Councillor the Rev Paul Flowers is Superintendent Minister of the Bradford-Great Horton Methodist Circuit and councillor for Great Horton Ward. He writes in a personal capacity.

Hardly a week seems to go by without at least one or two letters in the Telegraph & Argus about the Odeon. It manages to provoke support and evoke memories whilst it remains mothballed - a standing rebuke to the ghosts of the past and the arguments of the present. Why does it retain such fascination?

The Swiss-born psychiatrist Elizabeth Kubler Ross wrote extensively about the ways in which we approach death and dying.

She suggested that as individuals we go through five psychological stages of dying: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and finally acceptance. Those of us who have watched a loved one in the final stages of their lives, or who have contemplated our own mortality in any depth, will be familiar with these stages and identify with them.

I wonder if they are also appropriate to an entire community as it faces up to the death of one reality and the painful birth of another?

The Sunday Observer newspaper recently carried a supplement which reminded us that Bradford has more listed buildings than any other regional city in Britain. Indeed the writer of the piece waxed lyrical about the splendid heritage which is now being revealed afresh behind the tawdry and jerrybuilt excesses of the 1960s.

She wrote that this process was "symbolic of a city on the brink of greatness (which was) finally coming to terms with its past, yet with its arms open wide to its future". Is this so much purple prose or the reality that we actually perceive?

I have enormous respect for those who have defended the Odeon and have wanted it to be reinstated or reused in some way. They are engaging and dedicated people.

The question which I feel the need to pose to them is this: in the midst of so much grandeur in listed buildings in the city and the persistent opinion of English Heritage that the Odeon is of little or no real architectural merit, why go on?

I think the answer lies not in the dignified campaign of its champions but in the collective desire of so many to cling to the past out of fear for what the future may bring.

Like a person who is dying, or those of us who sit and watch, we would rather that the whole process be halted, stopped in its tracks, ended. But inexorably it grinds to its inevitable conclusion. When we finally accept reality we often find that we are at peace and calmly able to move into the future. A similar process needs to occur in Bradford with the Odeon.

The building itself is of little consequence - it is what it stands for as a symbol of the past that worries us. We should have the courage to let it go - to let it die - in order that we might embrace a better future.