Just think of the stories an old church would tell if it could talk. From the characters who once sat in the pews to the weddings, baptisms and funerals that took place within the four walls. That’s what I was thinking when I visited Malaysia last year only to discover a treasure trove of British colonial-era churches — the sort of historic churches you wouldn’t expect in Southeast Asia.
One of those churches was Christ Church in Melaka, which until last year was called Malacca, as in the famed Straits of Malacca. The church, built for a Dutch Reformed congregation, faces a square fronted by other relics of colonialism, including the mid-17th century Stadthuys (literally Dutch for city hall).
Erected more than a hundred years after the Dutch acquired this part of present-day Malaysia from Portugal in 1641, Christ Church wouldn’t become an Anglican house of worship until 1838. By then, the British East India Company had controlled Malacca for 13 years.
Despite construction having taken 13 years (1753-1776) the church is elegantly simple with its most notable features being the Nantucket red exterior — the same color is found in colonial buildings from the same era in the West Indies — and Dutch-style gambrel roof that wouldn’t be out of place in the Netherlands.
The interior is overrun by centuries of clutter that include church monuments on the walls and tombstones with their barely legible inscriptions in the floor to modern hymnals, liturgy books and even a ladder and cleaning supplies. Among the monuments…
… Read More
Click Read More to read the rest of the story from our content source/partners – The Christian Post.