It is coming up for 3 years since we asked the Bishop of Portsmouth to close Langrish Church for worship and I think, at last, at last, the bitter-sweet day is approaching when the church will be closed and the Parish of Langrish will merge with that of East Meon.
The Pastoral Scheme raised by the diocesan staff has undergone all its official stages; circulations for comment, committee approval, a pause for last-minute appeals and so forth and has now, finally been approved by the Church Commissioners. Some of the potential sticking points I mentioned in the September Squeaker were surprisingly quickly resolved and the date on which the church closes is to a large extent up to Langrish PCC in consultation with Fr Tony, East Meon PCC and the Archdeacon of the Meon, The Venerable Kathryn Percival who acts for the diocese.
The length of this period before closure will be dictated by the need to get a faculty to remove the war memorials from the church before it closes. A ‘faculty’ is the ecclesiastical equivalent of Listed Building Consent and will take 2 to 3 months to achieve. We then have to get the contractor in to do the work and, of course, we can’t give him the go-ahead until we have the faculty approved and so the weeks roll on…. It could be as late as July therefore before we close. We have a meeting arranged for 25 February with the Archdeacon, key diocesan staff, legal advisors and East Meon representatives to thrash everything out and then, with any luck, we will be able to predict a closure date more certainly. We will, of course, be planning a final Thanksgiving Service in the church before the doors are finally shut.
I called the closure day ‘bitter-sweet’. Sweet because it will mark the end of three years’ worth of wrangling with ecclesiastical authorities often not understanding why the process was taking so long and being frustrated at the seeming lack of action. To have finally reached a decision on the matter is therefore a relief. It is a bitter moment though for the small group of faithful worshippers that make up the regular congregation of the church. They, I should say ‘we’, are losing the use of a building we love and the strong bond of fellowship that has resulted from us gathering on a Sunday to worship together then chat over a cup of coffee and biscuits!
I have mentioned the war memorials before and we have raised the faculty request to remove the lovely WW1 stone memorial, currently attached to inside the south wall of the building, box it up professionally and store it in the cellar of Langrish House, along with the little wooden plaque commemorating those who lost their lives in WW2. We have also asked that the Stone plaque commemorating Sgt Major Horlock VC be removed and placed in the churchyard alongside the grave of our other VC, Rear-Admiral Eric Robinson which is marked by a similar stone. Lastly, the faculty requests that the framed illuminated scroll with the names of all those men in the parish who served in the armed forces during WW1 be removed and eventually re-hung in East Meon Church, which, by then, will have become our Parish Church. If you haven’t seen these memorials, they are a part of the history of our community and very much belong to us all, so I do urge you to go and have a look at them before the church closes.
In the meantime the church continues with services on the second and fourth Sundays of the month and we fully expect to be still open for Easter. Look out for notices for these and for the traditional Good Friday walk which, this year, will start from Langrish and finish at Warnford.
29 March Palm Sunday
3 April Good Friday Walk starting at Langrish
5 April Easter Day
Holy Week Compline in all churches in the benefice in rotation
16 April 6.00pm APCM in Langrish Church
David Mowlam
The Squeaker 