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Our Church

As we approach our 200th birthday, Christ's church remains as relevant to Caversham as it was in 1827.

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On a fine spring morning or summer's day, the walk from Caversham up the Peppard Road is a gentle, tree-lined incline past Queen Anne's School, leafy Balmore Walk, and assorted grand houses as you make your ascent to the summit.


Turning right off Buckingham Drive into what must have been the original continuation of Peppard Rd, you soon arrive at a rather charming little white chapel, incongruously sandwiched and half-hidden amidst the otherwise very regular-looking suburban houses.

A Home from Home


Grace Church Caversham, once Caversham Hill Chapel, is a hidden gem. Proceeding through a small gate lined with a picket fence, a small path takes you past a manse, and up to the door of the old chapel. Continuing round the corner, you arrive at the entrance to the new build; an annexe which contains the modern part of the church. Being a Sunday of course, you are met by a cheerful crew with big smiles and an even bigger welcome.


In an age when it can be difficult for many to even understand the point of the Church, Grace stands guard as an example of the kind of values that many fear are increasingly vanishing from our society. Even in a relatively affluent and pleasant locale like Caversham, we somehow yearn for those long lost communal spaces that once punctuated and directed our daily lives, but now seem forgotten in the blur of a frenetic, dissociative and largely impersonal modern world.

A Nation in Flux


Back in 1827, when Caversham Hill was being planted by Pastor James Sherman of Castle Street Chapel in Reading, Britain was a fast-emerging economy, super-charged by the industrial revolution, and fresh from victory in the Napoleonic Wars. Sherman's own father had been converted by the priest and hymn-writer John Newton: best known for the anthemic Amazing Grace.


And yet despite Britain's ascendancy, the country was troubled by economic depression and mass unemployment. The Corn Laws of 1815 had massively driven up food prices, and there was widespread protest and demand for reform. Flare-ups were not uncommon, including the now infamous Peterloo massacre of 1819.


By the 1820s, gas-lighting and running water had been established in Reading, and within a decade, the steam age had dawned. Not everyone was enthusiastic for the changes however, as local agricultural workers, fearing for their livelihoods, engaged in rioting and machine-breaking in the villages around Reading.


Caversham, then an ancient parish in the Binfield hundred of Oxfordshire, was surrounded by farm land, and it was through his acquaintance with a wealthy landowner, Mrs Burchett, that Sherman was commissioned to build a church in one of his ministerial stations in the Caversham Hill area. Taking just nine months to complete in fashionable Bath Stone, Caversham Hill Chapel appointed its first pastor, J. Dixon, in 1827.

A Tale of Two Centuries


William Blake's poem, And did those feet in ancient time, with its "dark satanic mills" spoke for many of the evils of the industrial revolution. For all of its technological leaps and bounds, there was a deeply-held conviction that such progress had done great violence to nature and to human relationships.


Quite what the climate was like in rural Caversham in the early to mid-nineteeth century is largely undocumented, yet there can be little doubt that the same fears seen in Reading — with the arrival of mechanised production — would have been felt in the suburbs, as the revolution continued its relentless drive in the ensuing decades of the century.


And so two hundred years later, as we enter the second quarter of the 21st century, we too find ourselves in a similar moment of great upheaval. As computer power drives the digital revolution right through even the most intimate parts of our lives, we too must consider the impact of technological progress on our souls.


As statistics point to the erosion not just of church attendance, but also of respect for authority and the lifelong family unit, we see also a corresponding leap in people's sense of loneliness and ongoing struggles with their mental health. In 2022, an astonishing survey by the Campaign To End Loneliness found that almost fifty percent of all adults in the UK routinely felt lonely — either occasionally or permanently*. With society increasingly divided and fissured, many fall victim to the ravaging influence of alcohol, drugs, gambling, gangs and sensuality to cope.


A Tale of Two Centuries


William Blake's poem, And did those feet in ancient time, with its "dark satanic mills" spoke for many of the evils of the industrial revolution. For all of its technological leaps and bounds, there was a deeply-held conviction that such progress had done great violence to nature and to human relationships.


Quite what the climate was like in rural Caversham in the early to mid-nineteeth century is largely undocumented, yet there can be little doubt that the same fears seen in Reading — with the arrival of mechanised production — would have been felt in the suburbs, as the revolution continued its relentless drive in the ensuing decades of the century.


And so two hundred years later, as we enter the second quarter of the 21st century, we too find ourselves in a similar moment of great upheaval. As computer power drives the digital revolution right through even the most intimate parts of our lives, we too must consider the impact of technological progress on our souls.


As statistics point to the erosion not just of church attendance, but also of respect for authority and the lifelong family unit, we see also a corresponding leap in people's sense of loneliness and ongoing struggles with their mental health. In 2022, an astonishing survey by the Campaign To End Loneliness found that almost fifty percent of all adults in the UK routinely felt lonely — either occasionally or permanently*. With society increasingly divided and fissured, many fall victim to the ravaging influence of alcohol, drugs, gambling, gangs and sensuality to cope.


A Light On A Hill


And so we come to the question that drove the great revival preachers like George Whitefield and John Wesley in the eighteenth century; a time about which Bishop Berkeley wrote that morality and religion in Britain had collapsed, "to a degree that was never known in any Christian country". How to reach the broken and abandoned masses when so many in the established church seem either incapable (or uninterested in) preaching the whole Gospel?


Take a walk down the high street of Reading today, and the reality of our age will reveal itself to you — if you permit it. In truth, we are so desensitised to it's excesses that we merely compare it to other places, rather than assessing it soberly in its absolute state. It's not just the homelessness or the drug problems, or even the ample evidence of the obesity crisis or fatherlessness; but there is a greyness, a joylessness, a lifelessness about it. Many of these things are tidied away to spare our blushes, but in some parts of the world, such is the extent of the problem, that this is no longer even possible.


And so in 2025 as we aproach our 200th birthday, the question for the aspiring Christian in Caversham and beyond must be: what is our response to such things? We can no more solve homelessness or poverty than Jesus Christ was willing or able to in his lifetime. He came to save lost souls for a new Jerusalem, not to save, or perfect, the old one — a process which depended entirely on his father in heaven, not on the strength of his will, or on his ambition to be a "good", moral, human being.


In Galatians 2, Paul finally catches up with the leading disciples of Jesus, all together in Jerusalem, after 14 years on the road. Having established that his group would continue to preach to the gentiles, and that the apostles would continue to preach to the Jews, Paul reports that both parties seem keen to stress only one other thing:


All they asked was that we should continue to remember the poor, the very thing I had been eager to do all along (Galatians 2:10).


As such we must be ready to enter the next 200 years with a clear sense of our mandate; to preach the gospel to, and remember the poor and hopeless of Caversham.



God bless you all,

Grace Church Caversham




*https://www.campaigntoendloneliness.org/facts-and-statistics/