EACH week, we let local places of worship ’get a word in edgeways’. This week, which is so strange for most of us, we feel we should widen that gap and share the column here on our website.

What does Church mean to you?

Some of you may have seen, when driving through Williton, that the Methodist Church on Tower Hill is for sale.

We took the decision to leave it when we found that necessary repairs and a new roof would cost over £100,000.

In an area which is one of the most deprived in the country and where the food bank struggles to meet the needs of local families, it seemed to us to be wrong to spend all that money on a building used by a couple of dozen people for two hours a week.

There was sadness from all of us on leaving a building that held so many memories.

We have been meeting in Danesborough View Common Room at 10.30am every Sunday morning and are grateful to the people to whom the room belongs for allowing us to be there.

We have wonderful, warm and happy services and have grown closer as a church family. For we are Church, no matter where we meet. John Wesley preached out of doors because he wasn’t allowed to preach in churches and the movement he began still goes on today.

Church buildings can be beautiful, serene places which enable people to find peace and to feel that they are in God’s presence. They are places where one can sit and be calm and think.

They can also be buildings that were built by people who wanted to show the power, not of God, but of Man. Ornate buildings, full of treasures, all showing piety by ritual and icons, perhaps putting that before care for the needy, the lost and the lonely.

I am not saying that it is wrong to worship in a church, only that a church building is not necessary for worship and prayer.

A good friend of mine used to walk up on the Quantocks when he wanted to ‘have a chat with God’ as he put it. This man also attended the village church every week and worked hard for community spirit in the village.

I carry my church with me. Members of my church family support each other and we have a real family feeling when we meet – and in present times, when we can’t meet. Our building may be gone, but we are still together.

Jane Sefton