Newport Congregation Will Get New Church--729 Years Old

A small Anglican congregation in Corona del Mar has received preliminary approval from the Church of England to dismantle a 13th-Century village church in the English countryside and transplant it in Orange County.

The small church, hardly bigger than a typical Orange County ranch-style house, will become the oldest church in the Western Hemisphere, said the Rev. Samuel Scheibler, assistant pastor of the 64-member St. Matthew’s by-the-Sea.

“That was one of our criteria,” Scheibler said. “We wanted one built before 1500 to beat Puerto Rico. The Chapel of the Holy Virgin there was built by Christopher Columbus’ chaplain.”

The church, St. Bartholomew’s, is in the village of Covenham, about 130 miles north of London and near England’s eastern coast. William the Conqueror established the parish in 1086 and the church was built in 1257, Scheibler said.

Barbara Harrison, a member of the Covenham parish church council, said the villagers, by and large, are happy to see the church exported to California.

“We couldn’t raise the money (to restore the church). We were going to have to demolish it,” she said.

“There are strong feelings, particularly among some of the older people, that the church is part of the village. But most of the people are very happy because they were upset that the church was going to be demolished. They would rather (it be exported) than it be a heap of rubble.”

St. Bartholomew’s Gothic, cruciform (cross-shaped) architecture has remained unchanged except for repair of its limestone block walls in the 16th Century (common brick was used) and the addition of a large stained-glass window in 1852, Scheibler said.

The Church of England declared St. Bartholomew’s “redundant” in 1978, after parishioners in the farming village, population 253, had to decide which of its two churches to preserve. Covenham once was two even smaller villages, each with its own church, but nowadays the citizens cannot afford to operate both churches, Harrison said.

Donations From Congregation

Scheibler said he has no doubt that his congregation can raise the money for the admittedly expensive project. He said his church, though small, is “fairly representative” of well-to-do Corona del Mar. “Some are affluent, some middle class,” Scheibler said.

He said the estimated $35,000 necessary to dismantle the church and pack the pieces, plus the cost of shipping the crates to Southern California, has already been donated by his congregation.

He said foundations also have been contacted about helping pay for restoring the church, although negotiations are preliminary.

He added that preliminary contacts have been made for locating the church in either Newport Beach or Irvine, but he declined to elaborate, saying negotiations are at a sensitive stage.

“It is going to happen,” Scheibler said. “My dad was a builder; I know what it takes. I’ve been involved with the church all my life; I know what that takes. I believe within the next handful of years we’ll see this church in Southern California.”

Scheibler said he expects the actual dismantling to begin in the summer of 1987, using mainly volunteer labor of archeology students from the United States and the United Kingdom.

He said he did not know when restoration would begin or be completed.

He said that while money to bring the church to Orange County has been raised, money to pay the greater expense of buying land and restoring the building has not yet been found. “That is a matter of faith,” he said.

Scheibler said the project “makes no sense divorced from the theological reasons for doing it.”

“Because we are traditionalists, we believe that it’s important to communicate honestly and emphatically our roots in historic British Christianity. Therefore, this project is for us a sermon--literally a sermon in stone,” he said.

“It is a way to communicate to a very modern Southern California that there is integrity and dignity in the traditions of the church.”

Once restored, the old church will become the home of the St. Matthew’s by-the-Sea congregation, which, though formed in 1980, still has no church of its own.

But, Scheibler said, the idea of importing an old English church to the United States occurred to him before he became associated with St. Matthew’s.

He said that as part of his graduate studies in England in 1981, he came across many “historic English churches literally falling down among themselves.” He suggested to a friend, one of the commissioners who govern the Church of England’s “temporal affairs,” that “we might be able to remove a historic church and rebuild it in America and therefore save it for posterity.”

The commissioner’s response, Scheibler said, was that “it seemed like a highly likely idea but had never been tried before.”

After Scheibler joined St. Matthew’s in Corona del Mar, he proposed the idea seriously and was given a listing of the churches declared “redundant” by the Church of England.

Such a declaration has a legal effect in England, Harrison said. A church declared redundant must be restored for some use--”a store or a house, anything like that”--or be demolished.

Harrison said that the parish could not raise funds to restore the old church and that there was no demand to convert it to residential or commercial use.

“There are only a hundred houses in the village,” she said. “We have one shop. We have a pub. It’s a farming area. Mainly we grow oats and wheat.”

She said that last September, Scheibler appeared at the village and explained his mission, “but we just thought he was interested in old churches.” In Covenham, Scheibler said, he found what he was seeking.

Some of the churches he had seen were being torn down to make way for public housing or factories. “We wanted to establish a relationship between our parish and the community that originally had been a worshiping community of this church,” Scheibler said. “You can’t very well do that if you’re trying to relate to an industrial complex.”

But in Covenham, the community was planning to make a memorial park of the church site. About 140 graves exist on the church property.

And, Scheibler said, the church itself was beautiful, despite its derelict condition.

“The county architect there described it as the loveliest rural church in Lincolnshire (Lincoln County). He said it looks like a painting of the ideal, romanticized English parish church.”

Scheibler said that while negotiations ended “perfectly” last week and that the formal bestowal of the church to his congregation will be signed Feb. 10, he spent many “sleepless nights” arranging the agreement.

“There were some sticking points. To start with, the church is 729 years old, and you just don’t waltz in and say you’re going to take a bit of British heritage out of the country,” Scheibler said.

“And also we needed to be very sensitive to the local townsfolk. The formal name of the village is Covenham, St. Bartholomew’s. Without St. Bartholomew’s, it loses some of its identity.

“It’s one thing for it to be a British ruin, but it is something else for it to be an American church. You have this young, American clergyman coming in with what sounded to them like an impossible idea. There were people in the village at the time who weren’t quite sure what we were up to.”

But once the formal documents are signed, Scheibler said, virtually the entire church will be turned over to his congregation.

He said that among the stone blocks and slate roof tiles and stained-glass panes will be three steeple bells, one of them cast in 1632. The Americans will also take the brass plaque installed on the church floor in 1415 to mark the grave of Sir John Stanwyck, a knight.

The approximately 140 gravestones will remain behind, he said. But even without them, “we hope to reproduce the church as nearly like the original as possible.” He said that California building officials “did not see a real problem with the idea, in theory,” of erecting the church in a California earthquake zone.

Scheibler said that “the same type of trees, the same environment” of the original church would be duplicated in its new home.

“We were inspired by Disney,” he said. “We believe that we can exactly re-create anything in Southern California. We will duplicate Covenham in Southern California.”