Our Vicar

Rev Lesley joined us in August 2024, she works part- time currently her normal working days are Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Sundays. She lives with her husband Will will live in the Rectory in Littlebourne. 

If you are looking for spiritual guidance or need help, please click here to email her or call her on 01227531194 or the Benefice Office on 07463949232.

If it is to do with an individual church, please look at the Our five churches page to allow you to contact the relevant church wardens. 

My thoughts for the month!

‘The Least of All Believers’-St Patrick March 17th

My name is Patrick. I am a sinner, a simple country person, and the least of all believers. I am looked down upon by many.

These are the opening words of the ‘Confessio’ (a sort of autobiographical reflection) of St Patrick, perhaps the most famous of all British saints. Patrick lived in turbulent times at the very end of Roman rule in Britain when things were beginning to fall apart. As he tells us he was born in Britain to a respectable Romano-British family who were Christian. As a teenager though young Patrick was captured by Irish raiders and taken to work there as a slave. After six years an opportunity for escape arose. Patrick travelled hundreds of miles, returning to Britain and then travelling to Europe to study and become a priest.

A few years after his happy return though he had a dream in which he was brought a letter by a man named Victoricus. As he opened the letter it was as if he heard the voices of people he had known in Ireland calling to him, ‘come back to us holy servant boy and walk among us again!’ Patrick saw this as God’s message. Despite all he had gone through there he returned to Ireland and spent himself for the rest of his life travelling, persuading and working wonders with little rest amongst the Irish Lords and People. He wrote, ‘Never before did they know of God except to serve idols and unclean things. But now, they have become the people of the Lord, and are called children of God.’ So, the Irish came to believe the Gospel and later would keep it safe when much of the rest of Britain had forgotten it. There’s much more to say about Patrick-and his generous, poetic and faithful heart and much to celebrate on St Patrick’s Day. But Patrick, ‘the least of all believers’ would himself would I think point us not to himself but to rather to wonder and turn in love to God, whom loved and served.

Rev Lesley

The story of the Three Kings- January 2026

Sitting down to write this I am thinking about what will happen in this year to come. I am reminded though that, within the deep winter of January, we have a timeless and golden gift that can help us remain grounded and hopeful: the story of the three kings.

The kings are careful watchers of the future. I imagine them necks bent, searching the skies for years, trying to read the intention of the heavens- without perhaps expecting things really to change. But they’re so wrong! One night, as we imagine, they see a star which pushes them into action and everything changes. They get up and leave their safety and their beautiful predictions to travel across arid plains, mountains and bandit infested wildness.

What they find when they arrive was something more wonderful than they could ever have predicted. God Himself was waiting for them. Heaven was on earth, and earth must have felt like heaven! Everything was different now. In a rather human way, the kings still give the child the gifts they have chosen - gold for a king, frankincense as a holy offering and Myrrh as a balm. Perhaps they glimpsed something of the future then- but not its full nature. Then they set off home, back to their lives -‘by another road’-but utterly changed by what they had seen.

This is a Gospel story for us to ‘ponder in our hearts’. We too can be looking for the sacred in our world and ready to set out to find it -I believe that if we do what we find will be wonderful.

Rev Lesley Hardy