With the closure of a church in Sussex recently approved by the Church Commissioners supported by a congregation of 25 with at least a further 55 coming to festival services, and many many churches throughout the country supported by far fewer people, the organ and its music is in danger of loss.
I've been writing heretically recently because the Church doesn't appreciate its failure to engage with people. The reality is that people are not local anymore. In our day to day lives we see people collectively finding the Creator, in hospitals for instance where interfaith movements are coming together with enthusiasm, and finding that the separatist views of religions do not accord with the basic message of loving the Creator and our neighbours as ourselves. People are either coming together in such circumstances, or rejecting the hypocrisy or the separatist orthodoxies altogether in atheism.
Until the Church moves forward, actively and inclusively bringing understanding of the Creator God to all, more and more churches will be closed, human discord and disharmony will multiply, and the subject of this forum, organs, will at best retreat to ivory towers.
This is not a merely British problem. It's happening in Germany too and
http://www.pipeorgans.eu/en/pipeorgans/Dreher-und-Reinisch-18-II-P for sale
(http://www.pipeorgans.eu/images/p/middle/2003-3-227134.jpg)
for just €14,000 is testimony to our loss.
I. Manual:
Prinzipal 8'
Holzflöte 8'
Oktav 4'
Rohrflöte 4'
Prinzipal 2'
Mixtur 1 1/3'
II. Manual:
Gedeckt 8'
Blockflöte 4'
Quinte 2 2/3'
Sifflöte 2'
Terz 1 3/5'
Scharf 1'
Krummhorn 8'
Pedal:
Subbass 16'
Oktavbass 8'
Choralbass 4'
Rauschpf. 2 2/3'+2'
Fagott 16'
The failure of the Church to engage in promoting the understanding of God the Creator by the process of which all matter and all life is created is a crime for which not only humanity but the human race itself may pay the ultimate price. The religions have resorted to the teaching only of worship of their teachers rather than that which their teachers taught. The teachers have been reduced to idols of superstition. Organs will die with them, unless we can navigate routes of survival and recovery.
Best wishes
David P