Our Vicar

Bishop Rose and Archdeacon Will are pleased to announce that the Revd Doctor Lesley Hardy was Licensed as Priest in Charge of the Little Stour Benefice on Tuesday 1st August at St Mary the Virgin church, Wingham.

Lesley will work Monday, Tuesday, Friday and Sundays and with her husband Will will live in the Vicarage in Littlebourne. If you are looking for spiritual guidance or need help, please click here to email her or call her on 01227531194. 

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. 

For weddings/confirmation/baptisms click the link.

May – God has gone up with a merry note! 

The merry month of May sees the church continue in its celebration of Easter and the days that follow with the festival of the Ascension, traditionally celebrated on a Thursday, the fortieth day of Easter, which this year falls on May 9th.  This day marks the ‘going up’ or ‘ascension’ of Jesus into Heaven and has been important to the church since its earliest days.  

The Ascension story is in some ways about parting. After his resurrection Jesus had appeared to his disciples on many occasions and spent time talking with them and teaching; in one of my favourite accounts, sitting with them to eat a breakfast of barbequed fish and honeycomb on the shores of the Lake of Galilee. Now though, He was leaving, returning to heaven, or so it seemed. The disciples gathered on a hillside near Jerusalem and watched amazed as Jesus was ‘lifted up’ and a cloud ‘took him out of sight’.  Bemused, they stood around still craning their necks upwards, trying to keep sight of the Lord for as long as possible until two angels appeared to tell them that they didn’t need to look any longer because, after all, Jesus would be coming back. It’s a strange, simple description of events leaving a lot unsaid or open to our imaginations.  

Over the centuries though art has filled the gap offering depictions which capture the juxtaposition of the deeply spiritual and material, the heavenly and the matter of fact, which come together in this rather lovely account. 

One of the earliest of these depictions, known as the ‘Reidersche Tafel’ is an ivory plaque dated to about AD400. It shows Jesus stepping up towards heaven on the clouds, as if they were stepping stones, whilst grasping a hand (the hand of God?) which descends from the skies and pulls him up, as if over a style or steep hill. By the Middle Ages though the Ascension began to be represented in illuminated manuscripts and paintings in a different way, from the viewpoint of the disciples, looking up.  All that’s left to be seen are Jesus’ feet disappearing from the earth, dangling from beneath the clouds. In York Minster there is a ceiling boss which cleverly plays on this idea showing the soles of Jesus’ feet as if viewed directly from below. 

For Christians there is of course no real parting. St Augustine of Hippo in a sermon of around the same time as the Reidersche Ivory was made, wrote:  While in heaven he is also with us; and we while on earth are with him. As the paintings of his feet suggest Jesus Christ is to be found in all things heavenly and earthly, even in desperately craning necks and dangling feet. 

Please join us at the ancient church of St Mary’s Stodmarsh for an evening service for Ascension Day at 5pm on Thursday May 9th 

Rev Lesley