Video for June 4th, 2026
Hello everyone and welcome to this week’s video. I’m recording this at the end of one of the pilgrimages to mark our 1350th anniversary year as a diocese. We have walked from St. Dubricius, Hamnish to Leominster where St Eadfrith founded the priory in 660.
One of my distant cousins did extensive genealogical research tracing my family’s ancestry back into the 15th and 16th centuries. My great great grandparents, John and Betsy Caswell Davies were from Leintwardine and buried in Almeley just before the first world war. John was descended from the wonderfully named Pyefinches of Presteigne. If you go into the eastern entrance to the churchyard there you pass a rather splendid table tomb to a John Pyfinch who I think may be something like my great, great, great, great, great uncle! Going even further back, one of my direct ancestors Richard Rodd (possibly my great x9 grandfather) built Rodd House near Presteigne in the early 17th century. Having these local links means a lot.
Similarly, it is good to reflect on our shared Christian history. It isn’t too hard to trace Eadfrith right back to the earliest Christian communities that sprung up in Rome in the 1st century. These are the Romans St. Paul writes to. During the second century Rome became a major centre of western Christianity, especially for the Latin speaking provinces. As early as the third century the faith spread through the army to Roman towns and military centres in Britain. British bishops attended the Council of Arles in 314. After the collapse of Roman administration in 410, Christianity survived in western Brittonic regions like Wales and Cornwall, often preserved by the ruling classes. Pushed to the fringes as the pagan Anglo-Saxons moved west, it took a further missionary effort by Eadfrith and others to bring faith back. He was a missionary monk from Lindisfarne a monastery founded by Aidan in 635, but whose roots were in the Celtic Christianity of Ireland and Iona, whose monastery was founded by Columba in 563.
Eadfrith’s mission was primarily to the Saxon tribe of the Magonsaete in Western Mercia whose area roughly corresponds to the area of the diocese today. The diocese was founded sixteen years after the foundation of this priory with Putta as its Bishop. Perhaps I should describe myself as the Bishop of the Magonsaete rather than Hereford? We predate the foundation of England. The rest, as they say, is history!
Eadfrith, alongside Dubricius and Milburga have been the inspiration for the Three Saint’s fellowship, an informal dispersed community which is just getting going in the diocese. It aims to encourage a simple, sustainable rhythm of Christian life around our three diocesan virtues of prayerfulness, Christlikeness and engagement. It is particularly relevant as our culture seems to evolve into a more clearly post-Christian, quasi pagan place. We can learn from the practices and priorities of the distant past to encourage us in our faithfulness to Christ today. This connection to our own spiritual roots echoes the search for identity rooted in something more than consumerism that marks much contemporary experience. Sadly, such a search for identity often finds its expression in an ugly nationalism defining itself against the other.
Identification with place is a characteristic part of Anglican identity. Every blade of grass is in someone’s parish. Commitment to our parish churches is not restricted to those who worship in them but shared by the whole community. They were all built with the community in mind and for the community’s use. These links are important bridges between those who would identify as Christians and those who don’t – which is now about 50% of the population, even here, according to census figures. We can no longer assume that everyone is a Christian as the Book of Common Prayer does. People have become much bolder in a non-christian identification than 50 years ago when most people probably put CofE on their hospital admission form as a matter of course.
We are a church with a renewed imperative to evangelisation. This is not the province of one tradition of the church, nor just for the hyper keen, but for all of us. “Go into all the world and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you”, said Jesus in the Great Commission in Matthew 28. That for Eadfrith included the Magonsaete. We, the descendants of the Magonsaete by God’s grace need to do the same.
+Richard