Living Stones Live Celebrates Church Buildings and Those Who Care for Them

The social media influencer Inspector Organ, was one of a number of inspiring speakers at the first Living Stones Live event at Abbotsbury church in Newton Abbot recently.

The day-long conference was organised by the diocese Church Buildings Team to bring together people who care for their church buildings, including clergy and lay volunteers, to get inspiration, guidance and support from a range of experts.

Other speakers included Douglas, a trainee LLM from Okehampton who created the Devon Churchland website and Instagram account, which features beautiful photos of Devon’s churches.

Rev’d Andrew Thomas also spoke about how to make church buildings welcoming and invitational and spoke about how money raised from Champing (camping in churches) had helped build connections and raise money in one of the Dartmoor churches in his mission community.

Inspector Organ, who is a professional musician, showcases church organs by visiting churches across the UK and making a video of him playing the organ at each church he goes to, explained that people all over the world are interested in historic English churches and social media videos about aspects of church architecture or history can generate a lot of interest.

He had some advice for churches who want to start telling the story of their buildings using social media. He said “Don’t try to follow a formul, be authentic and be yourself. I try to bring attention to churches because it breaks my heart to see them closing down. Most of all I love pipe organs – about nine a week are getting scrapped. That’s really sad.

“It’s important to be on social media because that’s where people are now. It’s fun to find your own community.. let it be you, be authentic, be consistent, engage the community and have fun! It will benefit your church building.”

Louise Brown, Church Buildings Officer, said afterwards “We were thrilled to welcome those looking after church buildings in the diocese to Living Stones Live. We know that looking after these buildings can be a challenge as well as a privilege, so our aim was that everyone would leave feeling inspired about the opportunities offered by their church building.

“We had some wonderful feedback from attendees, everyone said they had learnt something new and many came to tell us about the actions they were going to take back in their parish as a result. Thank you to all for an inspiring day!”

You can watch an interview with Inspector Organ below and we will be sharing more interviews from Living Stones Live in our Roots & Shoots newsletter in the coming weeks.