July 28, 2024, column from the Amarillo Globe-News:

Many UK churches are repurposed sites, tourist attractions

By Mike Haynes

                A conical steeple rises high above an 1800s stone church building across the street from Newhaven Harbour at Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland. It’s one of innumerable examples of majestic architecture up and down Great Britain and a testament to centuries of Christian faith.

                But not this century.

                The beautiful building has served members of Newhaven St. Andrew’s Parish Church and Newhaven Free Church since its construction began in 1843, according to the Atlas Obscura website. Since 1994, the black, white and red sign attached to its stone façade has read, “alien rock/indoor climbing.”

                Inside, instead of a pulpit and altar, walls that reach almost to the peak of the sanctuary give customers vertical surfaces to scale. An Atlas Obscura headline says, “This repurposed church offers a more literal way to get closer to the heavens.”

                The transformed house of worship wasn’t the only one my wife, Kathy, and I saw as we circled the British Isles a few weeks ago on a Viking ocean cruise. In Inverness, the unofficial capital of the Scottish Highlands, two steeples dominate the skyline next to the River Ness. One tops another former church which now is Leakey’s Bookshop. The massive building houses thousands of used books where worshipers used to sing hymns.

                Other churches now are community centers, and even the well-known cathedrals such as the one at Canterbury, England, host many more tourists like us than people attending services.

                Church attendance in Britain and most of Europe has been on the decline for decades – with parts of the United States following that trend. I remember a gray-haired man on a public bus when Kathy and I visited Oxford in 2010. I told him we were on the way to tour the Kilns, the former home of Christian writer C.S. Lewis.

                In a British accent, the man told us he knew where Lewis’ house was but that “I don’t agree with what he stood for.”

                That’s the impression I had gotten about most of the intellectuals at Oxford, who seemed to have ignored Lewis’ Christian books as much as Lubbock ignored Buddy Holly before the 1978 movie about their favorite son became a hit.

                I don’t know what changed, but the author of “Mere Christianity” and “The Chronicles of Narnia” seems to have gained some respect in England. On Nov. 22, 2013, 50 years after his death, Lewis was honored with a memorial stone in Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey in London, joining literary lights such as Jane Austen, Geoffrey Chaucer, Charles Dickens and John Milton.

                 And not that it’s resulted in fuller pews in Britain, but Magdalen College, the branch of Oxford University where Lewis taught for 29 years, gives him some love these days.

                While in Oxford after our cruise, Kathy and I sought out the entrance to Magdalen (for some reason pronounced “MAUD-lin) in order to experience Addison’s Walk, which we had missed on our other trip to the university city. It’s a circular dirt path, .8-mile long, on the Magdalen grounds, where Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson famously discussed Christianity one evening in the early 1930s. Lewis later wrote that the conversation, continued in his room at Magdalen, led to his transition from believing in God to acceptance that Jesus is that God.

                Our afternoon walk was lovely, as Brits would say, with a stream bubbling beside the path and deer grazing in fields on both sides.

                Back at the entrance to the 566-year-old college, we were pleased to see that, along with small books about Magdalen, you could buy an eight-page pamphlet called, “C.S. Lewis at Magdalen.” It was the only publication on the shelf about a single college professor or student. We also found out there is a plaque on a wall near Addison’s Walk with a poem by Lewis and another plaque in the Magdalen Chapel memorializing the writer.

                One of our cruise ports was Belfast, Northern Ireland, where we toured the Titanic Experience museum. We didn’t have time to see it, but Belfast, the birthplace of Lewis, has a C.S. Lewis Square that features seven sculptures of characters in his “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.”

  

              Another port was Dublin, Republic of Ireland, where we joined scores of people filing through the 1700s Old Library to see the Book of Kells, the 1,200-year-old creation that I wrote about in this space four weeks ago. The official guide to the book calls it “a brilliantly decorated manuscript of the four Gospels.”

                Yes, we did see it for less than a minute as we moved on to let others shuffle by, but it was a little like driving across a state line and back so you can say you’ve visited that state. We were five feet from the famous book, but on that day, it was open to a less-than-impressive page showing a genealogy list, not one of the gorgeously illustrated pages showing Christ or a gospel writer.

                A high-tech, immersive video presentation in a separate building almost makes up for the disappointing, quick look at the actual book. It shows how the Book of Kells was created, how its owners eluded Viking attacks and how it ended up in Dublin.

                Visitors get more emphasis on the art value, history and significance to Ireland than on the original purpose of the ancient book, and those aspects are important. It would be nice, though, to see a little more prominence put on the story its creators were telling: the Good News of Jesus.

                Of course, that’s not surprising in modern Great Britain.