Our History: A Journey Down The Avon

Our story begins before there was a church building in Stratford.

On 1 May 1845, Rev. Edward Gifford Pryce conducted the first recorded Church of England service in the Stratford district at Strathfieldsaye.

It was another 23 years before Holy Trinity opened its doors.

The present Strathfieldsaye homestead was built in the years following that first service.

Image: Strathfieldsaye Estate
Source: Victorian Heritage Database

https://vhd.heritagecouncil.vic.gov.au/places/1128

In the earliest years of Anglican ministry in Gippsland, there were no church buildings waiting for visiting clergy. Worship happened wherever people could gather.

On Sunday 28 May 1848, the Rev. Francis Hales conducted a service in Stratford's newly opened Shakespeare Hotel.

His own account gives us a wonderfully human glimpse of that morning. Hales recorded that:

“some of my morning congregation rode up quite drunk”

He added that this had “both humbled and grieved me.”

It may raise a smile today, but it also tells us something important about the beginnings of the Church in this district. Ministry wasn't confined to a church building — it went to where people were.
 

Hales added that this “both humbled and grieved me.” 

Apparently, meeting people where they are has always been part of ministry.

Rev. Francis Hales - https://companyofangels.net/halesf.html

By 1868, Stratford's Anglican community had been working for several years to build a church of its own.

Nine tenders were received, and at a meeting - appropriately enough, held at the Shakespeare Hotel - builders William Cook and John Moller were selected. Their tender was £617, 17 shillings and sixpence.

Lemuel Bolden laid the foundation stone on 18 March 1868. But there was still one rather important matter to settle:

What should the new church be called?

The building committee preferred Mary Magdalene, but the chronology records that this was apparently not the preference of Bolden and Canon Thomas Sergeant, who were given the final choice.

Their decision? Trinity.

And so, when the new church was finally dedicated later that year, Holy Trinity, Stratford entered the story.

The Sale newspaper described it as an “exceedingly neat, commodious and withal unpretentious structure” - and more than 150 years later, Holy Trinity remains at the heart of the Anglican community in Stratford.