History of English Churches in Switzerland – Interlaken
History of the English Church, Interlaken
Interlaken is where this whole story starts. It has no English church building — the English were never given one, and never built one. What they were given, in 1840, was the choir of a medieval monastery church, and two years later the Colonial and Continental Church Society sent out the first seasonal holiday chaplain in its history. Everything else in these pages follows from that arrangement.
The choir of the Ancient Church
In the development of tourism in the first part of the nineteenth century, Interlaken was one of the most favoured places of the British. On 21 October 1840, in response to an application, the government of Berne granted that the choir part of the “Ancient Church” be converted into an English chapel. St Ursula’s Church in Berne, recording the same moment in its own history of Anglicanism in Switzerland, puts it in the wider pattern: hoteliers throughout Switzerland were eager to offer facilities for worship, and “thus, part of the old church in Interlaken was converted into an English chapel in 1840”.
The building the English were let into had a long past. It was part of the old monastery, founded in 1130 and suppressed in 1528 — an Augustinian house whose choir now had English Morning Prayer in it.
The first seasonal chaplaincy
In 1842 the CCCS sent the Revd Anthony Sillery to Interlaken, “thus creating its first holiday seasonal chaplaincy”. That is the claim that makes Interlaken the origin point: not the first English congregation in Switzerland — Geneva, Lausanne and Vevey were all earlier — but the first place where the society deliberately staffed a holiday season rather than a resident colony. The model it invented at Interlaken is the one that produced Zermatt, Mürren, Belalp, Arolla, Château-d’Œx and dozens more.
In 1844 Sillery applied for seasonal assistance and the society sent the Revds W. H. Hill and J. T. Gwyther to Interlaken, to cover four months’ duty between them. The Intercontinental Church Society, into which the CCCS eventually became, dates its own presence from that second year rather than the first: its website says simply that “Short-term Mission has been taking place in Interlaken since 1844”. We have not been able to establish which of the two dates the society now regards as its founding at Interlaken, and both are given here as their sources give them.
The following year the Revd G. E. Biber compiled his report on the English Church on the Continent, and it records the scale of the thing exactly: the congregation of the summer chaplaincy at Interlaken had contributed £10 14s in the summer of 1844 towards the funds of the Colonial Church Society. By 1845, on St Ursula’s account, there were seasonal chaplaincies at Interlaken, Thun, Zurich and Lucerne, alongside a permanent chaplaincy at Vevey and resident chaplains at Geneva and Lausanne.
Miss Jemima’s Sunday
A visit to Interlaken was a fixture of the first Thomas Cook tour of Switzerland in 1863. One of the party was Jemima Morrell, whose journal of the trip was published a century afterwards. Schniewind quotes her lively description of the Sunday service of 5 July 1863 — English worship in the monastery choir, witnessed by one of the first modern package tourists in the week the industry began.
Four traditions, one roof
The most remarkable thing about Interlaken is what the arrangement turned into. In 1900 The Anglican Church Magazine reported:
The conditions of the CCCS Chaplaincy in Interlaken are unique. Protestant Catholics, Anglicans, Presbyterians and French Protestants in English Catholic worship under the same roof - that of the chapel of the old Monastery… The Anglican Services are held in the Choir of the old Church; the Roman Catholics in the Nave, and those of the Presbyterian and French Protestants in a side Chapel.
Schniewind’s comment is that Interlaken was “not only the first seasonal chaplaincy but maybe the first, in any case a very early, experience in ecumenism”. Four traditions were using one medieval building simultaneously, each in its own part of it, more than half a century before the word ecumenism was in common use. It was not a theological achievement so much as a practical one — but it worked, and it lasted.
The lease that kept it going
The owner of the church is the Evangelische Kirchgemeinde Gsteig-Interlaken. Under a contract with the CCCS dated 24 June 1936, the society was granted the use of the east portion of the church free of charge — the formalisation, nearly a century on, of what the Berne government had allowed in 1840.
Writing in 1992, a hundred and fifty years after the arrival of the first seasonal chaplain, Schniewind recorded that Interlaken was continuing as a summer chaplaincy of the Intercontinental Church Society. It still is: ICS runs summer services there today.
This account rests on sources published up to 1992, together with the present-day statements of the Intercontinental Church Society and St Ursula’s Church, Berne. For anything current, see ICS Interlaken.
Date of first Chaplaincy: 1842 (Colonial and Continental Church Society — its first seasonal holiday chaplaincy); the ICS dates its own presence from 1844
Church dates: Choir of the monastery church granted for English use 21 October 1840; use of the east portion formalised by contract 24 June 1936. No English church was built at Interlaken
Patron: None — the English used part of an existing church
Hotel: Services were held in the monastery church, not a hotel; the hotels of Interlaken supplied the congregation
Current Status: Owned by the Evangelische Kirchgemeinde Gsteig-Interlaken; Anglican summer services continue under the Intercontinental Church Society
Sources
Paul Schniewind, Anglicans in Switzerland, Past and Present (pp. 89–90, and p. 7 for Morrell and Biber)
“History”, St Ursula’s Church, Berne — the Anglican church in the Swiss capital
“Interlaken & Grindelwald”, Intercontinental Church Society
The Anglican Church Magazine, 1900, as quoted by Schniewind