All Saints Church First Female Vicar

Contacts at All Saints Vicar The Rev’d Clair Jaquiss 928 0717 [email protected] 07843 375494 Clair is in the parish on Tuesdays, Wednesdays & Sundays; or leave a message Associate Priest The Rev’d Gordon Herron 928 1238 [email protected] Reader Mary Babbage 980 6584 [email protected] Reader Emerita Vivienne Plummer 928 5051 [email protected] Wardens June Tracey 980 2928 [email protected] Nigel Glassey [email protected] 980 2676 PCC Secretary Caroline Cordery 980 6995 [email protected] Treasurer Michael Sargent 980 1396 [email protected] Organist Robin Coulthard 941 2710 [email protected] Administrator & Elaine Waters 980 3234 Hall Bookings [email protected] . ServicesServices Fourth Sunday of month: Eucharist Together at 10am All other Sundays: Eucharist at 10am (with Children’s Groups) Sunday Evenings: Evening Prayer at 6.30pm Tuesdays at 9.30am Eucharist (also on Holy Days - announced) All Saints Hale Barns with Ringway Hale Road, Hale Barns, Altrincham, Cheshire WA15 8SP Church and Office Open: Tuesday, Wednesday & Thursday 9am - 1pm Tel: 0161 980 3234 Email: [email protected] www.allsaintshalebarns.org Visible and Invisible... ‘So where is All Saints?’ they often ask me. It’s not just the stranger wondering where the parish church is, but often a long-term resident of the area who has never really registered where the parish church of Hale Barns actually is. I’ve often wondered at its invisibility. All Saints is a classic building of its time, designed to blend in with the new structures, domestic and commercial, that were springing up around it. It made a statement: a new church for a new age. ‘Your church is moving with the times ...’ was the heading on the appeal booklet that invited people to contribute funds and furnishings fifty years ago. Today, as a building, it seems hidden. ‘Where?’ they ask. ‘Between Booths and Ian Macklin, the Estate Agents,’ I reply. ‘Oh I know,’ they nod and smile, ‘the one with the big tower and the rose window.’ ‘No, that’s Holy Angels!’ Sir Nikolaus Pevsner has been described as ‘one of the most learned and stimulating twentieth-century writers on art architecture.’ His project to comment on every building of architectural importance in every English county must have been a work of love. He had a knack of being able to sum up a building in a brief phrase or two. In the Cheshire edition, there is All Saints: ‘Quiet, small and literally inturned ... a seamless white interior secretly lit’ alongside our neighbour, Holy Angels: ‘Boldly confrontational’. However, even when you go to look up Hale Barns in the index, it says ‘see Hale.’ Not only is All Saints invisible, but also it seems is Hale Barns. Some people do spot it to be fair. ‘Why does your church look like a fire station?’ someone once asked. It wasn’t very flattering, but at least they’d noticed it. I wonder if the invisibility of the building is an asset rather than a liability, a strength rather than a weakness. It is a haven of peace, even when the traffic on Hale Road is streaming by. It’s a place to come into unnoticed if that is how you might feel: to light a candle, pray quietly and go back unseen into daily life. It’s a place to go out from, changed by its quiet calm. Whether visible or invisible it is still a sign of God’s presence in the whole community – not just for the people who worship within its white walls week by week. The bible is full of quotations about how God is not to be contained in a building or in a place. Maybe that is the strength and the sign that this particular building offers. An invisible building has no walls to keep people out or to hold them (or God) in. It demonstrates by its very invisibility the way in which God is present, not just in a building but in the whole of people’s lives – inside and outside. Those who go out comforted, inspired or challenged by what goes on inside are the ones who make the goodness of God truly visible in the world. Clair Jaquiss Vicar, All Saints Hale Barns with Ringway All Saints Church, Hale Barns, 1967 - 2017 Life is full of surprises! In the summer of 1965 a young, newly married couple and their even younger baby left Hale Barns for ever. They left to seek their fortune in Birmingham in the Midlands with a new employer, British Gas. Leaving Hale Barns, they left behind a complex of five church buildings that had been much the same for very many years. At Ringway, close to the Romper pub, a farm or two away from the south end of the airport runway, stood the parish church. Surrounded by the graves of the Ringway villagers and the open fields of farmland, this church was much loved by its parishioners. Built of red brick with a little steeple and several elegant gothic stained glass windows, the building admirably met the needs of the scattered farm communities for whom it had been provided. Down the road from St. Mary’s in the heart of the bustling village of Hale Barns was another church, St. Paul’s. More of a mission church than a church proper, this building, built of wood, black and white, lay parallel to the main street, raised on stilts above its small plot. Principal services were held in the main church and St. Paul’s offered supplementary ones. Immediately adjacent, the old village church school built of brick with a slate roof, wrapped in creeper, had educated Hale Barns villagers up to the end of the Second World War when Elmridge School, on its present site, was constructed. Elderly men, as late as the 1970s would occasionally stop and reminisce “I was educated there” they would say. The fourth of the five church related buildings was the admirable vicarage, down its own short drive, once the home to gentlemen farmers. It lived an old-fashioned life, spacious lawns, a patio, iron gates across the drive, with bowling alleys and donkey rides for summer garden fetes. A large rambling building, vicars and their families found it difficult to keep warm. The principal bedroom hung over a void, perhaps meant once for farm wagons. The fifth of the church’s five buildings, the Church Hall was built in 1933. It served both the church and the village community. Regularly used by the Sunday School and for church meetings and events, it could be hired by the Women’s Institute, for birthday parties, for amateur dramatics for auctions or for anything else of a respectable nature. A coffee lounge was added in the early 1970s. Little changed, it is busy to this day. Our young family thrived in Birmingham; a second child was born, this time a son. After ten years the family moved again, this time to Cardiff. Meanwhile, back in Hale Barns, whirlwind changes had been taking place. The vigorous vicar, Canon Cox, decided it was a nonsense to have the principal church, St. Mary’s, out of the village where almost nobody lived. With tireless energy and willing church authorities, all was to change. And so it was, our family, now on the brink of being middle aged, returned in 1977 to find everything had changed. The old Hale Barns village street had gone, replaced by The Square of nearly twenty shops backed up by a car park. The mission church had gone. The red brick Ringway church of St. Mary was closed, about to become an architect’s office. Standing proudly in the middle of Hale Barns now stood the new parish village church. Built of cream coloured bricks with curves in every direction, “All Saints”, as it was called, oozed modernity. All windows were clear glass of regular rectangular shape. No fussiness anywhere. Everyone could clearly see the altar, and the celebrant taking the service could clearly see everyone in return. A truly modern church. But flat roofs have their problems and those who built the building proved to be better designers than builders. A supplementary pitched roof was eventually required and here and there waterproofing had to be improved. Nevertheless, it was a fine much loved home for Hale Barns worshippers. As to our family, their son sang in the choir, their daughter was confirmed and on a glorious spring day, she married there. Vicars came and went for the 1967 church. Tom Griffiths, who used to speak of “for your spiritual exercise this week…” served the community for 18 years and was greatly loved. His dear wife, Mavis, ran a young people’s club, much enjoyed by teenagers. Tom moved regretfully to the Wirral, and was followed by Rev. Bernard Gribbin, a Yorkshireman. Bernard transferred to Hale Barns from Chester Cathedral, where he had been precentor, with a passion for music. He managed the church finances with considerable skill. Stained glass was installed in the church’s north windows, designed by a Japanese designer with a strange mystical look about them. Another donor upgraded the electronic organ to the fine instrument that is still in use today. Father Bernard was followed by Father Simon Marsh in 1996. He brought to the church’s worship a fine sense of family, of togetherness, of love – in the best Christian sense – for one another. From time to time, all the church congregation would hold hands together, forming a huge circle round the pews. Father Simon and his wife Jilly were great “tidiers-up” at the vicarage.

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