Since the last few weeks has proved quite challenging for me in terms of my physical health and mental health, I decided to start revisiting church.

I am a believer and to me keeping my faith strong is important for my mental and physical wellbeing. The only issue is that I lacked church visitation, which I am not too happy about. Mostly because I don’t like to attend on my own. Today I made an effort to go out around 10am to visit the St Thomas’s Church which is within an hour of where I live and has been on my radar for a while. I have seen many old churches which are in much better condition, this was still in good condition but inside you can tell it doesn’t have the funding that others do. I spoke to a gentleman who confirmed the funding was poor. I understand time are hard, but it is surely the Church of England that should be taking it upon itself to provide adequate funding and repairs and not the general public who can only give what they can afford most of the time.

You will notice that this is huge, like most churches, and it has an upstairs which I was not expecting. I will be returning in the near future for sure to attend a Holy Communion service. I was granted permission to take photographs.

I was respectful to the altar and not to cross the wrong boundaries, but the public can enter the choir gallery area.

The church is large but apparently has a small congregation of people who attend regularly. I hope that more people will attend services here. It is one of a number of Church of England churches throughout Greater Manchester. I have yet to visit St. Peters church and St. Georges churches. I do intend to visit them but finding them open is very difficult considering that they are only open on Sunday for a brief time. This was not always the case.

Funding has blatantly decreased, and the public seem less interested in church and religions than ever before. The advent of modern belief systems has drawn a substantial part of the populace away from traditions like Christianity toward new age enlightenment beliefs and such. This is of course not deterring from the fact that there are around 2.83 billion Christians in the world making it the largest religion still to this day based on the teachings of Jesus Christ. A whopping 1.9 billion are Islamic and 1.25 billion are Hindu. Around 1.1 billion are non-religious. I hope that puts things in perspective – you should never feel ashamed of your faith. There will be others, so don’t be afraid to connect with them. The writer of Hebrews encourages the gathering together of friends and family as a community for support, love and wellbeing.

I was a little apprehensive about visiting as I haven’t done so in a while. I hope any future visits will provide an opportunity to connect with like-minded individuals. Thank you so much for reading and I hope the pictures are enjoyable too.

If you liked then please like, comment and let me know whether you are a part of a belief system or if you are an atheist.