This church……….As you came up the church path you crossed the site of an old coaching inn and you are now in what was one of its outbuildings. Its date? Before 1640. That was when a small group of people known as Dissenters or Independents, who believed that Christ, not the Sovereign, was Head of the Church and therefore the Church should be independent of state control. They risked imprisonment by holding services here. Later the law was relaxed and in 1705 they were able to acquire the building and adapt it for use as a place of worship.

They called their churches ‘Meeting Houses’, that is, places where people could come together and meet with God and one another. They had to be somewhere where you could see what was happening. Hence the design and lay-out of this building. The emphasis in the services was on preaching and reading from the Bible, usually done from a pulpit, together with the communion service which was (and still is) known as the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, conducted from a table rather than an altar.

As time went by the Independents became known as Congregationalists and then more widely along with Baptists and Presbyterians as Nonconformists and in more recent times with the Methodists as the Free Churches.

The two wooden pillars are the masts of ships in which Huguenots fled from persecution in France in the 17th Century, and are tokens of the gratitude these refugees felt for the way they were received and made welcome in the town of Sandwich.

A century later John Wesley was visiting these parts and needed somewhere to accommodate the people who gathered to hear him. This church was made available and on 26th November 1788 he preached here.

During World War I Sandwich became a centre of military activity and the church was often filled with troops stationed here. In World War II it was a very different matter. Coastal towns like Sandwich were largely evacuated and some churches were forced to close. This Church remained open but then in 1974 the premises suffered a serious outbreak of dry rot. This resulted in the demolition of the rear hall and the conversion of the church into a dual purpose building with the chairs replacing the pews and the space under the gallery being used to provide a vestry and kitchen together with two utility rooms.

In 1972 the Congregational Church in England and Wales joined with the Presbyterian Church of England to form the United Reformed Church. Sandwich is part of the Sandwich and Thanet Cluster within the Southern Synod. In recent years the Churches of Christ and the Scottish Congregational Union have been welcomed into the URC.

Over a period of nearly 400 years this church has seen many changes and today with the other churches in the town it seeks to serve the one Lord who is ‘the same yesterday, today and for ever’.

September 2008