There is something poignant about the photograph at the top of this page, because as you can see this is a quite magnificent building, a great 15th century Perpendicular rebuilding of what must have been a very fine 13th century church, from which the pinnacles at the east end of the chancel survive. The chancel in particular is a delight, with those beautiful windows ranging on the north and south sides. We came here in the spring, and the graveyard was lovely around the mighty pile. The tower is formidable, a powerful structure telescoping skywards, crowned by 20th century battlements and pinnacles, proud and glorious. A fitting church for its bold patron Saint, who is recalled by the monograms around the base.

What it is like inside I cannot tell you, and no one else has been able to tell me. Great Cressingham is one of the least welcoming churches in East Anglia, one of the most unfriendly English parish churches I've come across. It is not open. There is no keyholder notice. There are hardly any notices at all. Instead, an ugly metal chain and padlock are stretched across the medieval doors, a latch screwed into the ancient wood. At first, I wondered if the church had fallen into disuse, but I could not believe that a village the size of Great Cressingham could not support a parish church.

And in any case, the building must still be in use for something, for a noticeboard beside the door had a laminated card typical of the early years of the 21st century: Caution, uneven floor, danger of tripping. I wondered at first if the whole building was such a hazard that the churchwardens didn't dare risk anyone else entering, for fear that those wolves and leeches of the modern age, the no-win-no-fee solicitors, would descend, to tear the PCC to pieces, or to suck it dry for compensation. But as it turned out, this is an unlikely reason.

Great Cressingham is one of the Wayland Parishes. A great injection of European money was made in the late 1990s to try and revive the economy in this, the poorest part of East Anglia. Mostly, this has been very successful; the Wayland Initiative has brought new life to the town of Watton, lifting it from a moribund state to being a lively, pretty place again. Part of the initiative was to encourage tourism, and the local authority worked with the area's parish churches to develop church trails, tours and the like. It is possible to walk into the office in Watton, and they will tell you the interesting features of each church, where to find a key, and who to contact if you want to be shown around. Except, unfortunately, at Great Cressingham. They're a funny lot up there, the lady in the Wayland Initiative Office said. They just don't like people going inside.

This is bad for all sorts of reasons. For a start, it means that the parish simply isn't doing its job. Christ's injunction for us to welcome the stranger within the gate is hardly fulfilled by this ugly lock and chain. I wonder how a foreign visitor might feel, returning to the parish of his ancestors, hoping at least to see the War Memorial inside the church. And I know that this building has medieval survivals in the form of some interesting glass, but it is not considered that you and I should see them. I wonder if the parish has received any public money for the upkeep of the building? It should be a condition of all grant aid that the church is accessible to the public at all reasonable times.

It may well be that Great Cressingham is a thriving parish, and this church is packed to the gunwales three times every Sunday. Perhaps they actually don't need to be open as an act of witness to strangers, pilgrims and those with a thirst for a sense of the spiritual. Indeed, perhaps they have no room to welcome the tax collectors and sinners who might respond to the sense of the numinous they'd find by wandering into this building on their own, on a weekday.

But I suspect that this isn't so. The great majority of Norfolk's medieval churches are open to visitors every day. The Church of England knows the power of an open church, knows that it is its greatest act of witness, and in any case works very hard in this county ministering to all its people, Christians or not. But there are still pockets of Norfolk where the buildings are kept locked from one end of the week to the next, where the risk of Faith that an open door represents is not taken.

Instead, such benefices open their churches only for the slightly smug activities of the Sunday club, while the graveyard is left to the pagan cult of the dead, the bereaved worshipping their recent ancestors with propitiatory flowers, unable to combine this with a prayer said inside a sacred building, increasingly unaware even that this might be an appropriate thing to do.

As the years go by, the congregation gets smaller, and older, and less welcoming to strangers, hanging on to the rituals that comfort them but which otherwise serve no community devotional purpose, and are no means for sharing the faith and love and life of the parish. The building is used less and less often, eventually being abandoned altogether by people who, no doubt, bemoan the decline and fall of their congregation and shake their heads gravely at the immorality of the young of today, their lack of respect and belief.

And yet, they have not even once taken the risk of letting themselves be found by us, the strangers wondering at the God-shaped hole within ourselves, surprising a hunger to be more serious, and gravitating with it to this ground.

I may well yet be told that the parish of Great Cressingham is not at all like this. But I expect that it probably is.

The medieval parish churches of England belong to all of us, and if the current financial arrangements mean that too much responsibility falls on the local community, then those arrangements need to be changed. What does this locked fortress tell us about the hearts and minds of Christ's Church in Great Cressingham? Are we not to be trusted to enter the House of God? Ironically, the noticeboard beside the south door is headed CIVIL NOTICES. The most civil notice I could think of would be one that showed the times that the church was open, and where you could get the key when it was not.