History of English Churches in Switzerland – Clarens
History of Christ Church, Clarens
Clarens is the hardest of these churches to write about, and the reason is itself a piece of history. Its records are gone; it published nothing; and the magazine that carried news from every other English chaplaincy on the lake — edited two miles away at Territet — never printed a word from it. What survives comes from its neighbours and from the church that bought the building. And yet the building is still there, still in use, and better cared for now than when it was Anglican.
A church on the lake shore
Clarens was placed on the chaplaincy list of the Colonial and Continental Church Society in 1875, and the Revd W. C. Ormsby was its first chaplain.
The New Apostolic Church, which has owned the building since 1975 and published an account of it in 2020, dates the building to the same year: “En 1875, un architecte inconnu a construit une église anglicane ici, directement sur la rive du lac” — in 1875 an unknown architect built an Anglican church here, directly on the shore of the lake. Schniewind, working from society records rather than the deeds, could only bracket it: the church “must have been built before 1882 since in that year the church property was transferred to CCCS”.
There is a third date, and it is Schniewind’s too. In his account of the neighbouring chaplaincy at Territet he writes that “two further permanent Anglican churches were built in the region: Vevey in 1882 and Montreux-Clarens in 1888” — which cannot be squared with his own statement, forty pages later, that the Clarens property was transferred to the society in 1882. So the building is dated 1875 by its present owners, “before 1882” by Schniewind in one place and 1888 by Schniewind in another. We cannot settle it. It is the clearest illustration of what the loss of the Clarens records cost.
The accounts also differ on whose church it was. Schniewind has Clarens on the CCCS list from the start, with the property transferred to that society in 1882; the New Apostolic account says the church was built “pour le compte de la Ecclesiological Society” — on behalf of a body of that name, not the CCCS. We cannot reconcile these from the sources we hold, and both are set down here as they stand.
The silence
Schniewind’s paragraph on Clarens contains one of the most telling sentences in his book: records on Clarens could not be traced, and the column News from the Chaplaincies in The Anglican Church Magazine, “for years edited in nearby Territet, has no contributions from Clarens”.
That is not a gap in the archive. It is evidence about the chaplaincy. Every other church on this shore reported its confirmations, its collections and its visiting bishops to that magazine. Clarens, next door, sent nothing.
What can be reconstructed comes from the relationships. Clarens was regularly visited by the bishops, who as a rule would hold a confirmation service one day at Christ Church, Clarens, and the next day at St John’s, Territet — two English churches within a short walk of each other, each with its own congregation, both worth a bishop’s day. The chaplain at Clarens was responsible for several schools in the region, among them the Châtelard School at Les Avants, founded in 1927. In 1936 the chaplain, the Revd Charles P. Heywood, was appointed Rural Dean in Switzerland.
Held together with Vevey, then closed
From 1950 to 1962 Clarens was a joint chaplaincy with Vevey, under the Revd A. Douglas Adams. Adams is a thread running through this whole stretch of shore: the Vevey chaplaincy’s own history records him taking over the English church at Clarens after the Second World War, continuing to serve Château-d’Œx from there, and later holding the Vevey chaplaincy as well — one man covering, in succession, three of the churches in these pages.
He was followed by the Revd Sidney J. Baggott, styled “Chaplain of Leysin with Christ Church Montreux”, who was appointed Rural Dean in 1966 and took the Berne chaplaincy in 1968.
Then it ended, and here too the sources disagree. Schniewind writes that “after years of careful considerations the bishop closed Clarens in 1968”, and in his account of St John’s, Territet, he gives the month: “in October 1968 Clarens, which had been served in the last years from Vevey, was closed by the Bishop as a place of worship.” The New Apostolic Church’s account says Christ Church “a fermé ses portes en 1965” — closed its doors in 1965. We cannot settle it; the likeliest explanation is that the two dates mark different things, a last service and a formal closure, but no source we have read says so.
One further detail from the Territet side explains why the closure took so long to come. Amalgamating the two Montreux chaplaincies, St John’s and Christ Church, had been considered and described as “ultimately possible” — but, Schniewind records, “each church wished to maintain its own tradition.” St John’s was Anglo-Catholic; Christ Church, Clarens, like All Saints’ Vevey, was Evangelical. The two English churches of Montreux stood a short walk apart for ninety years because they were not interchangeable.
The cause is not mysterious, whichever year is right. The devaluation of the pound in 1949 had already emptied the English colonies of the Vaud Riviera — at Vevey it forced the chaplain out and closed chapels all round the lake — and Clarens, a church with no records, no magazine contributions and a congregation drawn from the same sterling incomes, was among the casualties.
A second life
At the end of 1975 the church was sold to the Swiss Église néo-apostolique. The purchasers put a date on it: Apostle Hermann Hänni signed the purchase contract on 22 December 1975 — which is exactly what “the end of 1975” means, and one of the few points where our two sources corroborate each other precisely.
Patriarch-Apostle Hans Urwyler consecrated the reordered church on 13 May 1979. The Montreux and Vevey congregations merged in 2011, and after three years of building work the Montreux congregation moved back into the renovated church on 8 March 2015.
So the English church on the shore at Clarens is a hundred and fifty years old and in better repair than it has been in a century. It simply belongs to someone else, and its own century of Anglican life is, apart from what its neighbours recorded, lost.
This account rests on Schniewind (1992), on the Vevey chaplaincy’s history (2011), and on the New Apostolic Church’s own account of the building (2020). It does not describe the building’s present-day life, which is that of another denomination.
Date of first Chaplaincy: 1875 (Colonial and Continental Church Society); first chaplain the Revd W. C. Ormsby
Church dates: Built 1875 on the lake shore, architect unknown; property transferred to the CCCS in 1882; closed 1965 or 1968 (sources differ); sold 22 December 1975
Patron: Christ Church
Hotel: None recorded — Clarens was a resident colony, not a hotel chaplaincy
Current Status: Owned by the Église néo-apostolique since 1975; reconsecrated 13 May 1979, renovated and reoccupied 8 March 2015
Sources
Paul Schniewind, Anglicans in Switzerland, Past and Present (pp. 103–104)
Oliver Rütten, “Montreux : des alpinistes, des touristes, des fidèles”, nac.today (New Apostolic Church), 8 October 2020
Graeme Livingstone-Wallace, All Saints’ Vevey (Vevey: All Saints’ Anglican Chaplaincy, 2011)