Yes, the Churches Unlocked Festival is back for its second year with more churches, more history, more fun!

St Saviour’s Church is one of thirty churches across the Dioceses of Llandaff and Monmouth taking part in the festival this year from 3 – 11 June.

Once again, the participating churches are offering walks and talks around the history and heritage of their area, with community events, family fun, music, arts, workshops and many other events.

You can find out more about CHURCHES UNLOCKED at www.churchesunlocked.org but read on to discover our full programme of events here are at St Saviour’s.

Windows on the Wild

CHURCHES UNLOCKED will open up and share our love and care for the natural world

Working with children from Moorland Primary School, we’ll be creating a Herb Garden to provide a living larder for the local community.

We’re also creating a shrine of St Francis of Assisi in our gardens, and there’ll be lots more gardening activities through the week.

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Saturday 3 June

10am: Open Doors

Our doors are wide open for you to discover St Saviour’s Church. Coffee, tea and cold drinks available with an opportunity to explore the church.

There is a Guided Tour of St Saviour’s Church at 10.30am.

Also, available all day, is our self guided QR Code trail. Church closes at 4pm

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Sunday 4 June

9.30 am: Festival Celebration of Mass

2.00pm: ‘Between the Brush strokes”

‘I see my paintings as poems, as prayers if you like,’ said the Welsh artist, Tony Goble. Join us as we explore the brush strokes of Goble’s colourful reredos at St Saviour’s.

This is a time to get up close and explore the reredos and find the meaning in the brush strokes, the poems and prayers in his painting.

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Tuesday 6 June

10.00 am: Mass

10.30am: Coffee Morning Chatter

Enjoy a cuppa and a slice of cake, and share and explore old photographs of St Saviour’s Church and Splott – a wonderful time to reminisce, share stories or discover things you never knew!

We will also be recording some of the conversations in order to archive some of the stories shared.

There’ll also be an opportunity for some gardening, if you’re up for it!

Ends at 12 noon.

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Wednesday 7 – Thursday 8 June

These days are set aside for some exciting activities with Moorland Primary School.

We’ll be exploring the church, celebrating our heritage, and creating a Herb Garden for the whole community.

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Saturday 10 June

10.00am The Great Big Open Day

The church is open from 10am until 4pm for you to explore.

Tea, Coffee and cold drinks available throughout the day.

Follow our self guided QR Code Trail using your iPhone and discover the treasures of St Saviour’s!

11am: Window Watch Tour

Grab a Cuppa and join us on a free tour unlocking the treasures of St Saviour’s, including the range of beautiful stained glass windows.

Check out the progress we’ve made in the gardens, and at our St Francis of Assisi shrine, and see some of the local school children’s work through the week.

12 noon: Mass

2pm: A Celtic World: Columba and the Celtic Saints

This free session opens up the world of Celtic Christian Spirituality and how it is connected to the natural world, drawing us deeper into caring for Creation and the stuff of everyday life.

Discover more about St Columba (a statue and window of whom you’ll find in St Saviour’s—there was once a church of St Columba nearby) and other Celtic Saints closer to home, including St Cadoc and his connection to Flat Holm in the Bristol Channel, and modern-day pilgrimage there.

There’ll be an opportunity to get creative and try writing your own prayers in the Celtic tradition.

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Sunday 11 June

9.30am Festival Mass

10.30: Join us for Brunch! Why not? All are welcome!

The Church is open for you to enjoy, explore and discover until 4pm.

During Churches Unlocked (June 3-10) we’ll be celebrating the Celtic Saints, including St Columba whose memory is alive in Splott in statue and stained glass. They have much to teach and inspire us! Here’s a little taster as we explore the Columba connection in Splott!

Here, he stands in a coracle, looking out to sea perhaps, in his favoured mode of transport, like many of the Celtic Saints as they moved across seas and waterways.  It says much about the adventurous and trusting way in which they pushed out from shore into unknown territory, not knowing what lay ahead but believing that God would guide them to the place that they should go.

St Columba, whose memory is alive in St Saviour’s Church, carved out in a statue and illuminated in stained glass, was born in the year 521 in what is now County Donegal in Ireland.  He was ordained a deacon at around the age of 20.  Having completed his training at the monastic school of Movilla, in County Down, one of Ireland’s most important monasteries, he travelled south towards Leinster.

After some time there, he moved to the monastery of Clonard overseen by St Finnian and where he may have experienced something of the traditions of the Welsh Church, for Finnian had been trained in the school of Saint David.

Columba was one of twelve students of Finnian who became known as the Twelve Apostles of Ireland.  He became a monk and eventually was ordained priest.

After much activity in Ireland, Columba eventually settled into spending much of his time on the Scottish island of Iona, establishing a monastery there, and from which he evangelised much of Scotland and Northern parts of England. He died on 9 June 597.

Scottish Splott

At the corner of Splott once known as the ‘Cardiff Cottages’ built to house industrial workers, the street names sing with a Scottish lilt. The Bute family left many a mark on the landscape and their Scottish heritage shines through in place names.  So, the name of St Columba became embedded in the memory of Splott.  Nestled within these Scottish streets was the first church in Splott of the then Church of England, the chapel of St Columba’s School.

As St Columba was growing up in the cradle of Ireland, our own St Cadoc of Flat Holm fame had already reached Scotland first.  At about 528, after his father’s death, St Cadoc is said to have built a monastery in Scotland, north-west of Stirling.  He stayed for seven years by which time Columba was still a teenager.

Cadoc’s Coracle

The South Wales born St Cadoc too had coracle adventures of his own, pushing out from the coast of South Wales not far from his settlement at Llancarfan in the Vale of Glamorgan, as he island hopped from Barry Island to Flat Holm to make his Lenten retreat.

Five miles out into the Bristol Channel, it’s where we make pilgrimage from St Mary’s with a regular pilgrimage programme, although we are coracle free!  It was on one voyage back to the island to fetch a forgotten prayer book that Cadoc’s companions, Baruc and Gwalches, drowned.  St Baruc’s body was washed up on Barry Island.  His memory lives on in the name.

A Final Journey

St Brendan (484-577) by far seemed to have the most adventurous journey of all – setting of from the coast of Ireland in search of the Island of Promise. It’s believed that for him this was Newfoundland, and where he received a vision to return home for his final journey.

His final Prayer on the Mountain is a prayer where his experience of crossing seas to far away places express his letting go of all things in order to die and come to Heaven’s shore. This metrical version of his prayer is from our Celtic Pilgrimage Manual, Here in this Place, to accompany our Flat Holm pilgrimages:

O shall I, King of Mysteries,
abandon all for sake of thee?
Give up the land which nurtured me
and set my face towards the sea?

Shall I give up my need of fame,
protection, pow’r and wide acclaim?
No food or drink to bring delight,
no bed to lay my head at night.

O shall I say farewell to all,
my land, my home, all that enthrals?
Pour out my heart, confess my sins,
in streaming tears for love of him?

O shall I kneel upon this shore
my knee prints marking out my prayer?
Abandon all and take the wounds
believing now that I’ll be found?

Shall I push out across the wide
expanse of sea and ocean tide?
Shall I let go upon the waves
and trust alone in him who saves?

Across the sparkling seas and storms,
O, King of Heav’n, O Christ my Lord,
you bid me come to Heaven’s shore.
I choose you now, for evermore.

Saints and Beasts

Stories of the Celtic Saints often feature animals, expressing the close bond between them and all that God has created.  Whilst the legendary tales may be difficult to fathom with our modern minds, the stories can captivate us and, if we dig deeper, reveal something of the character of the saint and their intricate relationship of everything that exists.

So, there was St Colman of Dromore, a contemporary of Columba who, in his solitude and poverty, learned much from three strange companions.  A cockerel woke him for prayer through the night.  A mouse nibbled at his clothes to wake him each morning, and a fly walked down the page to mark the lines of Scripture Colman was reading.

When they eventually died, he shared his sorrow with St Columba, who replied in jest and wisdom, “To you, the cockerel, the mouse and the fly were as precious as the richest jewels, so rejoice that God has taken these jewels to himself.”

The life of St Cadoc is no different and features animals as big as boars and tiny as mice.  It was a boar which marked the place for Cadoc to build his oratory at Llancarfan, a mouse which led him to a hidden room full of grain during a famine, and stags which were tamed to pull timber for building so that his followers weren’t deterred from their study of Scripture.

Emerging from these stories is an ancient secret waiting to be discovered in the way we relate to the natural world.  They are, perhaps, a call to pause and look at the beautiful miracle of God’s Creation, to see the details we miss so easily in our busy and distracted lives, to marvel in all that God has made, and to show it respect as the richest of jewels which belong to God, and over which we have been set as stewards not masters.

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ST COLUMBA AND THE CELTIC SAINTS: Discover more about St Columba and other Celtic Saints closer to home on Saturday 10 June at 2pm at St Saviour’s during the Churches Unlocked festival. There’ll also be an opportunity to get creative and try writing your own prayers in the Celtic tradition. The Session ends with Celtic Night Prayer. More details here

CHURCHES UNLOCKED: You can find out about the Church Unlocked Festival here

FLAT HOLM PILGRIMAGE: To learn more about our Celtic Island pilgrimage programme to Flat Holm, visit our pilgrimage pages

In the last year, Cardiff Foodbank distributed 52% more food parcels than the previous year. This morning, some of our congregation went on a little shopping trip!

It’s early on a sunny May morning, and we’re off to the supermarket, cash in hand.  Yes, we’ve got money to spend!  It’s not our money, and we’re not buying anything for ourselves, for we’re financed by a generous donation for Cardiff Foodbank given by some members of our congregation. Potatoes and pasta, carrots and milk are lifted from the shelves by the tray full.

Since 2014, St Saviour’s Church in Splott has been one of Cardiff Foodbank’s Distribution Centres in Cardiff, and it was the first in Wales to offer an evening opening time aimed to help those work during the day. 

There are two sessions, one on Wednesday afternoon and the other on Thursday evening and, like every Distribution Centre, they are staffed by a group of volunteers who give freely of their time.

Across the Churches of our Ministry Area, we also receive donated food each week , and despite the financial challenges that all of us face, people continue to generously donate items which then go to Foodbanks’ Warehouse before they are eventually distributed to the Distribution Centres across Cardiff.

Cardiff Foodbank recently released their stats on the number of emergency food parcels within our local community between April 2022 and March 2023.

The figures reveal that they have provided 19,253 emergency food parcels to people who couldn’t afford the essentials in Cardiff over the last year – and 7,639 (40%) of these went to children.

It’s the most parcels ever distributed by Cardiff Foodbank in a single year and represents a 52% increase compared to last year.

But the Trussell Trust Foodbanks don’t just distribute parcels of food to people in crisis.  They also work to tackle the reasons why so many people find themselves needing their help.

For example, food banks across the Trussell Trust network are calling for MPs across the UK to support a social security system that guarantees our essentials, by making sure that the basic rate of Universal Credit is at least enough to afford the essentials we all need to live.

And so, we arrive back at St Saviour’s, with a car full of food, and where we are met by more volunteers who are busy cleaning and preparing the church for the Churches Unlocked festival at the beginning of June, when we will open our doors for a whole week of celebrations.

Our churches are committed to tackling issues of social injustice, and this is just one way in which we work in partnership with others.

Despite the cost of living, soaring prices, increasing bills, and so many challenges and difficulties, kindness and generosity remain in abundant supply  People continue to respond to the needs of others, give of their time and their money.

If you would like to donate food to Cardiff Foodbank, then you can do so at any of the churches in the Ministry Area. You can also find out more about volunteering roles as well as how to help tackle Food Poverty at Cardiff Foodbank’s website