It’s always good to be here in Sherborne and good to be with you all today. Synod is a formal body but for me its really about the family of Christians where God has set us in our parishes to come together to become ever better at Making Jesus Known.
Having said that being here in Sherborne is always nostalgic for me as I served my curacy here at the Abbey, and this very school was where I began to learn the art of leading collective worship. Thirty-seven years have passed since I first took an assembly here and as I look out on you, I also see school faces and teachers all sat in neat rows, wishing I was someone else.
Well mercifully, the next Archbishop of Canterbury is someone else and I welcome Bishop Sarah’s nomination unreservedly. She is the best of us and, of course, formally of this diocese and cathedral. Please pray for her and her family as this incredible appointment is lived out. Just 27 words into her opening address, Sarah spoke of her calling to make Jesus known - you heard it here first!
Jesus has been known for many years in the places I have visited recently. At Wimborne Minster, we marked 1300 years of monastic and faithful parochial witness. How rare to have a town named after one of our churches. Then in Stapleford in rural Wiltshire, we marked over 800 years of witness with a full benefice service with the fastest serving of fizz at the end of the service I have ever seen. And then just two weeks ago, I was in the tiny hamlet of Ibberton where the ancient church is almost inaccessible and yet the faithful have raised over £100,000 to underpin their church and prevent it from falling into ruin as it did a hundred years ago. And tomorrow its Wilton, marking 180 years of that unique Italian building in rural England. Faithful witness down the centuries which should give us all hope in these fractious and anxious times. Our predecessors have seen worse and have ensured we are here today, still trying to be people of hope in a world that needs just that. As Bishop Sarah said last week, “Hope doesn’t skip over grief, pain and the messiness of life but enters into it, and tenderly tells us that God is with us.”
So today, my hope for this Synod is that it will give me hope. We have a budget to discuss. Money is a spiritual issue, and it matters what we do together. And as I speak about this, a reminder. A diocese, a DBF, is not someone else. It is you and me, the apostolic unit of mission in a given place gathered around a bishop exercising that apostolic ministry with all God’s people. The common fund is our joint effort to fund the local church and as with our predecessors, its down to us. This is a large diocese, and contrary to a mantra, central costs are only ever necessary and there to enable the whole. There is no excess, and the whole task, everyone’s desire is to secure the future of the local church. Your papers show that we still enjoy more clergy per population than most, even if it doesn’t always feel like it. And we all want more clergy don’t we? At last, the clergy stipend is being addressed, and I warmly welcome the 10.7% uplift for our hardworking clergy. And there is much more that still needs to be done with pensions and housing and wellbeing and workload, but this is good news. And just for the record, the diocese does not pay a penny for its cathedral, for the stipends of your bishops (which aren’t going up by that figure), nor for the diocesan bishops See house or my office, not a penny. Our diocesan budget is all about the local church, and we are now getting more support for that from the national church than ever before in history.
There are other signs of hope apart from the long-overdue stipend increase. We are clearing £5.6 million pounds of prior year balances this month, wiping out these historic debts where parishes have struggled to make ends meet. The hope is that this can lift a sense of burden and encourage greater generosity. I remember starting as a parish priest in this diocese and inheriting parish accounts with three years of non-payment of share. Gradually and sacrificially we grew, and three years later, we paid back that debt and springboarded into growth. We can all do that if we live with real hope and joy. And the news is also good, for the first time in many years, our worshipping communities are not only slowing their decline but, in some cases, beginning to grow.
But, all of these signs of hope are clouded by the historic, on-going deficit of £2 million pounds a year that is besetting our clergy numbers, our mission initiatives and our freedom to serve our communities. On my appointment, it was the lack of a vision and strategy that was the primary diocesan task. Now, it is eradicating this deficit of decline. We can even now count the years to when we will run out of the ability to fund our clergy and the cost of being church. Closing this gap is now my first priority alongside making Jesus known.
Of course, our brothers and sisters in the Sudans would love to have this problem. God has given us all we need to put this right and to grow, his generosity is not in doubt. Whilst some are indeed giving all they can, and others need even more support, just an additional £2.45 a week per worshipping community member resulting in the full collection of parish share, would secure our ministry. And then we could go on to grow it it! Imagine that! Thank you to those parishes who already pay their share in full. Thankyou. Alongside growing younger, our most pressing need as the church of this nation is to grow vocations. Even if we closed that gap, there are not enough clergy available to fund. We need to grow younger, to grow vocations and to grow giving so that Jesus is made known not just today, but in centuries time, as has been bequeathed to us.
As I look for hope, I can’t help but feel that even a challenge as modest as this, could be beyond us as we choose despair over hope. As Bishop Sarah said, we live in an age that ‘craves certainty and tribalism.’ But that is not the story of Wimborne, or Stapleford, of Ibberton or Wilton. These places and each of your places saw faithful Anglicans who had the vision not to maintain the church but to build it in the first place! And we, even though we forget and don't like being told this, we are the wealthiest, healthiest, longest living people ever to sit in those pews. Surely, brothers and sisters, as we look at the challenges of our world and the search for peace, surely, we can mind this gap and be about impact rather than impasse. I call us all here at synod and everyone in our parishes to choose hope over despair, and mind the gap so that we can make Jesus known.
I offer the prayer our Archbishop designate used at her announcement.
God, who in generous mercy sent the Holy Spirit
upon your Church in the burning fire of your love:
grant that your people may be fervent
in the fellowship of the gospel
that, always abiding in you,
they may be found steadfast in faith, active in service;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
Amen.