Church and Chapel: Cononley's Christian Story 

The Christian history of Cononley is not the story of one church.

Over the centuries, Anglicans, Quakers, Methodists, Baptists and other Christians have all been part of the life of the village. At times their traditions were sharply divided. At other times they discovered that they had far more in common than separated them.

The story eventually led to something which would once have seemed remarkable: Christians from different traditions worshipping and working together.

Beyond the parish church

For centuries Cononley formed part of the ancient parish of Kildwick, with St Andrew’s Kildwick as its parish church.

But membership of the geographical parish did not mean that everybody worshipped there.

By the seventeenth century, religious Nonconformity had reached Cononley. Records from 1668 identify four Quakers, members of the Society of Friends, living in the village.

The eighteenth century brought further religious change. Across the wider parish there were Roman Catholics, Baptists and Quakers as well as members of the established Church.

Then a movement which would have a profound effect upon Cononley arrived in the district.

The Methodists arrive

Around 1798 or 1799, followers of John Wesley preached at nearby Glusburn.

Among those who heard them was Thomas Townend, a Cononley weaver. Thomas and his wife Isabel also sold confectionery from their home in Main Street.

Their encounter with Methodism changed their lives. Among other things, they became convinced that they should no longer open their shop on Sundays.

A small Methodist society began meeting in their home.

It grew sufficiently for its members to decide that they needed a chapel of their own.

A chapel built by working people

Many members of the early Methodist congregation were handloom weavers and woolcombers.

They borrowed money, obtained a small plot of land and set about building a chapel. Members of the congregation appear to have undertaken much of the work themselves.

The new Wesleyan Methodist Chapel opened on Shrove Tuesday 1808.

The building itself has disappeared, but part of it survives in another form: some of its stone was subsequently reused in the building now known as the Church Centre.

Methodism was now firmly established in Cononley.

And it would not remain a single Methodist tradition.

Preaching in the open air

Primitive Methodists were meeting in Cononley by 1822.

The Primitive Methodist movement was particularly associated with energetic preaching and large outdoor gatherings known as camp meetings.

Cononley experienced these too.

In 1862, an annual camp meeting was held on Moseley Hill. Around a dozen preachers gave short sermons, and the gathering appears to have attracted many people who were not themselves regular churchgoers.

It must have been quite a sight: a hillside above Cononley filled with people listening to successive preachers proclaiming the Christian faith.

The Church of England comes to Cononley

While these new Christian communities were developing, Anglicans in Cononley still belonged to St Andrew’s Kildwick.

That began to change in 1846.

A National School was opened at New Inn Fold, and the building was also used for Church of England worship. The first Anglican service there was held on 26 April 1846.

Eighteen years later, on 25 July 1864, the new church of St John the Evangelist was consecrated.

Cononley now had an Anglican church as well as its Nonconformist chapels.

In 1871, Cononley-with-Bradley became a separate ecclesiastical parish.

The Baptists

The nineteenth century brought still more variety.

A distinct Baptist congregation was constituted in Cononley on Christmas Eve 1861.

Initially the congregation met in a room at the former tannery. Sixteen years later, it gained a purpose-built home.

The new Baptist chapel opened on Good Friday 1877.

By then the Christian landscape of Cononley would have looked remarkably diverse for a relatively small Yorkshire village.

Church and chapel were both firmly established.

Different ways of being Christian

Other groups also formed part of Cononley’s religious history.

Alongside the Wesleyan and Primitive Methodists were Protestant Methodists, while another Christian group became known locally as the “Willanites”.

These communities did not all believe exactly the same things or worship in the same way.

Nor should their differences be romanticised away. For much of the nineteenth century, the distinction between Church and Chapel could be important. Denominational identity was part of family and community life, and the different churches and chapels sometimes competed for members and influence.

Yet the story did not end there.

From competition to cooperation

During the twentieth century, relationships between Cononley’s Christian communities began increasingly to change.

Different congregations found opportunities to worship and work together.

One particularly striking example came after the disastrous fire at St John’s in 1946. With their own church unusable, the Anglican congregation worshipped for around three years in the former Mount Zion Chapel in Back Lane.

A building belonging to another strand of Cononley’s Christian history provided a temporary home for St John’s congregation.

Gradually, cooperation became more formal.

In 1964, a Cononley Council of Churches was established.

Ten years later another significant step was taken.

Worshipping together

From August 1974, Anglican and Methodist Christians began worshipping together.

The first meeting of a United Church Council followed on 21 March 1975.

This was a remarkable development when seen against the much longer history of Christianity in the village.

The descendants of traditions which had once established separate churches and chapels were deliberately seeking ways to share their Christian life.

That developing relationship eventually led, in 1991, to a formal constitutional basis for Cononley United Church.

One village, many traditions

Cononley’s Christian story stretches from the ancient parish of Kildwick through Quakers, Methodists, Anglicans, Baptists and other Christian communities.

People met in houses, built chapels with borrowed money, preached on hillsides, worshipped in a schoolroom and eventually built St John’s.

Their differences were real.

But so too was the faith they shared.

Over time, a story which had often been about separate denominations increasingly became a story of Christians working and worshipping together.

That history remains particularly appropriate for St John’s today.

Church and Chapel once described some of the divisions within Cononley. Over the generations, they also became part of a much more hopeful story: Christians discovering how much they could share.