Ricky Yates

Bridges over the Vltava River, Prague, as seen from Letna © Ricky Yates

Today, Saturday 19th September 2009, is a significant date. It marks the first anniversary of my arrival in the Czech Republic, together with my wife Sybille and Oscar the cat. In the late afternoon of Friday 19th September 2008, we arrived outside our Chaplaincy flat in Prague 6, at the end of a two day, 885 miles/1416 km drive across six countries + an English Channel ferry crossing. One year on, I’ve spent the last few days doing a little bit of reflection about how I feel about the move and all that has happened these past twelve months.

Firstly, I have no regrets about making the move. Fifteen and a half years was long enough to spend looking after ten Churches in North Oxfordshire. If I’m honest, probably two or three years longer than I would have wanted to be there. But God has his timings and I am convinced now, difficult though it was at the time, that it was worth waiting for the right move even though I had to wait more than two years and several interviews before being appointed to a new post. I’m also pleased that, nearly twelve months after I left, my former parishes finally have a new Rector. May she, (Yes – I’ve been suceeded by a lady!) take those parishes forward, building on what, under God, I and my Ministry Team colleagues, began.

Secondly, it is wonderful to no longer have responsibility for ten mediaeval Church buildings and their associated churchyards. Despite what so many people think, the Church is not a building or even an organisation. Rather, it is the people of God. Of course, mediaeval Church buildings do speak of God – they are holy stones and places where people do find space to be quiet and to pray and to worship. And I’m not a Philistine – such buildings need to be maintained and preserved. However, sometimes the conservation lobby needs to be reminded that Churches were built for Christian worship which should remain their prime purpose, rather than insisting that they become museums to the whims of the way Victorians thought they should look.

Here in Prague, the building we worship in isn’t ours – it belongs to the Czech Evangelical Brethren Ceskobratrské Církve Evangelické. The CCE are a joint Lutheran – Reformed denomination formed in 1918 and are by far the largest protestant grouping in the Czech Republic. Their congregation meet for worship at 9.30am each Sunday hence our service is at 11am. We pay them a modest rent for the use of their Church building and the facilities at Klimentská 18. In 2008, this amounted to around 48,000 Kc (about £1,600.00). As a result, we have no heating or electricity bills, no building insurance to pay, and no building repairs and maintenance to have to be concerned about. Instead, we can get on with being ‘Church’ without any concerns for the Church building.

However, just occasionally I do get frustrated at not owning our own Church building. Back in May when a member of the congregation died, it took two whole days before I could get confirmation from our hosts, that I could have the use of the Church building for a particular time and date in order to conduct a funeral service. The next of kin were left in complete limbo whereas, back in Oxfordshire, I could have immediately confirmed a date and time without reference to anyone else.

More recently, when our Sunday School was due to resume meeting on Sunday 6^th September after the summer break, we discovered on the day, that our Sunday School room in Klimentská 18 was unavailable. Our hosts hadn’t thought to tell us earlier! But these minor irritations aside, to be able to spend time and energy on people rather than buildings, is a great joy.

What lies ahead? That is a big question. There is a saying amongst clergy that when you move to a new parish or situation, “The first year you can’t do anything wrong – the second year, you can’t do anything right!” So far, people have, almost without exception, been very supportive. But I’m about to enter my second year……! Watch this space!!!!

A

On Tuesday 17th, I returned to the flat from our Breakfast Study Group & visiting a family who had enquired about the baptism of their child, to a request that I return a phone call from a retired Pastor of the Czech Brethren Church.

The Czech Brethren are a united Lutheran/Reformed Church and are by far the largest Protestant denomination in the Czech Republic. Once I got through, the retired Pastor asked me what I knew about the Anglican Church building in Mariánské lázne and about a person who claimed to be a Church of England Bishop and was conducting services there.

Mariánské lázne is a spa town in the far west of the Czech Republic, near to the German border. Better known in the past, by its German name of Marienbad, it was very popular with the upper classes of various European countries in the second half of the nineteenth and the first part of the twentieth centuries. King Edward VII, son of Queen Victoria, was one of many Britons who visited to ‘take the waters’. An Anglican Church was built there and opened in 1879. It remained in use for Anglican worship until sometime in the 1920/30s and following the communist takeover in 1948, was confiscated by the state. After the fall of communism in 1989, some limited financial compensation was agreed and paid into the accounts of the Prague Anglican Episcopal Congregation. These funds partly helped pay the deposit on the flat that Sybille & I live in. The Church building now belongs to the local council in Mariánské lázne who has restored it to good order and use it as a small concert venue & gallery.

All this I told the retired Pastor and he agreed that this was his understanding too. However, one of his colleagues in Mariánské lázne, had been in touch with him regarding someone calling himself a Church of England Bishop, who since the summer of 2008 had been holding services in Mariánské lázne, using the former Anglican Church building. What did I know about him?

This information immediately rang bells. Back in October 2008, we had a similar report from a member of an Anglican congregation in Switzerland. Unfortunately at that time, we were given a partially incorrect name and could not discover anything more. But now I had his full name, The Rt. Rev’d Dr. Edwin Wagner. And aided by that helpful friend called Google, a clearer picture emerged, even allowing for the fact that quite a bit of the material was in Czech.

Edwin Wagner is Episcopi vagantes - this Wikipedia article will explain. He belongs to an exceedingly small group who style themselves ‘Traditional Church of England’. Typical of such groups, they have four ‘bishops’ and only five other ‘clergy’. The expression ‘too many Chiefs and not enough Indians’ comes to mind. According to their website, they seek to ‘continue the best Anglican traditions and values’. Yet a few lines later they state that this includes the use of the Roman Catholic English Missal!!!!

In Mariánské lázne, Edwin Wagner has taken full advantage of the fact that a historic restored building is still known as ‘The Anglican Church,’ even though it hasn’t been used for Anglican worship for over seventy years. It was only when his delusions of grandeur got the better of him and he claimed that, what is a publicly owned concert hall and gallery, had now been upgraded to the status of a Pro-Cathedral, that the local clergy began to smell a rat, eventually leading to the phone enquiry of ten days ago.

Last Saturday, we drove the 100 miles/160 km out to Mariánské lázne to investigate for ourselves. The small town is beautifully situated in a wooded valley and had recently experienced a quite heavy snowfall. And after the years of communist neglect, many of the wonderful late nineteenth and early twentieth century buildings have been restored to their former glory. Walking the streets, we heard more German being spoken than Czech with many day or weekend visitors from across the nearby border.

We found the ‘Anglican Church’ but were disappointed to read a notice on the door stating ‘Im Winter geschlossen’ and similarly in Czech. Likewise, there were no notices about Church services conducted by Edwin Wagner. This rather confirmed the information we had been given that he had not been seen around the town by the other Christian ministers since just before Christmas.

A few days ago, I decided to bite the bullet and rang the mobile phone number given for Edwin Wagner on the ‘Traditional Church of England’ website. He answered in person and I asked whether he was still holding Church services in Mariánské lázne. He told me that they were to resume in a couple of weeks time in the same building. I challenged him about calling his services ‘Church of England’ or ‘Anglican’, and he claimed in reply that he makes it clear that he is “not in communion with the see of Canterbury”. But if you look at this website, all he does is put the letters ‘TCE’ on his publicity, with no explanation whatsoever as to what they stand for.

Now the Christian ministers and the Town Council in Mariánské lázne know that Edwin Wagner isn’t what he has been claiming to be, I think he might find it more difficult to resume his activities. But the whole affair has left me feeling very sad that a somewhat deluded individual has been practising a form of deception in the name of the Christian Church. I also felt that the response I received from the retired Czech Brethren Pastor was very pertinent. He thanked me for my detective work for which he was most grateful. But he concluded, “This is one of the troublesome realities of our time, that in spite of large secularisation and the small number of Christians in contemporary Europe, they still split and form further and further denominations. This is a reality even in the Czech speaking community”.