Vicar's letter
| Identities and our Parish |
Vicar's letter |
| Today we all live with several identities, several
senses of who we are. Many of us have our place at work,
we have our families - sometimes in some complexity,
the street or area we live in, we are citizens of
Maidstone, Kent, England, the U.K., Europe, the world.
Part of living well is negotiating these identities well. A Church of England parish is a geographical area. Parish boundaries can only be changed by an Order in Council which requires the Queen's assent. The parish priest is above all required to gather a congregation to celebrate the Eucharist each Sunday and together to serve those who live in the parish as well as possible. Our parish has three congregations; All Saints, St Philip's and St Stephen's. It is together, using our distinctiveness, that we seek to serve by loving God and our neighbour, those who live in our parish. We are a small group compared with the 21,000 or so who live in our parish; we serve as we are able, working with others of good will in our neighbourhood. Our parish belongs also to Maidstone Deanery, Maidstone Archdeaconry and Canterbury Diocese as well as the Church of England, the Anglican Communion, the world wide church. Identities are greatly influenced, if we are not careful, by our neighbours. To be Church of England can emphasise not being Roman Catholic or Baptist; to be St Philip's by not being All Saints. At its best we feel good about being All Saints, St Philip's, St Stephen's and we are positive about having good collaborative relationships with each other as together we seek to serve our parish. New relationships emerge. The diocese is calling us to enter into a more collaborative relationship with neighbouring parishes. I hope this will, in our case, be with other parishes in the South of Maidstone; St Martin's, Loose with which we already have a number of links. The church that served all the people of Maidstone from around 650 until 1395 was on the present site of All Saints Church but it was called St Mary's. The name was changed when Archbishop Courtenay pulled down St Mary's to make way for his new collegiate church of All Saints. From the 8th to 11th centuries St Mary's was a minster church; several priests lived near the church, worshipped together on week days and on Sundays went out to seventeen churches from Detailing to Goudhurst to preside at the Eucharist and serve the then vastly smaller numbers of people living in those villages. Maidstone itself probably had a population of only around a thousand people. This year the feast of St Mary falls on a Sunday, 15th August. It seems, then, a particularly good occasion on which to gather together as a parish in a Joint Parish Eucharist at 10.00am on the site of St Mary's Church, to listen, as Mary did, to God's call and seek God's grace to obey that call to love God and our neighbour in the particular circumstances of our lives. Christopher Morgan – Jones
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