The bold museum reflecting a “moonlight” experience of the unseeable

Robert Wright visits the UK's only Faith Museum, in Bishop Auckland, and hears how its funder hopes to inspire reflection on the divine.

Robert Wright

Robert is a journalist at the Financial Times.

A art installaton showing purple and pink flame-like shapes moving in a darkened room

The Eidolon art installation.

It takes a moment to grow accustomed to walking in the dark of the long, steeply roofed room that houses Mat Collishaw’s art installation Eidolon. But the artwork’s impact is immediate. Two huge, moving images in the middle of the room show a blue iris flower. It is being engulfed by flames but not consumed. Speakers play, in Latin, a story from the Hebrew bible’s Book of Daniel in which three young Jewish men survive being thrown into a fiery furnace for refusing to worship the Babylonian king. The artwork is a rare successful attempt to capture in modern art the essence of Christ’s crucifixion and the Christian tradition of martyrdom, with its roots in earlier Jewish beliefs.

Watch Eidolon

Eidolon is one of the highlights of the UK’s first Faith Museum, a bold project opened on October 7 in Bishop Auckland castle, the historic residence of the Bishops of Durham. The museum forms part of The Auckland Project, a series of initiatives in Bishop Auckland, north-west of Darlington, being funded by Jonathan Ruffer, a Christian and successful City investor. Ruffer’s childhood home was outside nearby Middlesbrough. The new institution aims to tell the story of 6,000 years of faith in Great Britain, starting with the Gainford cup and ring stone. The stone, found 90 years ago 10 miles from Bishop Auckland, may date from as early as 4,000BCE. It features carvings regarded as the earliest evidence of religious practice in Great Britain.

Jonathan Ruffer.

A man stands in a formal dining room that has traditional paintings on the walls

Jonathan Ruffer, in Bishop Auckland Castle.

Ruffer, however, declines to link the museum’s contents to his own faith or an explicitly Christian message. He insists that he is merely seeking to advance discussion of faith in a society where it is little debated but remains a potent force. In the living room of Castle Lodge, his home in the castle grounds, Ruffer compares the contemporary taboo about religion with the very different mores of the 19th century.

“Nobody talked about sex in Victorian times,” he says. “It’s impossible to imagine that because the public world was silent on it, it was not as much a guiding force as it is today. I think that’s where faith is now.”

He adds that the 10-year process of establishing the museum has made it “absolutely apparent” to him why there are no other similar institutions.

“What is a museum for?” he asks. “It’s to gawp at things and if you think what is the subject matter of a faith museum, it’s God. In whatever form and shape that you believe that God to be, you cannot see that topic.”

The museum is nevertheless rich in sometimes poignant objects that the curators call “witnesses” of faith. They include the Binchester Ring, a ring with Christian symbols dating from the third century of the Christian era. The ring, found only a mile from the museum, is regarded as the earliest known evidence for Christian practice in Britain. There is a small slate, engraved on one side, that served as an altar for Recusant Roman Catholics while their Church was out in the cold and had to stay hidden during the Reformation years. The slate could be turned over and disguised as a normal roof slate when not in use. The museum has on loan the Bodleian Bowl – a rare example of a ceremonial vessel used by one of England’s Jewish communities before King Edward I expelled the group in 1290.

Ruffer says the impact of the objects – many on loan from other museums - comes from their histories.

“There’s a great power in the objects that we have,” he says.

Eileen Harrop.

A priest stands in front of lead glass windows and carved seats.

Eileen Harrop, entrepreneur priest and museum advisor.

Among the advisers on the museum’s establishment was Eileen Harrop, a Church of England priest originally from Singapore and of Chinese origin. She was appointed an “entrepreneur priest” in 2016 to work with Ruffer on The Auckland Project. Meeting in the castle’s former library, she says the museum avoids suggesting all faiths are the same, while also steering clear of Christian proselytising. Harrop, now the vicar of four parishes around Bishop Auckland, expects the museum to have a powerful effect on visitors.

“It allows for people to experience the God who led Jonathan here,” she says. “It allows for people to enter into all the different ways in which people can identify something about faith and then it’s up to God.”

A visit’s emotional impact comes largely from the new institution’s first floor, devoted to works created by contemporary artists exploring faith. Some of the most powerful exhibits are black-and-white pictures in which Khadija Saye, a young British-Gambian artist, explores possible uses for religious objects belonging to members of her family, some Muslim and some Christian. Saye lost her life in the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire.

A series of works by Christian painter Roger Wagner has proved particularly timely. The museum opened the same day that Hamas terrorists started the current Israel-Gaza war with their attack inside Israel. The paintings translate stories from the Christian New Testament to the contemporary, riot-scarred occupied West Bank.

Eidolon is among the works on the first floor. Harrop calls it an “amazing installation”, particularly for its retelling of the story of Daniel.

“It relates a story… of what was going on in that particular experience of the faithful person called and protected with his companions in relation with God and the power of faith,” she says.

Ruffer, meanwhile, shies away from expressing spiritual aspirations.

Asked how he hopes people will respond to the museum, he says: “I couldn’t care less – that’s up to them. I have many faults but a sense of wanting to tell people or persuade people how they should be is very low down the list.”

Yet Ruffer is clear that he received a clear, divine call to come to Bishop Auckland. He was first drawn to the area by his enthusiasm for Spanish art and his determination to prevent the Church of England’s Church Commissioners, then owners of the castle, from selling its prize artworks – life-size, 17th century portraits by Francisco de Zurbarán known as Jacob and his 12 Sons. The paintings, saved for Bishop Auckland in 2011 by a multi-million-pound donation by Ruffer, remain in the castle. But the Zurbarán link inspired Ruffer to establish a Spanish Gallery, dedicated to art from Spain, on Bishop Auckland’s Market Place.

“I came here really through a calling,” Ruffer says. “I felt the need really to drop everything and come up to somewhere in the north-east, to be part of a community.”

Ruffer’s engagement with the town deepened when the Church Commissioners announced, also in 2011, that they planned to sell the castle. Auckland Castle was formerly a seat of both ecclesiastical and secular power when the Bishops of Durham were prince-bishops – uniquely in England, both secular governors and bishops. The bishops lost the last of their secular powers in 1836. Ruffer bought the castle and transferred ownership to a newly established Auckland Castle Trust, which became The Auckland Project.

“I’ve heard from people who have through it who have said they can’t really put their finger on what it is, but they must go back again,”

Ruffer accepts there are issues with trying to capture the imagination of Bishop Auckland’s 25,000 inhabitants from inside a castle whose imposing entranceway symbolises its symbolic role as a seat of sometimes oppressive power.

“That sense of power is felt as a reality by people,” he says. “But it’s empty. Power has long since moved away from the prince-bishops and then the bishops.”

The castle’s unique history nevertheless makes it the ideal setting for the museum, according to Ruffer. Exhibits are housed both in a wing of the historic castle and a new, purpose-built extension. Ruffer says the castle was a far better place to site a faith museum aimed at raising questions than somewhere more explicitly linked to a specific faith such as a cathedral close.

“Auckland Castle has been intricately involved with faith for nearly 1,000 years and yet it hasn’t been a place of worship,” he says. “It has a chapel but it’s ecclesiastical without being a cathedral, church or minster. So it seemed to me that that made it very appropriate for a faith museum.”

The early signs, according to both Ruffer and Harrop, are that the new institution is encouraging reflection among visitors. Ruffer says the museum has responded to the “elemental need” for faith. He adds that the positive reaction so far vindicates the initiative to establish the museum, which he says has brought together objects and described them “without any directional guidance as to which works”.

Harrop reports that visitors seem to feel the need to experience the museum a second time after a first visit.

“I’ve heard from people who have through it who have said they can’t really put their finger on what it is, but they must go back again,” she says.

Ruffer identifies the museum’s power by saying that it gives people an easier experience of the divine than would otherwise be available to them. He compares the experience of encountering God through the museum to looking at the light of the sun as reflected in soft moonlight. That, he points out, is far easier than looking painfully and directly at the sun.

“The thing that changes people is to be confronted with something bigger than yourself,” he says.

Interview

Change

Community

Faith

S&U interviews

2 October 2023

6 min read

Cost of living crisis: faith and food banks combine to tackle destitution and its causes

The Trussell Trust wants food banks in its network to reduce the need for their services. Robert Wright finds out why the trust regrets they still distribute so much food.

Robert Wright

Robert is a journalist at the Financial Times.

A man stands in front of a food bank's shelves of cereals and boxes labelled by foot type.

Howard Wardle at Eastbourne's food bank.

When Howard Wardle was making plans to set up a food bank in Eastbourne, in East Sussex, he received little support from his fellow church leaders. Speaking in the industrial estate warehouse that has been the food bank’s headquarters since 2017, Wardle recalls how at a meeting called to discuss the idea he largely encountered bafflement. At the time, Wardle was pastor of the town’s Community Church.

“They said, ‘There isn’t a need in the town – you’re wasting your time doing it’,” Wardle says of the meeting in 2011.

Wardle nevertheless received encouragement from Eastbourne’s Citizens’ Advice Bureau, from the major of the local Salvation Army congregation, the local authority’s social services – and the Trussell Trust, the UK’s largest organiser of food banks. The food bank, of which Wardle is now chief executive, last year handed out 280,000 meals.

Yet for Wardle and the Emma Revie, the Trussell Trust’s national chief executive, it is a matter of regret that its members are distributing so much food – organisations affiliated with the Trussell Trust handed out 2.99mn parcels in the year to March 2023. The figure was a 37 per cent increase on the year before, a rise largely down to the cost of living crisis started by the spikes in energy and food prices following Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

“It’s incredibly worrying and upsetting that so many people – more people – are having to come to food banks,” Revie says.

Workers at the Eastbourne Foodbank and others nationally are following a strategy of campaigning for policies that seek to ensure no one needs to seek emergency food support. They also employ staff who help clients to navigate the benefits system, prepare for work or take other steps to find a permanent solution to their problems.

“We were absolutely resolute that enough is enough. We needed to do whatever we needed to do to reduce the number of people needing to come to food banks.”

Emma Revie

The Trussell Trust centrally provides organisational support for affiliated food banks but deliberately does not undertake functions such as purchasing food.

Revie says it adopted the strategy of trying to put itself out of business five years ago, after experiencing significant growth in demand for its services. The trust was founded in 1997 in Salisbury by Carol and Paddy Henderson, a Christian couple. Christian principles have been core to the trust’s operations ever since.

“We reached a decision point where we either had to accept that this situation was likely to increase and would always be needed or we had to decide that that was not acceptable and change the way we thought about our work,” Revie says.

The trust recognised how inadequate food parcels were to the fundamental needs that member food banks were seeing among clients, she adds.

“The reason people are coming to food banks is they don’t have enough money to afford the essentials,” Revie says. “They know it’s not going to put credit on the gas meter. They know it’s not going to pay for school shoes.”

The organisation had to decide whether it accepted as inevitable that so many people needed its services or would reorient itself towards working to end that need, she adds.

“We were absolutely resolute that enough is enough,” Revie says. “We needed to do whatever we needed to do to reduce the number of people needing to come to food banks.”

“We’re not just here to get people on benefits. If we think they can work, we try to encourage people to get into work.”

Robert Crockford

In Eastbourne, the strategy of reducing dependence on food banks has been in place from the start, according to Wardle.

“When we started, we felt it was one thing to have a food bank giving out food but another to have people not need to come to food banks,” he says.

After receiving some grant funding, the food bank took on staff to help clients to resolve their financial problems and ensure they were receiving all the welfare benefits to which they were entitled.

“We built a welfare benefits team, a debt team and a medical benefits team so that we could help clients,” Wardle says.

Robert Crockford, the food bank’s senior advocacy officer, says he helps food bank clients to navigate issues such as the two-child limit and the overall benefits cap that restrict the amount benefits recipients can receive.

The two-child limit stops parents from receiving child benefit for any more than two children if the additional children were born after 2017. The benefit cap - £283.71 for a single person living outside Greater London – was introduced in 2013. It limits the total amount a person or family can receive from the system.

Crockford explains that he seeks to help clients to explore whether they count as disabled, a carer or have some other status that might enable them to receive higher benefits.

The group also works with People Matter, a charity that helps to prepare people for work.

“We’re not just here to get people on benefits,” Crockford says. “If we think they can work, we try to encourage people to get into work.”

Revie bemoans the overall inadequacy of the benefits system, pointing out that many recipients of Universal Credit – the main income-support benefit for most people who are unemployed or on low incomes in the UK – cannot afford food.

“When almost half the people on that benefit are unable to afford food, something systematically is failing,” she says. “So do you tackle the symptoms or do you tackle the actual problem?”

That emphasis on tackling problems is clear at another food bank affiliated with the trust – in Kingston, on the south-western edge of London.

Ian Jacobs, director of Kingston Foodbank, says his organisation works closely with Citizens’ Advice to try to develop permanent solutions for people seeking help.

“We do deep-dive investigations into people’s circumstances to try to see if we can get more money into people’s pockets,” he says.

Kingston Foodbank currently operates six foodbank centres and one pantry, where referred clients can select and buy reduced-price food. Jacobs says he would like one day to reverse the proportion, so that it operates six pantries and one food bank.

Jacobs, a member of the Doxa Deo Community Church, an independent evangelical church, also makes it clear that many volunteers are working at the food bank out of Christian conviction.

“We’re always open to pray with clients,” he says.

Revie says the trust is “deeply rooted” in the local churches.

“Many of our volunteers and staff are motivated in the work that they do by their Christian faith,” she says. “Our values of community, compassion, dignity and justice are deeply rooted in the Christian faith.”

Revie points out that the trust was founded by Christians and that its network grew through approaches by individual churches to the trust.
"We as an organisation work with people of all faiths and none and we certainly support people of all faiths and none," she says. "But we are deeply rooted in the local churches and many of our volunteers and staff are motivated in the work that they do by their Christian faith,” she says.
Faith has a "very special role to play" in the trust's work, Revie adds.
“Our values of community, compassion, dignity and justice are deeply rooted in the Christian faith," she says.

“We don’t believe there should be food banks in today’s society,” Jacobs says. “That’s why we do all the extra work to make sure people aren’t dependent on the food bank.”