By Richard Cleaves, at the launch of 'A Brixton Chapel' on 23rd February 2024

Twelve years ago Alan wrote a primer for the Congregational Federation.

In it, he stated, ‘God’s people meet in the household of faith.’ It’s a wonderful image of the church that has its roots in the New Testament. But it begs the question, what is the nature of the household of faith?

In response to that question Alan wrote his primer, called The Nature of the Household of Faith – some principles of Congregationalism. In sixty-odd pages Alan explored Congregational principles and set them in the context of Congregational history. Simple, accessible, thought-provoking, it is a good place to find the beginnings of an answer.

There is, however, another place we can turn to in order to find a response to that question. ‘In Congregationalism,’ Alan tells us, ‘each church is the microcosm of the macrocosm’, each church is ‘the smallest representation of the entire’. So, if we want to know what the Church is, we can go to one local church and there we will find the entire church in microcosm.

What we will discover is ‘a household of faith’. That certainly is what I discovered when I first encountered Trinity Congregational Church, Brixton. I had met Alan Argent and Yvonne Evans and a crowd of people from the church in the meetings prior to the establishment of the Congregational Federation in the early 1970s, but when I was training for ministry and doing some research I came to Trinity for the first time. My research took me to the British Museum’s reading room, and I needed somewhere to stay in London. Trinity, Brixton, was the place to go.

I was welcomed into what felt like an extended family. Meal times were an occasion for in-depth conversation on what everyone had done that day – whether it was research, or the day’s work. Everyone was interesting and everyone was interested. The most natural thing in the world was to share in prayer at the table, in meals together, in worship on Sundays with a Bible reading that was itself a form of preaching, and a sermon that engaged with each one of us and prompted questioning out loud and deep within. I was welcomed to ‘a household of faith’.

In retirement, I have found myself again doing research. Coming to an international conference as I was beginning my research, where better to find accommodation than in Trinity’s household of faith, this time staying with Lesley Dean – for which many thanks! – but being made to feel at home by Alan Argent and Jane Giscombe in the extended church family. Vigorous debate, discussion and argument were as ever the order of the day. With that warm welcome five years ago and fifty years ago I glimpsed the nature of the church as truly, the household of faith.

Therefore, to understand the nature of the household of faith, we need to know a local church. But it’s not just those who belong now who make up that household of faith. It’s those who have gone before that continue to be part of that household of faith. To understand the nature of the household of faith, let’s get to know the people who have belonged to the church in earlier generations. We can do that in conversation.

I had encountered this household of faith before ever meeting anyone here. My father and his two sisters, Susan and Clarice, grew up in Abersychan, south Wales. Their aunt and uncle could not have children and so it was that in her teens Aunty Clarice moved to Dulwich to grow up with Aunty Emmy and Uncle Percy. Moving from her home church in Abersychan, she made a home here at Trinity, Brixton. In conversation she would tell of the fun times she and so many young people had here in the 1930s. It was wonderful to meet people who had known Aunty Clarice when first I came here and to hear from them the same stories. Through those conversations, I caught a glimpse of the nature of the household of faith here at Trinity in the decade leading up to the second world war.

When Alan published his edition of The Angel’s Voice, that remarkable magazine published 1910-13, he gave a voice to the young men who had belonged to Trinity’s Bible Class. We felt as if we were meeting them as they argued about politics and women’s rights, teasing each other, their sisters and their girlfriends. Through their eyes we glimpsed this household of faith knowing what they at the time did not know, that many of them would not survive the ravages of war.

Now we look forward to Alan’s history of the church, A Brixton Chapel: Gathered to a Quiet Independence. In its pages we will meet the people who have shaped this particular household of faith and so we will find in microcosm the story of the entire church.

As we are ourselves ‘gathered to a quiet independence’ in Trinity Chapel, a Congregational Church, we may return to that quotation from Alan. Here it is that ‘God’s people meet in the household of faith, where the eternal meets the temporal, in the weekly round of worship and witness’. As we meet the people who have made up this household of faith since 1828, may we too ‘grow into Christian freedom, maturity and wisdom’.

For this reason let us bow our knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth, including Trinity Chapel Brixton, and every household of faith, takes its name. As we encounter this household of faith today, and through the pages of Alan’s history, may God grant, according to the riches of his glory, that we may be strengthened in our inner being with power through his Spirit, and that Christ may dwell in our hearts through faith, as we are being rooted and grounded in love.

May we have the power to comprehend, with all the saints that make up this household of faith, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that we may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, to him be glory in the church in the household of faith, and in Christ Jesus to all generations, for ever and ever. Amen.