All Saints', Preston

The parish church of All Saints’ at Preston seems to be a thriving evangelical witness. Its website states:

Christianity is all about the person of Jesus. If you are looking to find out more, we would love to help you.

Amen to that.

All Saints’ peculiarity (apart from its evident faithfulness to scripture) is its architecture. Not built in the predictable gothic with pointed arches and a steeple, it is nicely classical with ionic capitals. In other words, it looks like a Greek or Roman temple. This may seem a little ironic considering the early church’s wrestling with its relationship to the temples, and whether even procuring meat from them was acceptable. Built in the 1840s when gothic was all the rage, the people responsible for building this church clearly wanted to make a statement. As well as being predominantly funded by Preston’s working class, it was the product of a mini-revival of Bible reading led by ‘a young curate’.

This is a church which harks back, not to paganism, and certainly not to medieval Catholicism, but to the New Testament. This architecture looks back to the original blueprint, not the various photocopies and sketches in-between. Church history, previous practice and established precedent may prove to be helpful guides, but it is the New Testament to which we should always turn for inspiration, direction and ultimate authority.