In all my visits to St Albans I have never noticed the 1970s nave choir stalls.  Good on Jeffrey John (my very favourite Anglican dean) for getting rid of them.  There is nothing wrong in theatrical spectacle - as long as it is remembered that the congregation are participants, and not spectators.

Llandaff - the Epstein has to have something to hold it - anything chunkier would be worse, anything less obvious might be effete.  Not my problem.

Manchester Cathedral is odd - it has a wonderful set of medieval choir stalls, which are not much used now.  It looks more like a parish church than a cathedral, with its tower at the West End.  Due to the large number of side aisles, the nave seems wider than it is broad, and I understand its complete width is used for services (the choir being behind a screen and out of sight.)

Ian Pace went to school nearby.

And Mother Ann Lee, founder of the Shakers, was born in a demolished street (Toad Lane, or Todd Lane?) also nearby.

Then Tony Watson must have taught there !

And here's somthing in a church of which I disapprove


It is a stained glass window of Sir Winston Churchill put up while he was still alive and a Conservative MP, in the church of Holy Trinity, Exmouth.

I have considerable admiration for Churchill.  If it was not for his bloody mindedness and rhetoric we would probably be overrun by genocidal fascists.  However I am very uncomfortable with the sort of people (Margaret Thatcher, George W Bush and others) who use his name to support their own right wing positions (which I fear Churchill may well have supported himself.)

He was not a faithful, or even occasional, churchgoer, except for public occasions, and he expressed no Christian faith.

He was a MP of a particular party at the time of the windows creation.

The window represents everything I reject about my home town and establishment Anglicanism.

Raleigh is there because it is in Devon (Francis Drake is in another window.)  One of the villages taken over by Greater Exmouth is called Withycombe Raleigh.  The windows were certainly there when I was going in the early 60s, and probably date from early 50s.

I accept it may well be OK to memorialize people who are not noted for their faith (although at the risk of being a bigot, I don't really care for that) but the point is the characters chosen - not Emmeline Pankhurst or the Tolpuddle Martyrs or Keir Hardy was it?

There's a complacent conservative agenda at work there, I'm afraid.

Another reason not to put him in a window in a church.

When you say the Church in Ethiopia, due you mean the Ethiopian Orthodox Church?

http://www.eotc.faithweb.com/orth.html

An indigenous Christian Church pre-dating many European peoples becoming Christian, yet alone any missionary activity.

Here is my photo of a service by the Ethiopian Orthodox in the church of St Mary Abchurch in the City of London, which I posted earlier on the Church experience thread:


Note the lion and unicorn at the ends of the front pews.  A very fine Wren reredos (altar piece) rears up above the screen of the Ethiopian liturgy, with a pelican and her young at the top.  A pelican was supposed to feed her young with blood drawn from her breast, a symbol of Christ.  She does not look a bit like the pelicans in St James Park.

I have a comprehensive, but unexciting, account in a book by Christine Chaillot, The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church Tradition published by Inter-Orthodox Dialogue, Paris 2002.