THE hundred visitors who descended on St Peter’s, Haveringland, in Norfolk, last month were far more than it usually has in a day. It is known locally as “the church in the fields” and stands in isolation on a former Second World War airfield.
The gathering was for a conference exploring “reimagining rural churches”, and the participants took hope from the story of St Peter’s, the Rural Dean of Ingworth and Sparham, the Revd Andrew Whitehead, said last week.
When he arrived in 2015, the church had no services and was locked unless he opened it. It was listed for transfer to the Norwich Diocesan Churches Trust.
Today, it is a festival church open every day, with a busy Friends of St Peter’s Church group that books community events. A £500,000 project has transformed the building through extensive repairs and improvements, including wheelchair access, an accessible toilet, heating, lighting, a small kitchen, and a new interactive “heritage hub” (Features, 27 June 2025).
The Community Changemakers conference was funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, which had contributed £300,000 to the church’s transformation. The conference was held against a backdrop of significant challenges for rural churches, Mr Whitehead said. As a Team Vicar in the Aylsham Team Ministry — which includes 17 parishes — he is responsible for nine churches, including St Peter’s.
The diocese of Norwich has 640 church buildings — the second-largest number in the country — and the third lowest ratio of population to church (1451). Of the 640, 90 per cent are Grade I or II* listed. Its Church Buildings Commission’s report, published in 2023, warned that the existing system of support for buildings “relies heavily on the goodwill and energy of a dwindling number of increasingly elderly volunteers, members of congregations who will eventually — within the next 10 years or so — no longer be able to sustain their efforts” (Features, 15 March 2024).
The diocese has since employed more church-care staff, established a minor-repairs grant scheme, and is expanding the Diocesan Churches Trust and developing a Culture and Heritage Partnership, including the local authority.
There was no “magic-wand solution” to the challenges set out in the commission, Mr Whitehead said. But an emerging theme at the conference was “the need to reimagine and to be radical in the sense of going back to our roots”.
“Most of our buildings are medieval,” he said. “In medieval times, our buildings — whether you accept the thesis of the marketplace in medieval churches or not — were much more a place of community in its broadest sense, and that’s how they were sustained. People who supported the church weren’t just the people who went to the church for worship.”
Soon after his arrival at St Peter’s, he had told a meeting in the parish: “Look, there is nothing happening in this church. It’s all but dead. If you want it to live, then we need you.” From this meeting emerged a church action group — now the Friends of St Peter’s Church — who “weren’t committed Christians, but who were committed to the building”.
The Government-commissioned Taylor Review, in 2017, called for “a cultural shift in attitudes towards church buildings such that communities realise they are resources they can use and congregations have the confidence to share space”, prompting some clergy to argue that many areas were already served by well-appointed community facilities (News, 22 December 2017).
The community-hub model was not right for all churches, Mr Whitehead said. St Peter’s was the only public building in the village, which had made applying for public funding easier. But festival churches (he serves as a trustee of the Association of Festival Churches) were encouraged to find their niche.
One church in his group was full of art exhibitors in August. “It’s not necessarily a huge fund-raiser, and I can’t point to souls converted, but it makes the building the heart for the community in a way that it might easily not be if it just sits there, preserved for liturgical worship.”
In 2024, the National Lottery Heritage Fund announced that it expected to allocate £100 million to places of worship over the next three years (News, 13 September 2024). At St Peter’s, the Heritage Fund money was secured on the third attempt, after the church team sat down with the funder and went through the application “almost line by line” to understand what was required.
Success had hinged on the churchwarden at the time — Nigel Boldero, an “absolute force of nature” with a background in project delivery, Mr Whitehead said. There was now a “greater expectation of professionalism” from the Lottery, he said, which could pose challenges — given skills shortages in some areas.
Mr Whitehead said that the Community Changemarkers conference had conveyed “a real sense of optimism, of hope”. He continued: “I feel really strongly that there is value in the small, value in these rural places, which might not be measurable in terms of numbers of people in church on a Sunday, but is measurable in the depth of commitment people have to tending their churchyards, to giving money to restoring the tower or the clock, or whatever it might be.”
There was, he said, a tendency to look down on, or make fun of, the rural. “We get Dibleyfied, basically,” he said. “I think there is life in the rural church, and I think, where you can find it and you can spread it, that that kind of thing is infectious.”
communitychangemakers.org.uk