Crumbs from the Table

Our family recently visited Ripon in Yorkshire, an historic town associated with a figure called Wilfrid. On our visit to the Cathedral, it turned out that there was no biography available in the Cathedral shop, so I am minded to write my own. While this history is full of unfamiliar roles and concepts, nevertheless, these were our, albeit imperfect, Christian forefathers. Paul, in 1 Corinthians 3, warns of "boasting in men" and then goes on to say, "All things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future -- all are yours, and you are Christ's, and Christ is God's." It is in that spirit that I have penned the present brief life of Wilfrid of Ripon. The 600s is a long time ago, and at that time the map of our country looked quite different to the way it looks today. Just 200 years earlier, settlers (the Angles, Saxons and Jutes) had sailed across the North Sea from what is now Germany, Denmark and the...

The Anglo-Saxons had been Christianised in the 500s and 600s by Irish missionaries from the north, and from Roman (and Frankish) missionaries from the south. Thus, these formerly pagan settlers from what is now Germany and the Netherlands came to profess Christ, and embraced the gospel.  This led, in the late 600s and into the 700s, to a missionary movement from what we would call England back to the ancestral homeland of the newly converted Anglo-Saxons. In other words, having themselves turned to worship the true and living God, the Anglo-Saxons had a desire to bring that same gospel to their ancestors still living on the continent of Europe.  Two names stand out among the many Anglo-Saxon missionaries.  The first is Willibrord . He hailed from Northumbria, and arrived in Frisia (Netherlands) in 690. He laboured among the Frisian people for many decades, and saw fruit from his labours, but also died a martyr's death, demonstrating the ongoing hostility to the gospel on ...