ST NICHOLAS’s, Kittisford, in Somerset, has won the Patronal Festival Award 2025, for the service and reception that it held with funding from the Choral Evensong Trust.
It was certainly one of 80 churches awarded either a patronal-festival grant of £500, to enable those with out a resident choir to ask a visiting one, and host a reception after the service; or a patronal-festivities grant of £250, to assist churches with their very own choirs to placed on the reception.
The initiative was intended to rejoice and encourage choral evensong, foster community engagement, and enrich the spiritual and cultural lifetime of churches across the country (In the Parish, 18 July).
Swelling congregations and what the trust describes as “a joyous sense of local people” are successes which have led to the awards — enabled by the generosity of patrons, who include the King — being repeated in 2026. Churches have until 2 February to use.
St Nicholas’s won the award for its “exceptional degree of community and kids’s involvement”. It invited an eight-voice student choir from the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama to present a concert the night before, and to sing the anthem; and brought together a 25-strong community choir on Sunday afternoon to rehearse and learn specially composed music.
The primary-school choir sang the psalm, the bells rang out, and native radio featured the service. The churchwarden, Annie Musgrove, described it as “a magical experience, especially for a lot of our visitors who weren’t normally regular churchgoers. St Nicholas’s often sees a congregation of about ten on a great day.
“On Sunday 7 December, we counted 95 people within the church. We were delighted to welcome plenty of parents of the kids within the choir, people from other churches and the benefice, the Archdeacon of Taunton, and folks from the broader community who had never been in St Nicholas’s before.”
The celebratory hot meal that followed the service had been “an exquisite end to a really uplifting festival weekend”, she said, and the church would now be putting on choral events every month for the benefice.
“We welcomed over 150 people to our little rural church, and put choral evensong on the map. The community enjoyed coming together, and we now have made connections with people of all ages, from 4 to 97, in our local area and beyond.”
Application forms and eligibility criteria may be found at: choralevensong.org
