Y’all know I’m all about useful alternatives in church life. And history. And to a lesser degree, Georgia, where you’ll still find tin-roofed houses. Not tin really but corregated iron: a cheap, if down-market, resource.
Thus I was tickled to discover this British (and elsewhere) use of “tin tabernacles”: buildings meant to be temporary home for new congregations — some are now a century or more old, though few that survive are still used as churches. A few that do are Unitarian. They were made from kits, and could be quite decorative.
But there was no article about them at Wikipedia, so I just wrote one, my first.
If you know anything about them, go and edit or add to my stub of an article.
The brick Anglican church I went to when I was a teenager had a daughter church down the road that was built in the late 19th century when the working class population of that area started to increase. It was a tin tabernacle ‘temporary building.’ It is still there, more than 100 years later. (I’ve just found the website, but no pictures of the external of the tin tabernacle, Christ the King I’m afraid http://www.churches.lichfield.anglican.org/walsall/rushall/)
See my website http://www.tintabernacles.com
[Readers: this site promotes the sale of a book — ordinarily counter to my informal no-soliciting rule, but it seems to be such a good book on the subject. So good that an unsellable shelf-worn copy wouldn’t be an unwelcome addition to my collection.]