Despite the shopping frenzy, silly hats, office parties and gloomy news, a true Christmas story has been unfolding in an unlikely place. David Charters reports

SACRED images in stained glass lay broken on the rubble and wide-winged birds perched on the iron frames of empty windows, overlooking the clustered spread of the old town.

But, from these dripping ruins, a new church has arisen, and on Christmas morning, beneath the shining Welsh slate of the roof, its ancient timbers and magnificent stones will feel again the voices of celebration reaching into their foundations.

For, amid the cynicism and commercial vulgarity of the festive season, this is a story of how Christian faith and love worked another miracle – in Birkenhead, far away from the Holy Land.

A long abandoned church is open again.

Here, only a year ago, lay symbols of human degradation. Condoms, pornographic magazines and drug needles were strewn in the places where once devout men and women had knelt. Pages from the magazines had been used to start the fires, which destroyed interior fittings. The floor was thick with pigeon droppings.

In 2006, a young man fell to his death from the stairway to the Norman-style tower, alerting local people to the full horror of what was happening to the Oxton Congregational Church – built in 1858 on a ridge overlooking the rest of the town. For generations, the building was the gateway to Birkenhead.

As Oxton grew from a cluster of cottages into a prosperous suburb of the main town, rich merchants moved into the big villas so they could watch the ships on the river. But there were also hardy non-conformists, whose style of devotion was simpler and more direct than that found in the Anglican and Catholic churches.

Among them was Arthur H Lee, who started his famous tapestry works in Birkenhead 100 years ago.

Congregations swelled to several hundred. Although the numbers fell, an active youth club was run in the basement in the 1960s and the teenagers played guitars as well as ping-pong.

In the end, though, only 15 members were left and most were old and infirm. It closed in 1999. Meanwhile, the vibrant Wirral Christian Centre, part of the Elim Pentecostal Church of Great Britain, had bought the old Birkenhead Children’s Hospital, opposite.

Its leaders could see many uses for the Congregational Church, but it changed hands three times before they were able to put these into action. The first owners stripped out the pews and the metal parts of the organ, the rest of which burned down. The second owner had ambitions for converting the building into flats, but these proved impracticable.

So, in March, the Wirral Centre bought the building for £450,000 and immediately began the restoration programme. The church is now open for Christmas services while work continues on a theatre area for young people and other facilities which will make it part of the community. The project should be finished by Easter at an overall cost of £2m, some of which will come from grants.

Supporters of the work include John Davies, father of Chris, 23, who fell to his death.

In a letter to Pastor Paul Epton, senior minister at the centre, John explained that he had been shown round the church, now called the Wirral Christian Centre Church. It had become a “true beacon of light from darkness”, he wrote. Seeing it had helped lift his personal darkness. He believed the church had “an everlasting future” and thanked everyone involved “for all their efforts”.

Pastor Epton, 61, has been supported in the project by his own son, Greg, 29, an assistant pastor and an old boy of Birkenhead School, who has a BSc from Birmingham University and is now studying theology at the Elim Pentecostal College, Nantwich.

There are two other ministers at the centre – Nick Weyman, 41, and Karen Inman, 34.

After training at the Bible School in Capel, Surrey, Paul was ordained in 1973, when he came to Birkenhead and started the Wirral Christian Centre in an old welsh chapel, before moving to the children’s hospital 10 years later. He and his wife, Evelyn, also have two daughters, Natalie, 33, a consultant paediatrician, and Victoria, 27, a teacher, who works as the children’s co-ordinator at the centre, which has started 21 churches across the North West.

“Eventually, the elders of the Wirral Christian Centre decided that the property was in such a bad condition, dragging down the area so much, that they bought it,” says Paul. “Young people had broken in, fires had been lit, floors had been totally destroyed, all the windows were smashed. Only the hundreds and hundreds of pigeons were prospering in there. We set about doing a total conversion.”

Professional help came from Muir Architects & Stonecraft (stonemasons from the Isle of Man), local craftsmen and numerous volunteers.

“The first removal of filth, tons of it, was done by local volunteers,” says Paul. Money, too, came in generous quantities from the congregation. One Sunday morning offering was £11,000.

“The walls on this church are massively thick,” he says. “It would have stood for 1,000 years, but as a derelict indictment of neglect. The building was filled with filth of every sort – syringes, condoms, pornographic magazines. It was one of the saddest stories I have ever known, and then there was the death of the young man, but I have had a lovely letter from his father. We are in a down-town situation with very ordinary people, but they are wonderful and they are doing an incredible thing by giving of themselves. This is a Christmas gift to Birkenhead wrapped in love.”

davidcharters