here over the past two centuries are real enough.

A D