ON 29 November 1989, the Revd Martin Hunt, Priest-in-Charge of the parish church of St Helens Parish Church, Merseyside, died suddenly while deep underground, visiting the colliery in Sutton. A parish priest with a special concern for the mining community, and his funeral was attended by more than 1000 people (Gazette, 29 December 1989).
His legacy proved its longevity at St Helens on Sunday, when the church was officially redesignated as St Helens Minster — a working out of his vision of a “seven days-a-week ministry”.
“The idea of being a minster is not new,” the Team Vicar, the Revd Rachel Shuttleworth, said last week. “It’s what the congregation have been praying about for 40-odd years.”
While the Church of England is home to many historic minsters (Beverley, Southwell, York), in recent decades parish churches have been elevated to this status.
The Being St Helens Minster plan describes a commitment to focusing “missional attention on the meeting point between church, commerce and community”. Minster churches, it suggests, “act as a mother church for a town or area”.
In the past few years, the number coming through the church’s doors has grown. St Helens Minster is open throughout the week, and hosts gatherings including the Laziz Project for asylum-seekers and refugees, a café, and a foodbank. An operations and events manager runs an arts-partnership scheme. The numbers in church having “fallen off a cliff edge” after Covid, in Ms Shuttleworth’s words — they tumbled from about 200 in 2017 to 35 by the time of her arrival in 2020 — have doubled.
Central to the church’s mission is hospitality. A vision statement sets out a commitment to being “God’s family at the heart of St Helens”. The women who run the Costa Coffee next door were something of an inspiration, Ms Shuttleworth said.
“They know all their regulars by name and order, and, if someone has not been in, you can hear them commenting to one another: ‘I’ve haven’t seen her in a while.’ They wouldn’t call it that but they have the most phenomenal pastoral ministry.”
SITUATED in the heart of the town centre, the church building celebrates its centenary this year. Its predecessor was destroyed by a fire believed to have been caused by the fusing of electric wires (News, 8 December 1916).
Stepping inside you are greeted by the huge east window, presented by local benefactors, including Sir David Gamble of the chemical-manufacturing family. The Gamble Institute in the town was established “for the purpose of assisting our people to make themselves equal or superior to those countries where technical education has been an inspiration for a substantial number of years”.
It is one of several reminders in the church of the town’s rich industrial heritage. The area was once rural, comprising four small settlements (St Helens takes its names from the small chapel of St Elyn, around which the new town coalesced). Demand for coal led to the creation of the Sankey Canal, England’s first industrial canal, in 1757. The town’s original motto was, “From the Earth, Light”.
In the following century, the first glass factory was opened, financed in part by William Pilkington — a name that, as the council’s heritage paper notes, became synonymous with glass production.
Meanwhile, the Liverpool to Manchester railway line served as the prototype for railways globally. In 1829, the Rainhill Trials were held to the south-west of St Helens to test locomotive designs, with George Stephenson’s Rocket the winner. A short walk from St Helens Minster stands the landmark Beecham Building, the first factory in the world constructed to manufacture medicines.
Today, Pilkington is the town’s only remaining large industrial employer. The Sutton Manor colliery closed in 1991. About 43 per cent of the population live in the top 20 per cent most deprived areas in England. “It is a place that really struggles with aspiration and hope for the future, because there is this prevailing narrative that our glory days are behind us,” Ms Shuttleworth said. “There is enormous pride at being from St Helens, but it’s often related to things from the past.”
The Love St Helens campaign — which she launched last year to “champion what is good about St Helens” — was swiftly embraced by the last council, which, in its long-term strategy, described the town’s greatest asset as “the spirit and strength of our close-knit community”.
“Social media just only ever hears the bad,” Ms Shuttleworth said. “It breaks my heart. Actually, the people of St Helens are fantastic. They’ve got creativity, resilience, loyalty, and pride, and are hard-working.” Next door, the children from the church school are rehearsing for their Pentecost service, belting out “This little light of mine”.
THE minster-making ceremony on Pentecost Sunday began with a reading from Jeremiah: “Seek the peace and prosperity of the city in which I have placed you.”
Running in parallel with the transformation of the church is an £80-million bid to make the town centre a “vibrant and energetic destination”, delivered by the council and the English Cities Fund. A Hilton hotel, new market hall, town houses and flats, and a high-end transport interchange will take the place of the demolished shopping centre.
Residents seemed “relieved and excited”, Ms Shuttleworth said. “St Helens town centre has been declining over the past couple of decades. I think they had often been promised that something would happen, and it didn’t deliver. I remember vividly walking round the town centre the day when you could first hear the [construction] noise and it felt different. Everyone was saying, ‘Can you hear it? It’s happening!’”
She felt relieved, too, she said, to hear the new leader of the council, now in Reform UK control, reassure people that they had no plans to “burn down any initiatives”. Mirroring other areas in the Red Wall, the shift in St Helens from Labour to Reform has been “very dramatic”.
There is, Ms Shuttleworth said, “a real sense of being left behind — a sense of, ‘People don’t understand us. People in power don’t think we matter’”. But social media were also playing a part in shaping politics, she suggested. “When you talk to people, a lot of the things that they tell you are things they have read on Facebook, and, when you can challenge it with fact, it all tumbles apart.”
A “massively important” contribution made by the Church in areas of deprivation was continuity, she said. While projects might end after two years, the Church stayed. “We don’t chase after the new thing and tell people they aren’t welcome or they have to look a certain way to be here,” she said. “We just stay and sit in the muck with you.
“I’ve said it so many times this week until I am blue in the face: we are a safe place. I don’t care whether you voted for Labour or Reform or somebody else entirely, or whether you forgot it was election day and didn’t vote at all. You’re welcome, you’re loved: come in. You are safe here.”
THERE are challenges in such a ministry. ”You sit straddling across nostalgia and history, but also we are talking about a future,” she said. “We are preaching about a future hope the world has, that this is not the end. And that gives us an enormous hope to offer.”
There was “an awful lot of latent faith”, in St Helens, she suggested, describing as “emblematic” a man who had come in recently and told her: “I don’t know what I’m doing. I’ve been reading my Bible . . . and they keep talking about prayer and I don’t know what it means. I don’t know where to start. How do I pray?”
“It’s exciting,” she said. “It’s happening gently, slowly, and quietly, but it’s good.”
The service on Sunday featured both new words to “Praise, my soul, the King of heaven” by a local poet, Marian Cleworth (“Reaching out to souls fast sinking / there, beyond our walls of stone”) and a new poem by Jeanette Foster: “St Helens town, lift your voices high. Let pride ring out across the sky. / For in this church your story lives. In all it holds and in all it gives.”
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