The New Church on Cranbrook Road, Redland, may be Bristol’s smallest, but it’s not the most apathetic by any means. It’s distinctly possible you’ve never heard of the New Church. Yet for exactly a century,this tiny place of worship has stood quietly in Cranbrook Road on the bank of the old Cran Brook. The congregation these days is tiny — the New Church has a national membership of just 1,412 and Bristol is one of only 32 congregations. Services in Cranbrook Road attract an average of four to six people.
The New Church was started in 1783 by followers of philosopher and mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg who claimed to have talked with angels and visited Heaven, and who wrote some very long books. The Bristol church — the New Jerusalem Temple — began in 1792, the year that the president of the national New Church Conference was a Bristol layman called Anthony Hunt. But the early years were plagued with dissension and heavy debt. In 1819, a new church was opened in Silver Street but a breakaway group was founded in the Horsefair. The church was destroyed in the Bristol Riots of 1831 and the New Church in Bristol was effectively moribund for many years.
It was revived following the success of the church in Bath and lectures in the Princes Street Assembly Rooms in Bristol which attracted around a thousand people. The Bristol society first met behind what is now the Colston Hall, then in rented premises in the Triangle, Clifton, and the Oddfellows Hall, Rupert Street. But although the congregation shrank by half, the New Church’s first permanent home was opened in Terrell Street (now the site of Bristol Royal Infirmary) in 1878.
It was something of a poor relation in a city full of great religious buildings — ‘a small plain iron building in an almost unknown and uninviting street in the midst of a great city filled with noble churches’, as one minister put it rather glumly. A stone frontage was added later but it was still what another minister called disparagingly ‘a tin church with a false facade’.
Still, there was a minor scandal in 1890 when the minister, the Revd C.H. Wilkins, was forced to resign for taking spiritual comfort to a Mrs Davis rather too often, for too long and at what were called ‘unseemly hours’.
The church planned a new building in Terrell Street and built up close links with the new Church in Australia. But the infirmary needed the land to expand and the church was sold. The money was used to build a new church in Cranbrook Road, near the new suburb of Bishopston, and it opened on Christmas Day 1899.
The church flourished in the early years of the twentieth century and even the Sunday school had 75 pupils in 1917. But that year, the minister, the Revd G. Meek, was accused of taking a much bigger salary than he was due. His salary was suspended amid allegations of unpaid bills and broken promises and by the time the row was settled, the war and the drift of families out of Bristol had seriously affected church attendances. A new minister , the Revd William Bates, seems to have disapproved of women’s activities, especially the flourishing Girl Guides which welcomed members from other churches.
A letter from the time comments; ‘It is unfortunate Mr Bates does not look with a more kindly eye upon the Girl Guide movement, otherwise with tact many of these girls might have been brought in’.
By 1939 the church was thriving, only to be hit by another war. Even the once wealthy Bath congregation was forced to sell its fine premises in Henry Street (now restored by Bath University) and meet in a converted telephone exchange.
The Bristol New Church now shares a minister with Bournemouth, but still houses a library dating back to 1790 and the magic lantern which once attracted big crowds.
As Neil Marchant comments in Like a Great River Flowing — The Story of the Bristol Society of the New Church: ‘It is at time dispiriting to be so few but the church continues to be enthusiastic as it faces the centenary of worship in Cranbrook Road. It is not clear for how long the Bristol Society will survive, but we can be thankful for the rich heritage of the church and for its influence on the city of Bristol’.
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