Where have all the crosses gone?
I love to see a church building of the traditional English village church design, where the entrance with a cross in stonework above the door kind of speaks peace to those entering, saying, Welcome, because Christ died for you.
Here is what AI wrote about the disappearance of such crosses from so many English churches.
‘Travelling through English villages, one sometimes notices something strange. The old church remains, its tower and stonework proclaiming centuries of Christian faith, yet the cross that once stood prominently above the entrance or upon the spire has disappeared. Sometimes only the stone socket remains—a quiet reminder that a cross once stood there. Meanwhile, the St George’s Cross still flies proudly from flagpoles, pubs and village events. Perhaps that is because the cross has become sufficiently “English” to be displayed without embarrassment, while the deeper Christian meaning has become harder for us to speak about. Have we become more comfortable with the cross as a symbol of England than with the Cross as the proclamation that Christ died for us?
Perhaps this is something worth pondering rather than merely complaining about. The Cross is not simply an ornament of our heritage, nor merely a symbol of sacrifice, tolerance or national identity. It declares something astonishing: that God loved the world so deeply that Christ gave Himself for us. If we have lost sight of that meaning, perhaps the answer is not simply to put more crosses back on buildings, but to rediscover what the Cross actually says. “We preach Christ crucified” (1 Corinthians 1:23). The question for us is not merely where the crosses have gone, but whether we still have the courage—and the faith—to live under the Cross and proclaim its message.’
— Stephen D Green with ChatGPT, September 2026
