When visitors from overseas visit churches in England, they are often drawn to the great and famous—St. Paul’s Cathedral, Westminster Abbey, York Minster—and rightly so. These are among Europe’s most well-known buildings, celebrated for their architectural splendor and historical significance. Yet for the majority of English Christians throughout history, these were as foreign and faraway as they are to visitors from the rest of the world today. Instead the lives of English Churchmen lives revolved around the parish church, the place where they worshipped and prayed, and engaged in countless other activities that knit together the communities in which they lived.
In his anthology of England's thousand best churches, Simon Jenkins makes the following observation about these lesser-known places of worship. “Great cathedrals may speak the history of the rich and powerful. The local parish church is like Thomas Gray’s tombstone. It tells of ‘homely joys and destiny obscure…the short and simple annals of the poor.”
This year’s Kalendar pays homage to the English parish church by featuring medieval churches of County Suffolk. Some, funded by the wealth of the late-medieval wool trade, are magnificent edifices, equal in some respects to college chapels or a small cathedral. Others are more humble, simple structures of stone and flint, whose appearance has hardly changed since the time of the Normans. Yet all were important places to those who lived and worshipped in them, looking for the means of grace and the hope of glory.
This Kalendar is dedicated to the memory of these people--by celebrating the buildings they made and the goodly heritage they bequeathed to the Anglican Churches of today. To order your copy, click the link below:
2024 Anglican Ordo Kalendar
