Mother church

If I get into a regular pattern with this blog, there will be quite a few pictures of churches, I usually pop in if one is open when I am out and about. There is usually something of interest, even if in some cases it is what some clergy can do to an historic building. So, to start the ball rolling, here are some pictures of the church where I worship, St John the Baptist, Tuebrook, Liverpool.

Traditionally, the term "mother church" refers to the church in which you were baptised, and as I started attending as an adult, I was baptised here.

The amount of decoration in the church is similar to that in mediæval times. Not that it is mediæval: spending most of my time in church in Victorian buildings, when I visit a church that has been standing since the middle ages, I am struck by how plain it is. In the ancient church, the decoration was been painted over at the Reformation, and there is little or no visual evidence, apart from where restoration has uncovered fragments of a wall painting. This church is instead Gothic Revival - the conception of the architect, George Frederick Bodley, of what a 14th century English Gothic church looked like.

We cannot boast any of the scenes of the Last Judgment that adorned the walls in the middle ages, but we have the rather fine stencil work above: as I had been a bit wild with the incense on Easter Sunday, it nicely set off the light coming through the clerestory windows.

We will come back here again to look in more detail at other parts of the church, but for now, this is a taste of what I am used to in a church, to shed a bit of light on my comments on others.