Letter from the Rector – November 2009
November 2, 2009 by Andrew
At the end of this month, on 29th November, we shall be holding our Service of Thanksgiving to mark the inauguration of St. Andrew’s as a Minster. Over 150 invitations have been sent out to churches, city councillors and other guests to join us as the Bishop of Exeter leads what we hope will be a joyful and memorable occasion. The service is the climax to the week of activities, concerts and exhibitions described in this magazine, and we are particularly grateful to Peninsula Arts and the Local Studies Department of Plymouth Library for the considerable efforts they have put in to helping us mark this milestone in the history of St. Andrew’s.
Our church was itself founded originally out of a minster, the monks of Plympton priory setting up a church on this site in Saxon times to serve the little fishing community around Sutton harbour. Minsters in the Middle Ages were centres of Christian mission before the introduction of the parish system. Monks and evangelists would travel from them to villages and settlements of the region preaching, teaching, baptising, marrying and burying. York and Wimbourne, for instance, have ancient Minsters dating from that era.
In recent years, the term Minster has been re-introduced and bestowed upon a few churches in major cities that do not have Anglican Cathedrals, such as Stoke, Rotherham, Sunderland and Doncaster. There were plans in the 1920s for St. Andrew’s to be made into a Pro-Cathedral but these never came to fruition, and now we are delighted that the Bishop of Exeter, responding to a petition by the city council, has decided to declare us a Minster as part of the 1100th anniversary celebrations of the Diocese in order to recognise the significance of Plymouth in the life of the Diocese and the region.
The original purpose of the minster, to proclaim the Christian gospel in the locality, provides a great model for us as we grow into being the minster church in our own day. For many in our society the Christian faith seems obscure or outdated. Others have had an experience of church life which is far removed from the joyous discovery of the first disciples that we read about in the New Testament. The challenge is for today’s church to live and preach the good news of Jesus with a relevance and imagination that makes people aware of the call of God on their lives. That remains the desire at the heart of all our activities, to make known what the apostle Paul calls ‘the unsearchable riches of Christ’.
Nick McKinnel