Sunday, 19 October, 2025 – 5 pm
Download the Evensong Bulletin.
The All Saints Choir will offer Choral Evensong for the feast of Ignatius of Antioch. The service features Juan Esquivel’s Te lucis ante terminum and Herbert Murrill’s Evening Service in E alongside Alan Gray’s What are these that glow from afar?
Ignatius of Antioch, martyred in 115, had a profound sense of two ends—his own, and the consummation of history in Jesus Christ. In ecstasy, he saw his impending martyrdom as the fitting conclusion to a long episcopate.
Seven letters, which Ignatius wrote to churches while he journeyed across Asia Minor in the custody of ten soldiers (“my leopards,” he called them), give valuable insights into the life of the early church and the controversies that it faced. Of certain Gnostic teachings that exalted the divinity of Jesus at the expense of his humanity, Ignatius wrote: “Be deaf . . . to any talk that ignores Jesus Christ, of David’s lineage, of Mary; who was really born, ate, and drank; was really persecuted under Pontius Pilate; was really crucified and died in the sight of heaven and earth and the underworld. He was really raised from the dead.”
Ignatius maintained that the church’s unity would always spring from that liturgy by which all are initiated into Christ through baptism. He exhorted: “Try to gather more frequently to celebrate God’s Eucharist and to praise him . . . At these meetings you should heed the bishop and presbyters attentively and break one loaf, which is the medicine of immortality.”