SIR John Betjeman once remarked of St Mark’s, Swindon, that “its achievement lay in catholicising a parish, not merely a congregation”. Eighty years after Benjamin Britten’s Festival Te Deum was performed within the church, marking its centenary, the late Poet Laureate’s accolade has fresh impetus with the assistance of a £250,000 innovation grant from the Church Commissioners.
A summary of the project published in the newest report from the Strategic Investment Board (News,16 May) records that the church’s congregation, which, five years ago, stood at 15, has grown to greater than 70, with children — once absent entirely — in double figures. A weekly vigil mass at St Luke’s, one other church within the parish, with prayers and readings in Konkani (a Goan language), is attended by greater than 60, of which children form a big proportion.
But growth locally is measured not only in numbers, but in lay confidence, and “energetic love for neighbour”, the Rector of Swindon New Town, the Revd Toby Boutle, says. “It’s about growth which is organic and properly rooted in the neighborhood — our sense of being a parish church which is there to serve a specific parish, which is near the people throughout the community, there actively, visibly, loving and welcoming.”
He observes in an article for the see of Oswestry website that Betjeman’s tribute meant “not that everybody within the parish was sympathetic towards the externals of Catholic Christianity”, but that “the people of the parish as an entire have a more real conception of what the Church is, what she is meant to do, than is usually found elsewhere”.
Fr Boutle, a former barrister and one-time speechwriter to William Hague, was appointed because the incumbent of Swindon New Town in 2020, after an interregnum of greater than two years. At the time, the most important act of worship at St Mark’s was a Saturday evening vigil mass attended by about 15 to twenty people. The parish had been asking “How can we keep going with the limited resources that we’ve got?” he recalls. “There was, perhaps, a little bit of a siege mentality feeling”.
St Luke’s and St Saviour’s, the opposite two churches within the parish, were each plants from St Mark’s. In a review of a book marking the 1945 centenary, the Church Times noted that the church had “inspired a singular degree of affection and self-sacrificing service in the commercial population of Swindon”, where the Great Western Railway had “transformed a sleepy village into an excellent industrial town” (Books, 4 May 1945). The company had paid a part of the incumbent’s stipend, and allowed one in every of its factory rooms for use for church services.
St Saviour’s is one in every of the few remaining C of E churches built entirely by voluntary labour, constructed from wood in 1880 by railway staff on their time without work: “A bit army of carpenters, masons, gas-fitters, and labourers of every kind constructed a church to carry 100 and eighty in only over six months.” The Bishop of Bristol, Dr Forrest Browne, wielded a spade and signed himself on the list of volunteers as “bishop and excavator”.
SWINDON NEW TOWN PARISHGood Friday at St Saviour’s
The parish became a celebrated source of priestly vocations — estimated to number 100 within the century to 1975 — partly as a result of the work of the Revd the Hon. Maurice Ponsonby (fourth Baron de Mauley) who served for twenty-four years after his arrival in 1879.
It is a proud history recalled by Fr Boutle, who says that, even within the Sixties and Seventies, there have been “huge staff teams” and energetic service from Wantage Sisters. Since then, “the experience of most parishioners had been of clerical resources reducing yr on yr, but there being no corresponding increase in lay ministry,” he says. The congregations were “ready for change”.
The £4.8-million Innovation Fund was announced by the Archbishops’ Council in 2021: dioceses were invited to bid for projects that might “test the assumptions we make about how or why growth may or may not occur” (News, 12 October 2021). Grants of as much as £250,000 were made available for projects lasting up to a few years, which needed to support the national Vision and Strategy. It ended up 2022, when 18 grants were agreed.
Among the recommendations of the Chote review of the Council’s grants programmes was the necessity for “greater intentionality in ensuring that support is deployed across the total range of traditions” (News, 10 March 2022). Swindon can also be home to Pattern Church, a Holy Trinity, Brompton, plant opened in 2018 at a price of £6.45 million, including a £1.69-million strategic development grant (News, 21 December 2018).
Fr Boutle, who drafted the bid in 2022 with the support of the diocese of Bristol, recalls close working with the PCC. The idea had been to ask “If we had the resources, what might we have the opportunity to try?” quite than to think “We don’t have enough resources, we higher do a bit less.” The application was a “quite rigorous and difficult” process, he says, requiring “plenty of quite specialist work, that I believe as a parish priest one might just feel really not able to do. I believe plenty of it’s about confidence and capability.”
The innovation bid project was launched in February 2023. In addition to the grant of £250,000, the parish secured support from charities, including the Confraternity of the Blessed Sacrament and the Additional Curates Society. The total is near £400,000 for a five-year period, enabling the funding of a full-time Mission Priest, Fr Adam Burnham; a lay employee, Tom Dumbell; and project management support. Fr Tim Davies is serving his curacy within the parish.
The Strategic Investment Board summary says that the parish — the one Traditional Catholic parish within the archdeaconry — has been “exploring what good church growth looks like in a conventional Catholic context”, including “the centrality of mass in church growth”.
SWINDON NEW TOWN PARISHMessy Church activities
“The eucharist is at the guts of evangelisation, because evangelisation means incorporation into the energetic body of Christ, which we see at its fullness within the mass” observes Fr Boutle. “But also, the thought of us being actively sent out having been fed by the eucharist, and the thought of individuals being drawn into real community and real neighbourliness.”
The parish’s monthly Messy Church is eucharistic — a response to the Messy Church “mantra” that “This is church, this isn’t just preparation for church,” Fr Boutle says. “If it’s to be the fullness of what the church is, which means it has to have some relationship with the eucharistic community.” In addition to activities including crafts, there’s a 30-minute mass within the church with a children’s choir and young people serving and reading.
There is now a Sunday school in any respect three of the parish churches. “Messy Church has increased young people’s confidence and energetic participation within the liturgy,” Fr Boutle says. Asked about growing a children’s ministry from a standing start, he suggests that “consistency really matters. On the occasion when a family turns up, is there going to be something there for them? Those running our Sunday school were really ready for the proven fact that nobody might turn up.” Within the parish, resources and expertise are shared.
Growth has also come from increasing the Konkani mass from monthly to weekly (Goan children are likely to stay throughout the service, Fr Boutle says), and from welcoming refugees and asylum-seekers. Once home to a white working-class population, most of the younger congregation are from ethnic minority backgrounds, reflecting changing demographics in Swindon. Activities include a toddler group, youth group, and “welcome space”.
One of the hypotheses tested by the project is “whether by deliberately increasing clerical capability that was a way of accelerating lay capability,” Fr Boutle says. “I believe this has worked in practice.” It is very important to not see lay ministry as “a panic measure response to a discount in clergy numbers”, he says. Lay persons are currently giving a series of talks — “Grace at the bottom level” — on how their faith affects their every day life, including Gavin — a tattoo artist who began attending church after reading the Bible twice — who will probably be talking on “Ink and icon: Tattoos as testimony”.
SWINDON NEW TOWN PARISHCorpus Christi at St Mark’s, Swindon
“Sometimes, we’ve had loads of recent people at St Mark’s, and it hasn’t really been clear to me where they’ve come from,” Fr Boutle reflects. “I believe there’s this sense of a recent generation of individuals being fascinated about faith and wanting to return along and switch up, and wanting church which doesn’t seem like the world, that appears like they could imagine church to look.”
He senses “renewed confidence” within the Traditionalist wing of the Church. “A confidence based on a willingness to share our gifts — in saying not that we’re there to place to form some pure sect throughout the Church of England, but to share those charisms we have now more widely . . . which implies having good and warm relations with our brothers and sisters.” The Bishop of Bristol’s support was crucial in securing the innovation funding, he says.
The Church Times obituary for his Nineteenth-century predecessor opined that, “wholeheartedly Catholic in his teaching, Lord de Mauley was content to work slowly and patiently so that he might construct on a firm foundation” (Gazette, 23 March 1945). Eighty years later, the work continues.
