St. Aidan
St. Aidan
St. Aidan
Acknowledgements
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of the Bible, Anglicised edition, copyright © 1989, 1995 by the Division of Christian Education
of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by
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Scripture quotations taken from The Holy Bible, New International Version (Anglicised edition)
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Scripture taken from The Message. Copyright © 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2001, 2002. Used by
permission of NavPress Publishing Group.
‘Here be the peace of those who do your sacred will’, ‘Lord, you are my island’, ‘Day by day, dear
Lord’, and ‘Oh Aidan, you had the vision’ used by permission of The Community of Aidan and
Hilda • ‘His love that burns inside me’ used by permission of Andy Raine and Neil Arnold • Extract
from sermon ‘All gift’ used by permission of Kate Tristram • ‘You cannot heal’ used by permission
of James Percival • ‘Leave me alone with God’ used by permission of Northumbria Community
• Extract from email on ‘Spatial planning’ used by permission of Richard Summers • Quotation
from After Virtue used by permission of University of Notre Dame Press.
Every effort has been made to trace and contact copyright owners for material used in this
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Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
St Aidan’s
Way of
MissioN
Ray Simpson
with Brent Lyons-Lee
Bibliography.......................................................................... 145
Notes..................................................................................... 150
Introduction
In response to the challenge posed by ISIS (or ISIL) to the world,
Archbishop Justin Welby said:
It is also necessary, over time, that any response to ISIL and to
this global danger be undertaken on an ideological and religious
basis that sets out a more compelling vision, a greater challenge
and a more remarkable hope than that offered by ISIL… If we
struggle against a call to eternal values, however twisted and
perverted they may be, without a better story, we will fail in the
long term.1
Aidan’s seventh-century mission to English-speaking peoples
offers a better story, a more compelling vision and a greater
challenge than any I know.
The archbishop told a meeting of new monastic communities
that he could not see how the churches can bring the gospel to
the world because they are so disunited. Their disunity springs
from historical circumstances that have no relevance to people
today. The only way forward he could see would be through a
revival of some kind of monasticism that went deeper than the
divisions. Aidan inspires a contemporary missionary monasticism
whose roots are older and more organic than Benedict and which
can sow seed and bear fruit not just in enclosed places but in the
streets of the world.
Winston Churchill said:
When one generation no longer esteems its own heritage and
fails to pass the torch to its own children, it is saying in essence
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Introduction
7
1
Incarnational and
indigenous mission
Any community, church, nation that forgets its
memory becomes senile. 3
Mission has become a bad, if not uncomfortable word. It has
ridden on the back of colonial conquest. For example, the
colonists who settled in Australia created the legal fiction that
its indigenous people did not exist, in order to legitimise their
conquest. They had a disregard for the spiritual depth of the
tribes. Later, they created reservations for Aboriginal people but
forcibly ‘stole’ their children and put them in ‘the Mission’, which
was run by the government or the church. There, the gospel was
preached but abuse was modelled.
Hispanic peoples were brought the gospel by members of
religious orders who had a Bible in one hand and a sword in
the other. These missionaries called the natives ‘savages’ and
required them to renounce their beliefs, good and bad alike, and
embrace ‘the true faith’. The Anglos in North America took a
similar approach, giving rise to the conflict between cowboys and
‘Indians’. Some of them preached the gospel but failed to respect
either the Native Americans or the earth they cherished. Many
Afro-Caribbeans have inherited their faith from forebears who
were slaves. The slave owners made sure the gospel was preached
to them, but modelled slavery.
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Incarnational and indigenous mission
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St Aidan’s Way of Mission
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Incarnational and indigenous mission
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St Aidan’s Way of Mission
is divorced from the long term. Both ISIL and Pepsi Cola have
a mission: what decides their worth are the values upon which
their mission is based.
In the light of these challenges, we now look at the seventh-
century Aidan Way of Mission to see if we can learn from its
components and credentials.
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Incarnational and indigenous mission
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St Aidan’s Way of Mission
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Incarnational and indigenous mission
two ways: first, by living a way of life that reflected gospel values,
and second, by creating little ‘colonies of heaven’ that modelled
something of the kingdom of God on earth. He did not rush out
where angels fear to tread. He built up a relationship of trust with
his sponsor, King Oswald, and with Oswald’s staff and warriors.
He had learned some English from the royal refugees at Dunadd,
but, until he was fluent, Oswald, with great humility, translated
as Aidan shared the gospel at the court.
Aidan, however, was keen to go into the highways and byways.
His plan met an early hurdle that could have aborted the mission
before it had begun. Oswald gave him a royal horse. No doubt
Oswald thought this was fitting for a bishop and would enable
Aidan to reach the greatest number in the shortest time. Aidan,
however, wished to walk alongside his missionary brothers and
alongside the peasants who could not afford horses. This was
what Jesus had done on the paths of Judea. To ride a horse would
put him above ordinary people and create a cultural divide.
Risking Oswald’s anger, he refused the royal gift.
With a few brothers, Aidan traversed both town and country
on foot. The travellers turned aside to greet anyone they met,
whether poor or rich, listening to them and becoming friends.
If the people they met were believers, the brothers strengthened
them in the faith and stirred them up, by words and actions,
to the giving of alms and the performance of good works. They
asked unbelievers if they would like to know why they had come,
and told them Gospel stories.
At the Iona post-mortem on Corman’s failed mission,
Corman had put its failure down to the barbaric nature of the
Northumbrians. Aidan had argued that the missioners should
have been more gentle and should have only gradually laid down
the whole gamut of Christian teachings. Bede (the monk-historian
who recorded these events some 50 years later) commended
Aidan’s tenderness in comforting the afflicted and relieving the
poor, living what he taught: ‘He took care to neglect none of those
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St Aidan’s Way of Mission
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Incarnational and indigenous mission
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St Aidan’s Way of Mission
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Incarnational and indigenous mission
hospitality from the very ones we assume are the candidates for
our evangelism plans. Luke re-theologising would say that the
only way we can understand and practise again this kingdom
message is by getting out of our churches and re-entering our
neighbourhoods and communities. This is where we will discern
God’s future, not in our vision and mission statements or the
arrogant need to start a movement in our own image. This is a
time for a radical shift in the imagination and practices of our
once dominant Euro-tribal churches.18
Ross Langmead, in The Word Made Flesh: Towards an incarnational
missiology, points to three interpretations of incarnational mission:
(1) follow the patterns Jesus used in the Gospels; (2) participate
in Christ’s risen presence with us in our context; (3) join God’s
cosmic mission of enfleshment in which God’s self-embodying
dynamic is evident from the beginning of creation.19
Reflection
I imagine Aidan training his younger brothers to become culture-
friendly by deep listening to those Saxon peasants whom Corman
had dismissed as barbarians. Pat Loughery, Adjunct Instructor at
The Seattle School of Theology & Psychology, who lectures on
Celtic Spirituality and follows the Community of Aidan and Hilda
Way of Life, asks his students to sit on a park seat and listen while
someone tells their story. He says it has become a fun challenge
to ask his students to listen to other people tell their stories, and
also to try to discern the stories that the culture is telling as a
whole.20 A Scottish training course for youth workers invites
them to listen to music that young people like or to photograph
street graffiti and draw out what speaks of a longing for God, of
dysfunction because of the flouting of God, or of recognition of
good and therefore godly values. Try one of these exercises.
I imagine Aidan thinking how best to get inside the Saxons’
culture and redeem it. Young Western people often have a pagan
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St Aidan’s Way of Mission
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Incarnational and indigenous mission
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St Aidan’s Way of Mission
22
3
Soul friends and
lifelong learning
With disciples you can build movements. With
consumers you can build nothing.27
Pagan Ireland, it was said, became a land of saints and scholars.
Soul friends kept alive people’s love of holiness and learning. We
do not know whether there was a soul friend tradition, dimmed
but still alive, among the Celtic Britons within Northumbria.
The Welsh word for soul friend is periglour, meaning a person
who will allow me to tell the whole truth about myself and to
seek healing. We do know that the tradition was burgeoning in
Ireland.
Aidan grew up in Columba’s family of monasteries, which
were steeped in the soul friendship tradition. Columba’s friend
Comgall, the sixth-century founder of the monastery at Bangor,
stated, ‘Though you may think you are very solid, it is not good
to be your own guide.’ His large community taught that ‘a person
without a soul friend is like a body without a head’.28
As I have mentioned, Columba’s Iona monastery came into
being as a result of his soul friend’s advice that he should win as
many people to Christ in a foreign land as had lost their lives in
the battle between his tribe and another in Ireland. Adomnan’s
Life of Columba cites examples of advice and prophecies that
Columba gave, both as a soul friend and more generally.
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Soul friends and lifelong learning
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Soul friends and lifelong learning
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St Aidan’s Way of Mission
Discernment
Discernment is a key ingredient in contemporary soul friendship.
Spiritual discernment is to separate distinctly that which is
authentic from that which is false. It is the art of finding God’s
will in the concrete decisions that face us in the maze of life. It
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Soul friends and lifelong learning
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St Aidan’s Way of Mission
and India. They teach them to make and mend things and to
utilise water. They also care for their souls.
Lifelong learning
The monastic communities that became the backbone of Ire
land from the sixth century included schools. Sir James Ware
calculated that there were 164 famous schools,32 but there were
many more smaller ones. All Columba’s monasteries of any size
had schools; he founded 32 in what is now Scotland. In general,
they had a missionary character. The word ‘nurseries’ might better
describe some centres, such as the school of the legendary St Ita,
who was known as the foster mother of the saints of Ireland.
Here, learning involved personal and holistic mentoring. In the
monasteries the scribe was highly valued. He devoted his time
to copying and multiplying books. Scribes not only provided
the educational tools for each generation of students; they also
preserved the memory of their Christian history and theology.
Aidan continued the same basic pattern of including schools
in his monastic communities. Each student was given an
anamchara—a soul friend. Students memorised the 150 psalms,
rehearsing them as they walked and reciting them in the church.
They learned to read Latin, the living language of educated
people in those days, and to write on tablets of wax. They studied
the Gospels and were taught the theology of some of the great
church and desert fathers. Aidan had to adapt to the new culture.
His students came from Anglo-Saxon families known but not
necessarily related to the local king, unlike those in Ireland,
where all were part of the king’s tribal family. Their tutors,
initially, were foreigners—the Irish. Nevertheless, the concept
of family remained strong, both because the abbot was a parent
figure and because children of families linked to their king made
their home there.
Aidan founded his base monastic community in 635 on the tidal
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Soul friends and lifelong learning
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St Aidan’s Way of Mission
Bede writes:
[Aidan’s] course of life was so different from the slothfulness
of our times, that all those who bore him company, whether
they were tonsured or laymen, had to study either reading the
Scriptures, or learning psalms. This was the daily employment
of himself and all that were with him, wherever they went; and
if it happened, which was but seldom, that he was invited to the
king’s table, he went with one or two clerks, and having taken a
little food, made haste to be gone, either to read with his brethren
or to pray. (EH 3.5)
This habit of learning took root among all the races and language
groups in the British Isles:
There are in the island at present, following the number of the
books in which the Divine Law was written, five languages of
different nations employed in the study and confession of the
one self-same knowledge, which is of highest truth and true
sublimity, to wit, English, British, Scottish, Pictish, and Latin, the
last having become common to all by the study of the Scriptures.
(EH 1.1)
It was after the 664 Synod of Whitby that Chad, ‘being consecrated
bishop, began immediately to labour for ecclesiastical truth and
purity of doctrine; to apply himself to humility, self-denial, and
study’ (EH 3.28).
When universities were separated from the monasteries in
the second millennium, they gained greater freedom of research
but they also lost something—a holistic understanding of godly
learning that embraces head, heart and hands and whose source
is God. Wisdom is not learned by mere data accumulation or
cerebral analysis. That is why individuals, churches and networks
now thirst to recover wellsprings of wisdom. We may catch from
the Irish a love of learning rather than a love of letters.
Lifelong learning is for everyone, whether they have an aca
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Soul friends and lifelong learning
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St Aidan’s Way of Mission
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Soul friends and lifelong learning
Reflection
I imagine Aidan living alongside those he appointed as tutors
in his monastic schools, laying out a curriculum that embraced
study, prayer and soul friendship, how to learn from communal
interactions, and how to integrate head learning with things of
the heart and the hands.
Holistic learning has been lost to our society. Although Bede
skips over such things, it seems clear that Irish monastics were
often warriors who learned to integrate their physical and spiritual
natures. Feats of endurance and daring in the inner life and in
service to others marked them. The custom of standing in cold
water, chanting praises and prayers, is one example. Cuthbert, an
English product of Aidan’s mission, like earlier Celtic Christians,
practised it.
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St Aidan’s Way of Mission
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Soul friends and lifelong learning
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St Aidan’s
Way of
both outreach and discipleship for today’s church. As in his
previous BRF book, Hilda of Whitby, Ray Simpson shows
that such figures from past centuries can provide models for
MissioN
Christian life and witness today. An author and speaker on
Celtic spirituality with a worldwide reputation, he combines
historical fact with spiritual lessons in a highly accessible style.
‘The huge challenge for Christians today is to communicate our faith amid
a diverse and divided world. The Celtic Christians of the first millennium
Ray Simpson with Brent Lyons-Lee
showed how to do this with a sensitivity, passion and integrity which led
entire kingdoms to Christ. This book, based on deep reflection and down-
to-earth engagement, shows us how to follow in their footsteps today.’
Simon Reed, Community of Aidan and Hilda
Celtic insights
978-0-85746-485-9
for a post-
UK £7.99
BRF
Cover image © Geoff Porter
brf.org.uk
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