Open Minded

I recently heard in a lecture the phrase ‘open minded space.’ I immediately started bouncing in my chair because as we prepare to put jazz, café, prayer, science and art in Malmesbury Abbey for our Holy Week Festival I felt that 'open minded' might describe something of our communal life in North Wiltshire.  We are certainly a space and a half, and there is something open minded about the approach we are taking in it. I dug deeper.

The philosopher Michael Walzer writes about ‘single minded’ spaces and ‘open minded’ spaces. A single minded urban space might be a car park, or if it’s an interior space perhaps a dentist’s surgery. These spaces have a clearly identified purpose, you don’t dance in either. There isn’t a flexibility of usage or tolerance from the dental nurse. An open minded urban space would have a more fluid usage, possibly like a park – where you might find resting, exercise, café, art and concerts – or if it’s an interior urban space our bookshops have been morphing for years to include café, IT, community and education (yes, I know that they still want to sell books, but they’re being nice and open minded about it.) The architect Richard Rogers buys into this (in Cities for a Small Planet) and I think if we turn back the clock and consider the ancient multiple usage of our Abbeys – prayer, education, hospitality, shelter, commerce, music – we might claim that there have long been open minded spaces with some pretty awesome architecture across our nation.

One reason why we might have lost this sense of open mindedness, around and in many of our church buildings, is the encumbrance of fixed single minded furniture redefining our space; and also the ground around our churches gradually becoming a single minded space totally focussed on burial. And, as if to reinforce this single mindedness, for many people their experience of church every other year or so is sadly a funeral, sitting in an uncomfortable pew. Death and furniture, that’s what the church is about. Oddly, when churches die and close their moribund buildings are often liberated to become art centres, sheltered housing, community centres and worship spaces, offices and restaurants, as if reclaiming their open mindedness.

Victoria Ward, director of Spark Knowledge, attempts to put open minded space in a 21^st century context and her insights challenge us to create space with

(i) places for prayer and reflection,

(ii) proximity between different usages,

(iii) ritual,

(iv) performance and  creative buzz,

(v) artefacts,

(vi) places to meet and even work, and

(vii) markets, both of ideas and things.

Ha! I enjoyed ticking all her boxes and want to buy her a latte near our 15^th century bibles and contemporary art as we listen to scientists speaking about God and Josh and the Wild singing blues and find a chapel to pray and a dance class to go to. I could then leave her to go on the internet and work near the tomb of the first king of England.

The church knows that we should be transformed by the renewing of our minds, the question is where?