The Rector Writes – June 2009
Dear Friends
Thursday 11th June is the fiftieth anniversary of the opening of Emmanuel, Vounog Hill in Pen-y-Ffordd. That evening at 7.15pm there will be an act of worship to celebrate the occasion at which the preacher will be the Venerable John Thelwell, Archdeacon of Montgomery and former Rector of Hawarden. 
Members of local churches will be invited to attend as well our friends and neighbours who live nearby.
The church will be open from 11am until 4pm on the Friday and Saturday for visitors to view the flower festival. Various organisations in the neighbourhood have been asked to arrange a display. Many people who visit the building for the first time, perhaps having passed it for years, remark what a nice church it is!
Our celebrations will conclude with a festival Eucharist at 10am on Sunday 14th June. There will be no other mid-morning services at either church in the parish that day. The idea of combining our congregations on one occasion was championed by Emlyn Jones, whose anniversary of death falls the day before, and whose presence is sorely missed at evensong.
Emmanuel’s design is based on the chapel of the former War Memorial Hospital in Wrexham, which still stands even if it is not used for that purpose. I am told that when the late George Leech was a patient in the hospital during the 1950s, he was thinking of a building to succeed the wood and corrugated iron church near where the butcher’s shop now stands, and the chapel gave him the idea for a brick-built church in the village.
Since being responsible for the parish I have come to realise that a chapel in a hospital complex depends on the surrounding buildings for facilities such as meeting rooms, a café and toilets, and that away from these it does not function as well. It is a tribute to the determination of members in the past to run a Sunday School in Emmanuel that classes were held in the tiny vestry and store-room opposite.
Over the years there have been several proposals to extend the building so as to provide additional accommodation. The latest of these fell foul of the credit crunch in August 2007 when the developer who had offered to buy the land behind the church, which would have funded the project, effectively withdrew.
If that had been the end of the matter then the fiftieth anniversary celebrations would have been over-shadowed by the sadness of the prospect of closure. The congregation had decided, with regret, that there was no prospect of growth or even of survival without the basic facilities which it had had to do without for so long.
Quite recently however our architect, in conjunction with a local builder, has identified another scheme which would be funded by selling most of the car-park for housing association purposes. The existing building would have the benefit of a kitchen and toilet either side of the porch, and a moveable partition, which would give the option of dividing off a proportion of the worship area for meetings of various kinds.
Emmanuel has at least two remarkable architectural features. One is that it is the ‘wrong way round’ – that is, the altar is at the west end and the entrance is towards the east. This is due to the site being to the west of the adjacent road. During construction of the extension the main entrance will be out of use and the altar will be moved to the ‘proper’ end, with people entering via the vestry. The other striking feature is the window behind the altar which includes a representation of Jesus as The Good Shepherd.
Its worship also has two notable features. It is two and a half years since the style of all-age worship which was developed at the parish church was tried at Emmanuel. This has always been in the afternoon and has become known as Tea Time Praise. Also the form of non-eucharistic worship which has been developed from Church in Wales resources and used on the fourth Sunday morning each month was adopted in the equivalent form for the evening for the Archdeacon’s Visitation service in Bistre this year.
We are not so naïve as to think that a church’s problems can be entirely resolved by just providing better physical facilities but it has surprised me that the church has lasted as long with so few. Hand-in-hand with this must be the adoption of a growth strategy to inspire potential members with the privilege and the duty of responding to the love of God as demonstrated in Jesus Christ. Later in June I shall be making a presentation to the Diocesan Conference on just such a resource produced by the diocese of St David’s.
Yours sincerely
Martin Snellgrove