This page has the latest thought from our Vicar Marcus, followed by the latest Diocesan letter.
Vicar’s Thought for the month of May 2025
Easter is past and Pentecost is yet to come. The Easter story is one of tragedy and triumph, inviting our repentance and offering us redemption. If it is true it changes everything. If not, it changes nothing. The Easter story has left us with a choice; we either accept it, and our lives should change, or we don’t and we put the story out of mind until next year.
Try to imagine what our lives would look like if it is true. I like the phrase that begins the rule of the lay Franciscans which is to live ‘observing the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ by following the example of St. Francis of Assisi who made Christ the inspiration and the centre of his life with God and people’. This putting Jesus at the centre is getting to know about Jesus and getting to know Him by “devoting ourselves especially to careful reading of the gospel, going from gospel to life and life to gospel”.
That is reading the Gospels with commentaries, reading about lives that have been changed by knowing Jesus, and coming to know Jesus ourselves through prayer and worship. For us this is a holy experiment, the ingredients of which are faith, hope and love, the practice of which opens us up to “Jesus, the gift of the Father’s love”.
Marcus
Letter for May 2025 from the Archdeacon of Ludlow
Dear friends
I seem to live in overlaps and borderlands. What do I mean? Well, our diocese is one that occupies space between Wales and England, criss-crossing the border. We exist (largely) in two counties – Shropshire and Herefordshire (not overlooking our parishes in Monmouthshire, Powys, Worcestershire, and Telford & Wrekin). I live and serve in Shropshire, a county that straddles two dioceses: Hereford in the south and Lichfield in the north.
The Ludlow Archdeaconry is in the overlap, the centre of the Venn diagram.
Then there’s my role as Archdeacon. My colleague, Archdeacon Derek, and I minister in the overlap. We represent parishes to those working in the Bishop’s Office and the Diocesan Office and vice versa. We provide a link between multiple overlapping groups and individuals.
As Christians we all live in the overlap. We are already saved by grace, we are being saved and sustained by grace, and one day we shall be fully saved by grace when Christ returns. God’s kingdom of justice and joy has already begun with Christ’s first coming, his death, resurrection, and ascension, and one day it will fully begin at his return. We are citizens of the nation in which we live, and we are citizens of heaven.
We live in the Now and the Not Yet, the time between.
This month marks 80 years since VE Day, Victory in Europe Day, when the evil of Nazism was defeated in Europe. My late mother would tell me stories of how she and her friends, children at the beginning of the war and teenagers at its end, celebrated with overwhelming relief. We remember with thankfulness the courage and sacrifice of all those who served at home and abroad to win the fight for freedom against Nazi tyranny.
But that wasn’t the end of the war. In Burma, Singapore, and other places, the war raged on as fiercely and cruelly as ever. VJ Day in August 1945 finally brought hostilities to an end. The troops still fighting between May and August, and their families, often felt overlooked in the celebrations of VE Day. They were existing in the overlap.
This season of the Church’s year is the time in between. We are between Easter Day and Pentecost. We have celebrated the joy of the resurrection, and we await the celebration of the coming of the Holy Spirit in power to set the Church alight in love and witness.
I wonder how that idea of living in the overlap, grounded in the past and moving to the future, knowing that we and all our times are held in the hands of our unchanging and faithful God, could help us as we continue on our pilgrimage?
The Ven Dr Fiona Gibson