Chacewater Methodist Church

The Methodist Church in Chacewater

- a personal view

Cornish Methodism, yes we can say this, for there is an expression of Christian belief here in Cornwall that is both distinctive and ancient, has deep roots far older than common ideas of Nonconformity as practiced in the eighteenth century. We can look to the mission of Fr Julian Maumoir in seventeenth century Brittany, to the Jesuits in the sixteenth, to the thirteenth century Franciscans and beyond them glimpse the simple but profound observances of our Celtic ancestors close to the dawn of Christianity itself.  [i]

Methodism found fertile ground here when, as one early admirer has it, ‘it came down from heaven as it was wanted, piece by piece’.

In Chacewater as elsewhere Methodism did indeed arrive in bits and pieces, by the end of the eighteenth century there were Primitive Methodist societies in Chacewater, Creegbrawse, Skinner’s Bottom, Wheal Busy and Mount Hawke as well as societies of Protestant Methodists, Methodist New Connexion, Bible Christians and Wesleyans in Chacewater village.  [ii] These societies would meet by the hearth of some cottage or farmhouse and were originally an addition to the formal recital of faith in church – bible classes rather than a separate church. When separate churches came to be built many mourned the loss - ‘Methodism is not the same since they gave up cottage meetings and took to vestries’ as the daughter of Edward Burgess (a well-known early preacher) put it.  [iii]  Many still feel the same way.

Throughout the eighteenth century and those preceding it the spiritual needs of the people of the booming copper town of Chacewater were ill-served by the established church – the old parish church of Kenwyn was three miles away. [iv]   It may well have been the flourishing hearthside meetings of early Methodist societies that prompted the building of St Paul’s Church on the outskirts of the village in 1828.  The Wesleyan Chapel was built in the heart of the village two years later.  Primitive Methodist Chapels at East End close by the bridge over the Carnon River and at Creegbrawse followed; the Bible Christians built Zion Chapel at Cox Hill and rivalry broke out between them all.  This rivalry was not an expression of social divisions as it was elsewhere - Matthew Moyle of Chacewater, who leased the Creegbrawse chapel to the Primitive Methodists reserved a private pew for himself in the manner of a medieval lord of the manor.  [v]

Divisions between Church and Chapel remains to this day, as do shades of that between the Primitive Methodists and the Wesleyans, long after the amalgamation of the two village chapels on March 1 1978. It all has nothing to do with the central message of the New Testament that is preached in them all.  They tell me that a Redruth man will not eat cherries, neither a Camborne man red apples. This because the rugby team colours of Camborne are cherry-red and white and those of Redruth red and white – this sort of sporting rivalry is harmless enough, but rivalry between Christians seems to me both pointless and disrespectful.

Richard White, Tremarner.

September 2000

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Richard White, Tremarner.

September 2000