The Painted Parish - The Mall Galleries

The Mall Galleries is currently "presenting a rare exhibition of new and recent paintings exploring Britain’s churches, chapels and cathedrals by members of the Federation of British Artists.

The Painted Parish features paintings exploring British Churches, examining notions of place and time, life and loss, as well as faith and worship.

The poet John Betjeman wrote in his poem Churchyards, 'Our churches are our history shown / In wood and glass and iron and stone'. Here, though, Britain’s ecclesiastical buildings are rendered in watercolour, oil, pastel, and more, inside and out, as places of worship, sites of construction, iconic status or desolate ruin.

Exhibiting artists include members of the country’s leading national art societies, the Royal Society of British Artists (RBA), the Royal Society of Portrait Painters (RP), and the Royal Institute of Oil Painters (ROI), amongst others.

An illustrated e-catalogue accompanies the exhibition, featuring a foreword by Dr Timothy Brittain-Catlin, Reader in Architecture at the University of Kent and author of Churches: Explore the Symbols, Learn the Language and Discover the History (Harper Collins, 2008)."

While an interesting collection of images, the 'parish' is seen almost exclusively in terms of the church building rather than either the people or the geographical area. Works by Lisa Graa Jensen, which integrate area, building and people, then stand out as the primary exception to this general rule of thumb.

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John Betjemen - Christmas.

Faith in the Public Space and the role of the Church

Making sense of the census was a useful workshop organised by the Greater London Presence and Engagement Network (PEN) on the new Census data and how it can help churches respond to their local context. We heard about the parish statistics that the Research & Statistics Department at Church House will be publishing based on Census 2011 and used a draft resource for stimulating discussion in parishes about the local implications arising from this data.

Following on from this workshop, The Very Revd Dr David Ison, Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, gave this year’s PEN lecture Guardian or Gatekeeper? Faith in the Public Space and the role of the Church at St George the Martyr Parish Church, SE1. In this lecture, David reflected on his recent sabbatical research on Christian-Muslim relations together with his experiences as Dean of Bradford. 

His thinking essentially mirrored that expressed by the Queen in her address to faith leaders at Lambeth Palace in 2012 where she suggested that the Church of England, while providing an identity and spiritual dimension for its own many adherents, also "has a duty to protect the free practice of all faiths in this country" and "has created an environment for other faith communities and indeed people of no faith to live freely." An example of this in practice is the Common Good Network funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation within their Bradford programme. 

For more on David Ison's lecture, click here.

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The Staple Singers - If You're Ready (Come Go With Me).