East Grinstead - Religious Organisations

Religious Organisations

East Grinstead has an unusually diverse range of religious and spiritual organisations for a town of its size. A broad range of mainstream Christian denominations have places of worship in the town, and several others used to be represented; Protestant Nonconformism has featured especially prominently for the last two centuries, in common with other parts of northern Sussex. Several other religious groups have connections with the town, from merely owning property to having national headquarters there.

The Church of England has four places of worship in the town. St Swithun's Church was founded in the 11th century. Architect James Wyatt rebuilt it in local stone in 1789 after it became derelict and collapsed. Near the entrance to the church, three stones mark the supposed ashes of Anne Tree, Thomas Dunngate and John Forman who were burned as martyrs on 18 July 1556 because they would not renounce the Protestant faith. John Foxe wrote about them in his 1,800-page Foxe's Book of Martyrs. Two other churches are in St Swithun's parish. St Luke's Church in Holtye Avenue on the Stone Quarry estate was built in 1954 to serve the northeast of the town. St Barnabas' Church in Dunnings Road serves the south of the town; the present wooden structure of 1975 replaced an older church built in 1912. The fourth church, in the northwest of the town, is dedicated to St Mary the Virgin. Built by W.T. Lowdell over a 21-year period beginning in 1891, the Decorated Gothic Revival church was consecrated in 1905 and has its own parish. It was established by adherents of the Oxford Movement, and services still follow a more Anglo-Catholic style than East Grinstead's other Anglican churches.

Roman Catholics worship at the Church of Our Lady and St Peter, founded in 1898 by Edward Blount of the Blount baronetcy, a resident of nearby Worth. East Grinstead's first Nonconformist church was the Zion Chapel, built in 1810 for the Countess of Huntingdon's Connexion. The small evangelical Calvinistic group owned the church until 1980; it is now used by Baptists and is called West Street Baptist Church. Trinity Methodist Church is the much-expanded successor to older places of Methodist worship in the town; the community dates back to 1868. The United Reformed Church community meets in the Moat Church, a former Congregational chapel built in the Early English Gothic Revival style in 1870. Jehovah's Witnesses worship at a modern Kingdom Hall; the community, established in 1967, previously used a former Salvation Army building. The meetinghouse of the LDS Church on Ship Street was built in 1985. A 2007 book also noted the New Life Church—a Newfrontiers evangelical charismatic church—the Kingdom Faith Church, another independent charismatic congregation, and the Full Gospel Church.

The Opus Dei Prelature have a conference centre at Wickenden Manor near the town, and Rosicrucians also have a presence in nearby Greenwood Gate. The London England Temple of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, is just over the Surrey border at Newchapel; and the United Kingdom (and former world) headquarters of the Church of Scientology is at Saint Hill Manor on the southwestern edge of East Grinstead. Scientology's founder L. Ron Hubbard bought the Georgian mansion and its 24 hectares (59 acres) of grounds from the Maharaja of Jaipur in 1959, and lived in the town until 1967.

In 1994, a documentary entitled Why East Grinstead? was produced for Channel 4's Witness strand of documentaries. It sought to examine and explain the convergence of such a wide variety of religious organisations in the East Grinstead area. The documentary, produced by Zed Productions and directed by Ian Sellar, reached no definite conclusion: explanations ranged from the local presence of ley lines to the more prosaic idea that religious leaders had settled there because they liked the views.