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 one of 80 churches awarded either a patronal-festival grant of £500, to enable those without a resident choir to invite a visiting one, and host a reception after the service; or a patronal-festivities grant of £250, to help churches with their own choirs to put on the reception.

The initiative was intended to celebrate and encourage choral evensong, foster community engagement, and enrich the spiritual and cultural life of churches across the country (In the Parish, 18 July).

Swelling congregations and what the trust describes as “a joyous sense of local community” are successes that 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 apply.

St Nicholas’s won the award for its “exceptional degree of community and children’s involvement”. It invited an eight-voice student choir from the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama to give 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 local radio featured the service. The churchwarden, Annie Musgrove, described it as “a magical experience, especially for many of our visitors who were not normally regular churchgoers. St Nicholas’s usually sees a congregation of about ten on a good day.

“On Sunday 7 December, we counted 95 people in the church. We were delighted to welcome lots of parents of the children in the choir, people from other churches and the benefice, the Archdeacon of Taunton, and people from the wider community who had never been in St Nicholas’s before.”

The celebratory hot meal that followed the service had been “a wonderful end to a truly uplifting festival weekend”, she said, and the church would now be putting on choral events each 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 have made connections with people of all ages, from four to 97, in our local area and beyond.”

Application forms and eligibility criteria can be found at: choralevensong.org