Further to your article about obtaining a faculty for a lavatory and servery, I would like to add that, in negotiations with the DAC and others, such as the Church Buildings Council, English Heritage, and the Victorian Society, do not be disheartened by an initial discouraging response. We submitted our application in September 2009, and received the faculty in February 2012. It can take a long time.

Admittedly, we had to move the font to the south-east of the nave, and install a gallery. We had much correspondence with various parties, and held several meetings with them in order to pursue our plans. The DAC secretary was extremely helpful in all this.

I would suggest that one person needs to be responsible for dealing with the correspondence, drafting responses, and so on, in conjunction with the incumbent and churchwardens.

With regard to fund-raising, we found that involving someone other than a PCC member in this was beneficial. We asked a local businessman with a connection to the church to do this for us. It worked very well. Perseverance is the name of the game.

YOU have a successful project behind you; so this is encouraging. It can take a great deal of time to gain all the necessary permissions for works in churches. The various bodies concerned have several strands of interest.

Preventing unnecessary or unwarranted alterations to a building that will usually outlast the current custodians is important. Liturgical and sacramental change is here to stay, and fitting the building to our generation may be short-sighted. Permanent changes for perfectly good short-term gains have to be offset by what the next genera-tion may wish for in their life of worship.

Some agencies are concerned that historic buildings, listed to protect the nation’s heritage, should not be altered lightly. Yet church buildings have never been frozen in one era, and most of them, in their various nooks and crannies, hold the story of the building through a variety of architectural, liturgical, social, and historical changes of the past. The challenge is often to allow the present generation to change and develop the building without wiping out those stories from the past.

The strongest concern of others may be the preservation of one predominant period of history, or the work of a particularly notable architect. This concern has to be offset by the wisdom that says that the best way to preserve an ancient building is to keep it in the use for which it was designed.

On this subject, the advice of the diocesan advisory committee and the decision of the Chancellor may give the best way to tie together preservation and the current need to add facilities.

All the issues of the quality of the building and its conservation and preservation also make the cost of building works in church buildings very high in comparison with less notable buildings. The care involved in marrying together the conservation of the past story, the needs of the present, and giving a worthy building to future generations takes great skill and expertise.

As you say, it takes time to do it well, and the church congregation and PCC, as custodians of the building, bear the brunt of working this out from day to day.

Send issues and questions to maggiedurran@virginmedia.com