The old communion table has now been retrieved from storage and placed in our vestry/meeting room. This is perhaps the oldest relic from the original church chapel at Hale. This had been given to the original school chapel when it opened in 1899 by a member of the parent church, Bowdon Downs. In 1914 when the “new” church was opened (the present building) a new communion table was installed, and the old one was returned to Bowdon Downs. When the Downs church closed, it was given to Trinity Presbyterian church in Bowdon for use by the Women's Guild – this was a couple of years before the union in 1972. When the Bowdon congregation transferred to Hale, the Guild brought it back to stay in the Round Room in the old part of the buildings. In 2014 it was briefly returned to the Hall, which was the original chapel, when it was used for services during the main church refurbishment, becoming once again the centre of worship, where it began.
The table has one peculiarity: it may seem a nice uniform oval, but it actually has no axis of symmetry at all. This is because the carvings show thirteen faces evenly spaced around the table, the number gathered together at the last supper.
(by Jim McKnight, originally published in Vision Update issue 23, Jun 2022)