Churches are apparently turning into mosques. Who knew?! Well, I did, for one. Not least because a little walk up the main road from our church and you run into at least one. Notably, an old Methodist building that is now a mosque. That is besides the swathes of purpose built mosques that were never churches that predominate in the area. In a majority-Muslim part of town, Muslim people needing space to worship and a dearth of Christians in the same place is likely to lead to this.

The political party Reform insist this is an incendiary problem. The Times report that the party plan to promote a policy whereby this is banned in planning law. The proposed change to planning law will prevent Christian places of worship from being adopted as Islamic ones.

Church leaders appear to have largely suggested this is a non-problem. It is worth noting, ‘Analysis by The Times has found that it is extremely rare for churches to become mosques, accounting for less than 0.09 per cent of the 47,000 churches active in the 1960s.’ It is frequently the case that former churches that become mosques have often been turned into something else in between. For example, St Mark’s Church in Peckham ‘closed for Christian worship in 1965 before going through an assortment of identities. “It was used for dealing scrap metal,” Gunay Veli said. “Then it was a pickled onion factory. I used to run a fish and chip shop and bought my pickled onion there. In 1980, we bought it and turned it into a mosque.”

The Times go on:

Heritage groups have repeatedly highlighted the lack of government funding to keep historic churches from ruin. [Professor Linda] Woodhead [head of religious studies and theology at King’s College London] said “the future of Christian churches” was a “very serious problem” and that it “would be a great loss” if many more closed.

However, she said, the “real issues threatening Christian heritage are not being addressed by Reform” and that this made people “suspicious” that the party was “trying to create polarisation and hostility in society between a majority and a minority for political purposes”.

There are a few problems worth thinking about specifically here.

If the closure of churches is a problem to us, it bears asking why. Why is it a problem to us? From a Christian perspective, surely it is irrelevant whether a church closes and becomes a block of flats in the service of the almighty pound, a supermarket providing an altar for materialism, a community centre promoting liberal secularism or a mosque in the worship of Allah. None of these things are any worse from a gospel perspective than any of the other things. The issue, I would have thought, is not what the building becomes, but the loss of the church that once existed there in the first place.

The question then becomes, why did that church cease to exist? Whatever the many possible answers – and there are many – the only one that really matters is this: because people stopped going. It is the same phenomenon that leads to locals bemoaning the degradation of the high street. Every time a high street chain store closes, there is an outpouring of grief whilst ignoring the elephant in the room: it closed because nobody used it, including those bemoaning its loss. The same is true of the local church. Why did it shut? Fundamentally because nobody used it and people stopped going.

Even those who would argue that it is a tragedy on heritage grounds have a problem here. Many want to maintain our heritage whilst having dismantled the framework it provided. Here in Oldham, for example, we have a surfeit of cotton mills. All of them speak to the history and heritage of our town, but most of them are derelict and now stand as testament to the failure of the cotton industry. The plethora of empty, dilapidated church buildings serves only to do that same so far as church hegemony is concerned. The empty derelict buildings are testament only to the fact that nobody goes to them anymore. They want to keep the buildings without maintaining any aspect of what made them useful and valuable.

The other problem on heritage grounds is that those who want to keep our church buildings – much like high street shoppers desperate to save Debenhams – don’t ever go to them. They are horrified at the thought the church is no more and its buildings are liable to go with it, but they have no intention of actually going to church themselves. They mourn the loss but seem to have no concern for doing anything to stem the possibility. In fact, heritage folk insist on keeping these buildings but then refuse to lift a finger to manage or maintain them once they are listed. In this sense, they are worse than the high street shoppers who bemoan the loss of chain store they never patronise because at least these shoppers are not insisting somebody takes on the work of maintaining a monument to a shop nobody is using!

Which brings me round to the Christian position here. The church is fundamentally its people. Long before the building becomes untenable, the church as a gathering became untenable. Long before the building was dilapidated, the church gathering became dilapidated. Which means, if you want to save church buildings, and if you don’t want to see them turned into mosques, the answer is to go to church. If you don’t want to go to church, you don’t want to keep the building because a church building is nothing if it doesn’t have a church in it.

If you are content not to go to church, if you are happy not to have a functioning church in the building, it begs the question why you have a problem with anything else being there (whatever it may be). Of course, you may argue that you would object to it being turned into, say, a brothel. But that isn’t really because a church building shouldn’t become a brothel so much as you would rather a brothel just didn’t exist at all. Which begs the question, if you would tolerate a church building becoming a block of flats but you wouldn’t countenance it being permitted to become a mosque, what is your actual problem here? Clearly neither is any more holy than the other. Neither is going to do much for the souls of the people. Why would the one be okay and not the other? Might it be that you just object to the existence of mosques altogether?

If the church isn’t in the building at all, there is no Christian heritage to protect. Holding onto old buildings won’t do anything to protect Christian values (if that is, indeed, what you are after doing). If you want to protect Christian heritage, the solution is to be a Christian, act like a Christian and go to church. If you don’t want to do that, a building with no Christians in it will be about as useful to the preservation of the Christian faith as being filled with non-Christians. It doesn’t matter if those non-Christians are worshipping Allah, Vishnu or at the altar of materialism, if they aren’t worshipping Jesus they are all fundamentally in the same boat.

By the same token, if we want the right to be able to meet freely and worship our God according to our conscience, we have to accept that others must be permitted to do the same. The loss of a church may be a sad thing inasmuch as it speaks to church decline. However, more likely, it speaks only to the decline of nominal Christianity. Nominal Christians may keep a building open, but they aren’t doing anything for the gospel and it seems that Muslims can just as easily keep the building open and not serve the gospel too. Which means the issue is not that churches might become mosques, it’s that those who bemoan it typically aren’t Christians themselves.

If you want to save our Christian heritage and you want to keep our churches open, the answer must lie in making true disciples. The answer isn’t to stop mosques from using church buildings – they are no more detrimental to them than any other non-Christians in the building might be, including nominal Christians who don’t actually believe the gospel – the answer is to make disciples who really love Jesus for whom a place to meet in which to worship him according to their Christian faith actually matters.