Sunday Worship - Our Ionian Service

Our Parish is blessed with having not one but two Grade One Listed Churches.  In financial terms, especially when it comes to repair and upkeep, this may sometimes feel like a burden on the community, but perhaps we should view this more as a privilege?  Such historic and ancient buildings are an important part of our heritage and should be celebrated.

Each church has its own identity.  Different in the nature of its location and especially different in its interior layout.  But our worship remains the same. 

One other commonality is that as a Parish we share our Priest – The Rev’d Dawn who is responsible not only for St Marys and Upper Hardres, but also four other churches –Elmsted, Hastingleigh, Waltham and Petham.

The demands on her time means that Dawn cannot physically be at each of these churches every Sunday.  Inevitably, this impacts on the regularity and nature of services at each church.

St Marys Stelling, now has a Lay-Led ‘Ionian service’ on the first Sunday of the month, with Family Communion on the 3^rd Sunday.  When there is a 5^th Sunday in the month, there is a Benefice Service and each church hosts this by rotation.

What is an Ionian Service I hear you all ask.   Described as an informal Celtic service which draws on the Wild Goose liturgy, it has its roots In Celtic Christianity, where the wild goose has deep ancient roots as a symbol of the Holy Spirit. Its symbolism, from Celtic lore, reflects the untamed nature of God’s spirit.  “The Wild Goose” or in Gealic “Ah Geadh-Glas”.

 Hopefully you will find the following article interesting – and perhaps we will see you at our next Ionian Service, (or family communion), after which as usual we will be catching up with each other over tea, coffee and cake! 

On a remote Scottish island, Christian community quietly gave birth to a new style of worship — one that has since found its way into thousands of Church of England parishes across the country.

Iona is a small island off the west coast of Scotland, barely 3 miles long, where the Atlantic wind cuts sharp and the sky feels enormous. It has been a place of pilgrimage for over a thousand years, ever since the Irish monk Columba landed here in 563 AD and founded a monastery that would go on to evangelise much of Scotland and northern England. Its founder, George MacLeod, described it as a "thin place" — somewhere the membrane between the material world and the spiritual one feels almost see-through.

It was on this ancient, windswept island that one of the most significant quiet revolutions in modern British church worship began — one that has shaped the Sunday experience of congregations from Cornwall to Cumbria, from Devon village churches to busy urban parishes in Leeds and Manchester.

George MacLeod and the Birth of the Community:   George MacLeod was a decorated First World War veteran turned Church of Scotland minister, working in Govan — one of the most deprived areas of Depression-era Glasgow. He became increasingly disturbed by what he saw as a fatal disconnect between the Church and ordinary people, and felt that church had retreated into its own language and comfortable rituals, becoming something done at people rather than with them.

In 1938, he took a group of unemployed craftsmen and trainee ministers to Iona and set them to work rebuilding the ruins of the medieval Abbey together. The point was the togetherness itself: clergy and workers, side by side, eating, working, and worshipping as one. The physical rebuilding was meant to symbolise the rebuilding of the bond between church and community.

The Iona Community that grew from this experiment was officially a project of the Church of Scotland, but MacLeod had broader ecumenical ambitions from the start. Today it has around 280 full members and more than 2,000 associate members worldwide, drawn from across the Christian traditions — Presbyterian, Anglican, Catholic, Quaker and beyond.

What Iona Worship Looks Like:   The atmosphere is deliberately welcoming and non-hierarchical. There is no sense that you need to know the right words or carry the right level of theological literacy to belong. Services blend spoken liturgy with simple sung responses that anyone can pick up within moments.  Prayers are direct and grounded, connecting faith to the realities of everyday life — work, relationships, justice, doubt.

The Wild Goose and Its Songs:   The force that carried Iona-style worship beyond the island and into the wider church was music — specifically the work of the Wild Goose Resource Group, founded in 1987 by John L. Bell and Graham Maule. The Wild Goose is a Celtic symbol of the Holy Spirit: untameable, surprising, impossible to confine.

Bell and Maule created songs that were immediate and honest, musically accessible without being trivial, and rooted in scripture while engaging with the messiness of real human experience. Many were short, repeated refrains — needing no hymn book — that a congregation could pick up in moments. Their influence has been enormous. John Bell was awarded the Thomas Cranmer Award for Worship by the Archbishop of Canterbury in 2018 — a recognition, from the very heart of the Church of England, of the profound impact Iona's musical legacy has had on Anglican worship.

From Scotland to the English Parish:   A Church of England parish using Iona-style worship might not necessarily call it that. It might simply describe its evening service as "informal" or its midweek gathering as "contemplative." But the fingerprints are recognisable: the sung Kyrie the congregation repeats without books, the prayer for justice that names specific situations in the world, the simple Celtic blessing at the close, the sense that everyone present — young, old, new, and seasoned — is equally welcome.

For many congregations seeking to reach people alienated by formal religious language, or wanting worship that holds together social engagement and spiritual depth, the Iona approach has been revelatory. It offers a way of being church that is rooted in ancient tradition yet alive to the present moment — one that takes seriously both the needs of the individual soul and the demands of a broken world.

St Mary’s Church Team