"The Church is mission" and its missionaries are the baptised faithful of God who are called to that exercise just as they are called to be saints, as St Paul states (ICor1.2)

Mission requires the opportunity to be able to move from place to place easily, and it also requires a base to provide stability, in a home, to which the missionaries may return, God willing, to re-charge their batteries and to help them on their way to becoming saints as well.

The background to our discourse this morning is the 200 years from the middle of the fourth century when St Patrick left behind a Christian presence on these shores and moved, eventually, to Ireland. From there Columba took the faith to Iona and made that a secure base from which to convert Scotland. From Iona, Aidan and company were sent to begin the work of evangelising England which had by that time lost the faith, and they set up a base on the Island of Lindisfarne. It is from there that the north of England was again won for Christ

Nearly all the missions carried out in what our history books mendaciously call "the Dark Ages" -- between the years 600 and 1100 -- had some connection with the

Holy Island. The base is easy to locate on the map and in history, but its missionary sons and daughter are so numerous that it is not so easy to locate all of them.

Some are well known even today. We are honoured to have as our patron St Aidan, who as one of the founding fathers of Lindisfarne, arrived there with the first consignment of Irish monks from Iona in 635. They came at the invitation of King Oswald who was preparing to re-evangelise his Northumbrian kingdom after the upheavals of warfare. This was achieved, as always, by planting first a monastery and this in time developed a school for training English boys which eventually produced the second generation of missionaries. Among these were the blood-brothers Chad and Cedd who carried on the work in the north and in middle and eastern England. St Chad had a comparatively short life, but the importance of his work cannot be mistaken. He travelled widely in the midlands and north -- tradition has one stop not far away from here at Chadkirk near Stockport -- and Jenny Austerberry says of him "The picture which Bede gives of St Chad was of a quiet, gentle man, a man of great charm, wide sympathies, indefatigable energy, and a sincere faith. A man who went quietly about his work, content to serve wherever he was called, and to minister to all with whom he came into contact".("Chad, bishop and saint" page 15)

But perhaps it is true to say that the greatest of this generation of missionaries was St Cuthbert who was a native Anglo-Saxon and trained in one of the many daughter houses of Lindisfarne, at Melrose, which is now in Scotland. The prior there was Eata who had been trained by Aidan, and when Eata was made bishop of Lindisfarne, Cuthbert went with him as prior. He was already well-known for his personal holiness and like Aidan before him, he withdrew to live the life of a hermit on the nearby island of the Inner Farne. Much against his will, Cuthbert eventually agreed to follow Eata as Bishop, but two years of constant travelling warned him that his end was near and he again retired of the Farne Island he loved so well. He was buried in the Church on Lindisfarne in 698 and eleven years later, when his coffin was opened, his body was discovered to be undecayed. It was placed in a wooden reliquary but when the Island was threatened by the Danes, it was removed for safety and for many years was transported around northern England by faithful monks, until at last it came to rest in Durham, where, surprisingly, it survived the Reformation and remains to this day.

One of the early missionaries who seemingly had no connection with Lindisfarne was St Paulinus. He came to Kent from Italy with the second batch of Benedictine monks to help St Augustine and he was sent north as Queen Ethelburga’s chaplain and eventually he baptised her husband King Edwin in a wooden church at York at Pascha in 627/8. He spent some time touring the north, baptising continuously, accompanied by his faithful deacon, James, and he is noted for having built a stone church in Lincoln. Paulinus wrongly decided there was no future for the faith in the north after Edwin’s defeat by the Welsh in 633, and he became Bishop of Rochester for the rest of his life. Seemingly, the Irish way of monasticism had no attraction for one who had been trained as a Benedictine in Rome.

The Irish way of living the religious life may have been somewhat primitive, but it was all embracing and provided opportunities for women as well as men. The first woman to be clothed as a nun in the Northumbrian Kingdom, was Heiu at a daughter-house of Lindisfarne at Hartlepool. She died in 657. Another foundation, this time in Scotland, at Coldingham, had as its first Abbess, St Ebba who was King Oswald’s sister and St Hild was the first Abbess of what became a double monastery of men and women in Whitby also in 657. This soon became recognised as one of the

foremost monasteries in England, being renowned for its strict discipline and high standard of education. No less than five future bishops were trained there and Hild was respectfully known to all as "Mother".

In 663, Hild hosted the famous Synod of Whitby which brought to an end the calendar schism between the Celtic and the Anglo-Saxon Churches in England. At first, she supported the Celts under whom she had been trained, but later she accepted the Synod’s decision to adopt the Roman/Byzantine Pascalion. Hild died on 17 November 680 after a long illness. During her time as Abbess, the monk known as the father of English poetry, Caedmon, wrote wonderful religious poems for the first time in the English language at Whitby.

About the same period, the monk known as the father of English Prose and History, the Venerable Bede, was busy with his life’s work. He was born in 673 and at the age of seven was entrusted to the first Abbot of Jarrow, St Benedict Biscop. He remained in the monastery and when he was thirty, he was ordained a priest. Later he wrote:--"From the time of my receiving the priesthood until my 59th year, I have worked, both for my own benefit and for that of my brethren, to compile short extracts from the works of the Venerable Fathers on Holy Scripture, and to comment on their meaning and interpretation. And while I have observed the regular discipline and sung the services daily in the Church, my chief delight has been in study, teaching and writing." In addition to 25 commentaries on Holy Scripture, he wrote his famous "History of the English Church and People", together with several lives of English Saints and other works, all of which have come down to us.

Whilst on the subject of the arts, mention must be made of the Lindisfarne Gospels which were produced about 698 and which show the extraordinary skill which the monks attained in the making of books. The scribe was a monk named Eadfrith who became Bishop there in that year. The production of such precious objects -- books, crosses, sculptured stone etc -- was regarded by the monks as a form of devotion. Some idea of the resources available to the monastery can be seen from the fact that the famous Gospel book contains 258 pages which would require about 130 calf-hides. (It is worth going into the new British Library near Euston Station to see this example of our heritage, the original Lindisfarne Gospels, now on display there in all its original glory).

The mission of the Church to the North brought the faith; it brought peace (for a short while until the Normans came); it brought education and culture, and for all this we can and must, give thanks. But our forebears were not just concerned with this land; they were minded to send missionaries to northern Europe as well. St Wilfrid began this trend almost by accident by preaching in Fresia on his way to appeal to the Pope in 681, after Archbishop Theodore had divided his diocese of York without any consultation. (This was not the Archbishop being high-handed so much as pressing on hurriedly with his great plan of bringing to the Church badly-needed organisation to replace the chaos. A Greek, appointed as a caretaker archbishop in 668 when himself was an old man, saw no reason to delay his great reform by the nicety of consultation).

Ten years later, more missionaries from these parts went back to Fresia under St Willibrord and though he himself did not see much success, his work paved the way for one hundred years of English pioneering work on the continent of Europe, and Willibrord is much better known there than he is in England.

The Church is mission, and when that mission is persued with love and vigour, saints appear and miracles happen. Under God, the inspired Irish missionaries of the so-called "Dark Ages" in fact radiated a dawn-like clarity of light in a darkening world. Not only did the widespread preaching of the Faith and Word of God flourish, but with it went scholarship and learning, fine arts and literature, produced by careful attention to God and careful attention to His Creation, and carried out with craftmanship and persistence. Sadly, because so much of their achievements were swept away after 1066, most of our fellow countrymen and women do not realise the importance of our valuable heritage from those 500 years when the true Faith flourished in this land.