What's in a Church - The Flavel Church

What's in a Church - The Flavel Church

Sitting on Mayor’s Avenue, just in front of the Arts Centre that takes its name, is the Flavel Methodist Church. It is named after a man who had a life so full of adventure, strife and flights from danger it could quite happily be made into a Hollywood movie.

John Flavel was born in Worcestershire in 1627. His father, Richard, was a preacher and young John was brought up in a very pious household. His father was a non-conformist, who preached dangerous heresies for the time about the nature of God. He was thrown into Newgate Prison, along with John’s mother, for holding an illegal act of worship in their house. They both apparently caught the Plague and died soon after.

John certainly showed promise, winning a scholarship to University College, Oxford and impressed so much in his studies that at the tender age of 23 he was chosen to be a minister in Diptford.  He was quickly ordained after impressing with his scholarship, but gained a greater reputation for his ability to talk to people and use persuasive language to get their support or cooperation.

He was soon to move to Dartmouth after his fame as a preacher and a diplomat spread. The people of the town apparently appealed to him to come and live and work in Dartmouth, despite Diptford being a much larger place. He came, it seems, because he felt it was where God wanted him to be.

He arrived in the town in 1656 and was noted for his “excellent gift of prayer, and was never at a loss in all his various occasions for suitable matter and words”.

He was very knowledgeable and well read on all ‘the controversies’ of the bible and was clearly a man who thought deeply about his beliefs and cared very much for his ‘flock’.

Then the Act of Uniformity 1662 was passed when Charles II became king. This act stated that anyone who did not use the Book of Common Prayer for worship could not hold a post either within the Church of England or the Government.

Flavel stopped preaching openly, but began to do so privately. A few years later the law was toughened yet again so that anyone who would not commit to using the Book of Common Prayer would have to move five miles at least from a place represented by a Member of Parliament. This forced Flavel to move to Slapton, but he still kept preaching.

Flavel was a Presbyterian – he believed that a church should be organized by an elected committee, not be governed by a single minister who was in turn governed by the hierarchy of the church.  But he was no lonely extremist. The act had caused a schism that completely split the church and the country, with 2,000 ministers cast out for not agreeing with the Book of Common Prayer.

Flavel left the South Hams, and had a rollercoaster life travelling the country and acquiring an even greater reputation for his religious writing and ability to offer advice and prayer in times of strife. He was forced into hiding many times, and was nearly shipwrecked once in a heavy storm, which it is said abated after Flavel offered a prayer for mercy up to God.

He later returned to Dartmouth and when the Act of Uniformity law was repealed in 1678 he started to worship in a chapel off Foss Street. He did so until his death in 1691.

This chapel was used throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, but in 1895, £1,200  - or the best part of £1million today - was spent to construct a new chapel. The rectangular church is made of snecked limestone with Bath Stone dressings. Snecking is a type of masonry that creates very strong structures. It does this by having parallel courses of stone that are then broken by larger stones – this breaking gives the wall its strength. The irregular patterns the stones create are also very pleasing to the eye. The building has a slate roof with pierced, crested ridge tiles and features two gabled porches.

The old chapel was used as a Sunday school until German bombers destroyed it in World War 2.  It was later rebuilt, but was knocked down in 2004 to make way for a new Arts Centre that would bear the name of the learned, pious man who had made Dartmouth his home and fought for the right to worship and preach the gospel - as he understood it.

First Published October 2013 By The Dart

see also http://pinterest.com/bythedarttv/dartmouth-churches/

Tags