The Diocese of Bristol was honoured to host the Church Commissioners’ Annual General Meeting at Bristol Cathedral on 19 June 2025.
Bishop Viv opened the gathering with a heartfelt welcome, weaving together personal history, diocesan identity, and a call to justice and reconciliation. She began by welcoming attendees to a cathedral and city close to her heart. She shared her family’s deep Bristolian roots, recalling her mother’s birth in the city and her grandparents’ courageous voluntary service during the Second World War - stories immortalised in the Cathedral’s North Aisle.
“We therefore hold dear in our hearts those currently suffering from total war attacks,” she reflected, connecting past and present struggles.
Tracing the unique history of the Diocese, Bishop Viv described its creation in the 16th century, its shifting boundaries, and its distinctive character.
“Bristol Diocese was created because its citizens had a fierce pride for their city,” she noted, highlighting the diocese’s diversity and the determination to transform church and community together—not because of geography, but because “God in Christ calls and holds us together.”
Bishop Viv closed her welcome with a blessing for all present.
“Welcome to Bristol Diocese. We are brave, creative, open and generous. We hope you will be encouraged and empowered by this day.”
Read Bishop Viv's full address below
Welcome to Bristol Cathedral, a warm welcome to all those who have come because of your interest in the work of the Church Commissioners, of which I am one.
Welcome to a church which is dear to my heart. My mother’s family were Bristolians, my mother was born here and the voluntary work of my grandparents during the second world war is depicted in the North Aisle. My grandmother was a VAD nurse. My grandfather, profoundly deaf after injury in the first world war, but still able to see well, was a Fire Watcher at St Mary Redcliffe where he had been head chorister. My mother’s family was bombed out twice and it was years before they again had a permanent home. We therefore hold dear in our hearts those currently suffering from total war attacks.
Bristol Diocese was created because its citizens had a fierce pride for their city, petitioning Henry VIII to become one of the 6 new Dioceses created in the 1530s and 40s. This church was formerly the Augustinian’s Abbey church, the Abbot living in the precincts in winter and in the summer at Abbot’s Leigh, known to many from the hymn tune by CV Taylor. Bristolians got their cathedral, but the Diocese was given no endowment. It also had no fixed boundary beyond the city, so has at times been annexed to Gloucester, and for a while to the County of Dorset. I doubt that any Bishop of Bristol visited Dorset, and I am sure that County is much better served by the Bishop of Salisbury.
In the 19th century South Gloucestershire and North Wiltshire became our northern boundary making in my view the perfectly if peculiarly formed diocese I serve, with 4 Lord Lieutenants ( if you include Abbots Leigh and therefore Somerset) and a multiplicity of cultures and contexts, and engendering a determination to Transform our church and our communities Together not because of geographical logic (it defies that) but because God in Christ calls and holds us together.
In 2018 as incoming Diocesan bishop I was given a formal charge, which included, amongst much else, bringing into the foreground of our attention those not then at its heart Those who did not have power and do not have power, or have been excluded from power because, as Luke tells it, it is there that God’s kingdom is appearing. So I was asked to ensure that our most resource deprived communities were not further marginalised, because we had so much to learn from them.
There was mention of racism and there was mention of safeguarding. But they were then peripheral. But then I started to encounter witnesses to stories of the diocese had not been in the Diocesan profile.
Amongst them Gloria Daniel invited herself to my office, bringing Bishop Joe Aldred with her from Birmingham She had a plan to erect black plaques in the churches of Bristol to tell of the estimated 760 000 taken and enslaved African people, and their descendants, of whom she is one. She wanted her plaques also to tell of the compensation paid to slave owners, of which her ancestor, the plantation owner Thomas Daniel, was one, and who was memorialised in several places in Bristol Cathedral. And she and Bishop Joe expected a response quickly.
Gloria’s great great grandfather was born into chattel slavery on a plantation owned by Thomas Daniel. There are numerous monuments to Thomas Daniel and his family in Bristol Cathedral. But this new memorial is the first dedicated to the people they enslaved.
The new and utterly beautiful plaque was created by Marcia Bennett-Male a stone carver of African ancestry working partially with images cherished by the Fante people of Ghana. It is located under the rose window at the west end of the Cathedral, and honours John Isaac born into chattel slavery on Thomas Daniel’s estates. It acknowledges the lives of at least 4,424 African and Caribbean people who were enslaved and exploited by the Daniel family. The Daniel family claimed financial compensation from the British government under the Abolition Act of 1833, after decades of profiting from money lending, banking, and the sugar trade.
The plaque was erected by the descendants of John Isaac. It states straightforwardly that Tran-Atlantic slavery was a crime against humanity. Black lives matter yesterday today and tomorrow.
I tell that story because this is a city which understands what the Church Commissioners are hoping for from the proposals for a fund for healing, repair and justice. The communities of this city have, through my lifetime, wrestled with what to make of the legacy of slavery and the legacy of the Anglican Edward Colston. The toppling of his statue in 2020 brought that fraught debate into the open, linked it intrinsically to the stories of the 1963 to the Bristol Bus boycott, (which led to the passing of the Race Relations Act) and unrest in St Paul’s in 1980 ( which led to transformation of policing in the city). It continues in the debate about the city’s history, of trading in slaves going back to before the 11th century, and of the hard work needed if racial justice is to be established and this city is to be One City, the strategic vision we Bristolians hold. That our city may hold together those living with the legacy of the industrial revolution, the legacy of slavery, the legacy of war and increasingly the legacy of climate breakdown.
As part of that work just this week Bristol Cathedral has launched a new open call for visual artists to create a permanent artwork that honours the resilience, culture, and faith of African and Afro-Caribbean communities in Bristol. The commission invites creative responses to be installed in the Cathedral’s north transept, in dialogue with the existing Edward Colston memorial window,
This commission forms part of the Cathedral’s wider commitment to racial justice, reconciliation, and truth-telling. You can see more in the exhibition All God’s children in the south choir aisle.
Welcome to Bristol Diocese. We are brave, creative, open and generous. We hope you will be encouraged and empowered by this day.