St Paul's Cathedral - 26/05/04

[The Return of the King is of course the concluding part of Professor Tolkein’s great trilogy, The Lord of the Rings. Life followed art earlier this year when the grave goods of the first Christian King of London were uncovered on East Saxon territory at Prittlewell. Included in the haul were two delicate gold foil crosses which may have been attached to the convert King Saeberht’s funerary garments.

The crosses returned to the light just at the beginning of the year in which we are celebrating the 1400th anniversary of one of the events which has shaped the history of London ever since. Roman London certainly had a Christian community and a Cathedral. Bishop Restitutus attended the Council of Arles in 314 at the command of the Emperor Constantine in order to debate the tangled affairs of the church in North Africa. This was a world of wide horizons. There were other Bishops, perhaps one of them was the martyr Argulus, another Bishop Fastidius, one of whose works has survived.

But the barbarian tide which flooded into Britain after the legions left eventually submerged the remnants of a church which perhaps had never been very strong.
There were memories and vestiges, however, and in Rome there were the Papal archives describing the structure of a British Church with its metropolitical sees in London and York. Pope Gregory the Great despatched missionary monks to recapture the lost territory for the Church.

Kent seemed the best place to start since the Frankish Queen was already a Christian and her husband Aethelburt was acknowledged as overlord by many of the petty kings south of the Humber including his nephew, Seaberht king of the East Saxons.

St Augustine’s mission to Kent prospered and by 604 the way was open for the consecration of a bishop for London. Augustinus ordinavit Mellitum quidem ad praedicandum provinciae Orientalium Saxonum, quorum metropolis Lundonia civitas est. [Bede]

So Mellitus the shaven crowned monk from Rome arrived in London the capital of the Euro-skeptic East Saxons and thanks to the influence of Aethelburt the first St Paul’s was built.

The conversion of London had not gone very deep however. Saeberht’s three sons had not followed their father to the font and when he died their manners towards the bishop deteriorated. It is said that they once saw Bishop Mellitus celebrate the Eucharist perhaps close to this very spot. Barbara inflati stultitia, they demanded the eucharistic bread. The bishop explained that baptism with its disciplines came first. The lads said that they didn’t need the font but they wanted the bread. The bishop said that it didn’t work like that and they expelled him from the city. ]

As the Church sought to serve the East Saxon tribe in the 7th century, there were many new things for the natives to absorb.

There was new teaching and not least a brighter prospect beyond the grave which contrasted with the melancholy speculations of the pagan cults.

There was a religion of the Book which re-established contact with the literary culture of the old prestigious Roman world in its surviving West European outposts in Gaul and Italy.

There was a new style of worship. The mass built bridges between God and humanity but also between members of different tribes. Chanting, the spread of which is especially noticed by the historian the Venerable Bede, was itself a powerful means of helping people to listen to one another and relate more harmoniously.

There was a new organisation, dependent at first on the good will of tribal rulers but as the church grew, especially in London during the episcopate of St Erkenwald at the end of the 7th century, it developed as a social institution influential in its own right and soon indispensable in the administration of the English kingdoms.

England was not as yet divided into parishes of course. The term parochia in the 7th century seems to have meant a regional sphere of spiritual authority – most commonly that of the bishop. Boundaries were only roughly drawn and in the first part of the 7th century, Bishops were mostly peripatetic. It is only with Erkenwald consecrated by the Greek monk Theodore from Paul’s home city of Tarsus, that London received a properly resident bishop.

The work of evangelisation was undertaken by minister communities, like the ones founded by Erkenwald himself, at Chertsey and Barking where his sister Ethelburga was abbess. You should imagine these minsters scattered throughout Essex and Middlesex and perhaps South East Hertfordshire, small stockaded communities with a simple church served by monks and nuns who spent much of their time in agriculture.

This, then, was how the story began in London as the Latin mission adapted itself to the needs of the East Saxon tribe and sought to reclaim the territory lost when the legions departed.

The Christian story in London has profoundly shaped the appearance and lay-out of the city, its education and cultural traditions. Yet despite the pan London significance of the founding of St Paul’s and the oecumenical character of the 1400th anniversary of the restoration of Christian faith and practice in our capital, only the Goldsmith’s company, the Lord Mayor and the Corporation have been brave enough to recognise this anniversary.

There has been a determined attempt to edit out the Christian contribution to the development of London. Professor Adrian Hastings, author of a fine book on English Christianity in the 20th century commented, “If it is remarkable how little histories of the 18th and 19th centuries mostly bother to say about the weight of religion – that of the Church of England especially – for the 20th century they have been almost entirely silent, except for the occasional caricaturing aside.” It is indeed bizarre that the antics of the Rector of Stifkey commonly receive more attention than the contribution of William Temple to the philosophical foundations of the Welfare State.

I do not come here to winge however but to predict that in the dangerous world of the 21st century with increasing social fragmentation; with consequent advances in the intrusiveness of the surveillance state; with profound questions being posed about the nature of human beings by the advance of technologies permitting gene and silicon enrichment of certain individuals; with the development of a critique of Western culture, appealing even to some of our own young people, a critique based on religious traditions; in face of all these challenges in our own world we shall be forced beyond the contemptuous disregard of the Christian story which is characteristic of our elite of anti-elitists, to an urgent investigation of our religious roots so central to the achievements of the West to see whether there is any virtue which might inspire and save contemporary Londoners from immobilising fear and discontent.

If the world city church is to be a source of hope however it has to start with realism and humility about its record.

The orthodoxy of the lounge bar of the Pig and Whistle is that religion is a cause of conflict and that the worst wars in history have been religious wars. You do not have to be a secularist to see elements of truth in this prejudice. Jonathan Swift Dean of St Patrick’s lamented that too often we seem to have enough religion to hate one another but not enough religion to love one another.

The great killers of the 20th century were of course secular messianic states attempting to engineer humanity into a utopia built upon a vast funeral pyre. But the fear of religion is well founded and has come to haunt our contemporary discourse in a way inconceivable only twenty years ago. The French answer is of course to drive religion out of the public square altogether and the ban on headscarves is being followed by a ban on the Sikh turban and other symbols.

It is of course a real scandal that members of Christian churches, followers of the Christ who died to love his enemies into loving should have been so often implicated in demonising opponents and leading the charge. London now has a very special link of friendship with the Diocese of Berlin. Bishop Huber of Berlin is a Canon of this Cathedral and I am an Ehren Dom Prediger. The Dom in Berlin was the Imperial Chapel where the Hohenzollerns are buried. From the pulpit where I preached last Ascension Day, royal chaplains launched fiery denunciations of the British Empire while my predecessor Bishop Winnington Ingram showed scandalous zeal as a recruiting sergeant for the war with the Hun.
By contrast the Church was intended to be a school of profound and peaceful relating. The heart of the Church’s life is revealed in the communion. All sorts and conditions are invited to come together without distinction of race or status, to give thanks for life and to be re-membered, as members of a new body, which does not obliterate our precious individuality as persons but which develops our full spiritual beauty in relationship with God and with other persons. The constant repetition of the mass, throughout the history of London, built social cohesion and helped to lay down the social capital which is eroding so rapidly in our own time.

The Christian faith not only knitted people together in a new way but also put flesh and blood on the idea of the common good, in a universal context, which transcended private interest and tribal loyalty. As such the Church was a powerful agent of unity and peace as Europe emerged from the traumas of the barbarian overthrow of the Roman Empire.

These are the enduring themes – the knitting together of what begins by being broken and fragmentary and the universalising of communion. The church’s role in education and its reception, for example through the work of St Thomas Aquinas and others, of the scientific and philosophical legacy of the ancient world was the intellectual aspect of this opening to the universal.

The Church of the high Middle Ages, the Church of the builder of old St Paul’s Bishop Maurice was confident and expansive but the traumas of plague and the pressure of the Turkish advance intensified after 1453 and produced greater rigidity and dogmatism in the church.

The old Western Church was full of diversity, radical friars disputing with tenured monks; episcopal jurisdictions riddled with exemptions and peculiars like some great Gruyere cheese; illuminated nuns; a disputatious theological culture with many issues open to sometimes ferocious debate but withal the relentless advance of ecclesiastical bureaucracy and an increasingly complex legal structure which had its apex in Rome.

Professor Dairmaid MacCulloch in his excellent new book on the Reformation Era points out that in 1500 there were no Roman Catholics in Europe with the exception of the Kingdom of Bohemia. There a reform movement led by Jan Huss had resulted in the establishment of the Utraquist Church, so called because lay people could receive both the bread and the wine in communion. There were Roman Catholic Churches in Bohemia consciously loyal to the Pope but elsewhere and in London nearly everyone was a member of the Western Catholic Church in which of course the Bishop of Rome had a pivotal position.

The 16th century saw this old church fragment and the debris being recast in the form of the churches we know today. Every church was affected and in many ways the Church of Rome was more effectively reformed than the Church of England in the sessions of the long running Council of Trent. Certainly Rome was a more successful missionary church as a result of the Counter Reformation.

On the edge of civilised Europe, London reflected the turmoil. We do not have the time to analyse the situation in great detail but in the 1520’s the Bishop of London was there with Cardinal Wolsey in St Paul’s Churchyard presiding at solemn burnings of Lutheran books. Bishop Tunstall’s agents pursued the Bible translator Tyndale to the Low Countries and bought up the first edition of his New Testament with the intention of destroying the work. The unexpected consequence was that the Bishop inadvertently financed the second and improved edition.

Bishop Stokesley, active in the royal diplomatic service, was indefatigable in his opposition to Cranmer’s reforming agenda and although his reputation has suffered from the canard that he baptised his cat, Stokesley had the satisfaction of receiving the last traditional Catholic funeral for a bishop in this Cathedral probably until the service for the late Bishop of Edmonton, Brian Masters.

Stokesley’s successor, Nicholas Ridley was one of the Protestant stars of the Edwardian Church whose work lives on in the educational and medical foundations of the City, like Christ’s Hospital and St Thomas’s, in whose beginnings the bishop was intimately involved. Ridley of course ended his life being burnt under Queen Mary as a heretic. His successor Edmund Bonner was a stiff supporter of the Papal Supremacy. He ended his life under house arrest and so it went on.

The Church which had knit the people together in a communion which transcended local loyalties and opened the new community to universal values became itself the nursing mother of conflict. London was just one of the battle grounds in a European civil war which resulted in the devastation of much of the continent before the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 brought most of the fighting to an end.

The spiritual damage was lasting and haunts us still. The West European Enlightenment emerged out of disgust at what religious fanaticism had done. It is no co-incidence that during the decade which saw the conclusion of the Thirty Years War and the English Civil War, Galileo published his “Dialogue Concerning Two New Sciences, Descartes his “Principles of Philosophy” while Newton was born. “The fragmentation brought about by warring Christian absolutisms argued the need for another type of belief system, more rationally persuasive and less controversially subjective.”

The period which saw Europe divided yielded fruit as well as bitterness. Much good flowed from putting the vernacular scriptures in the hands of the laity but we are still recovering from some of the malign developments of the period. Church life was over bureaucratised; mystery was over-defined; and organisation and doctrinal rigidity was used in a polemical interest to war with other sects often in unholy alliance with states and dynasties anxious to consolidate their lands against competitors. This forms an agenda for repentance and change if we are once again to resemble the church described by St Augustine. “In certis unitas, in dubiis libertas et in omnibus caritas”.

In the Church of England this history bred a distrust of “enthusiasm”. Sir Christopher Wren who built this place had personal experience of the havoc wrought by enthusiastic religion. He and his father were ejected from home and living by Christian enthusiasts. His uncle Matthew, Bishop of Ely spent 15 years in the Tower of London after the abolition of episcopacy. As you can see from Pepys’s Diary, the years following the Restoration of 1660 were haunted by the fear that the fanatic sectaries of various kinds would make a come-back. Wren’s answer is in this Cathedral and in the City Churches. His God is a God of order, balance and proportion and beauty – in fact quite like an architect. He is not a God of volcanic irrational enthusiasm. A bishop was among the most prominent founders of the Royal Society and in England the divorce between a scientific approach to life and faith was never so pronounced as it was in some parts of the Continent.

In England we had bishops like Bishop Warburton who was said to occupy a small corner of rationality within the ark, “as much disgusted by the stink within as by the tempest without”.

The Church in the Diocese of London was re-imagined in the course of the 18th and 19th centuries. I can illustrate some of the most significant developments by reference to the work of Thomas Bray, Vicar of St Botolph’s Aldgate chosen by Bishop Henry Compton to be his commissary in organising the church in the state of Maryland which then fell under the jurisdiction of the Bishop of London.

Bray was the founder of SPCK which still exists and still has its HQ in London and also SPG the forerunner of one of the premier missionary societies in the Church.

Bray’s contribution was in education and overseas mission. When Charles Blomfield became Bishop of London in 1828, the most pressing need was at home. The demographic explosion had made London larger than all the other capital cities of Europe put together. Following the vision enunciated by the Scottish minister Thomas Chalmers, Bloomfield set about building churches, opening schools, and re-inventing the church as popular institution. 200 new churches were opened during his episcopate. I know because there are a crop of 150th anniversaries every year and I am becoming familiar with Bishop Blomfield’s packed diary particularly since I have followed him in taking an active part in the affairs of the Church Commissioners alongside our Lord Mayor.

Campaigns to build new churches for the expanding suburbs in Middlesex continued throughout the interwar years of the last century. The story has been told in a fascinating PhD thesis by Rex Walford which I very much hope will be published in some form. It was for the campaign to build 45 new churches that T.S.Eliot wrote “The Rock” which was staged just 70 years ago in Sadlers Wells theatre.

Some of the dialogue, in “The Rock”, especially the stab at cockney speech, is frankly excruciating and I can understand why T.S.Eliot discouraged publication after 1934 of the full text. Still there is an attempt to relate the church building campaign to the challenges of London in 1930’s with a cast of redshirts, blackshirts, “plutocrats, flash ladies, gunmen and other shady and rapacious individualists, getting lower and lower in class till the stage is pretty full” and there are some good lines.

“Of all that was done in the past you eat the fruit either rotten or ripe.
And the church must be forever building, and always decaying and always being restored.”

The Rock raises the large questions about our life together which are still with us.

“Though you have shelters and institutions
…
Or a house a little better than your neighbour’s;
When the Stranger says “What is the meaning of this city?
…
What will you answer?
…
O my soul be prepared for the coming of the Stranger,
Be prepared for him who knows how to ask questions.”

I took part in a debate in Parliament recently on the Governance of London. Understandably the contribution of the city to human flourishing was seen by most speakers in terms of the benefits offered by a place like London to ensure the prosperity and protection of its citizens. The meaning of a city, however, which releases creative energies and brings delight in life, goes beyond material benefits and has to do with common objects of love and shared vision. I believe that behind the hyping of every passing moment, the noise and the neon glare there is a void which aches for want of the wisdom of God. This is a time of great challenge and opportunity for the church.

We find ourselves towards the end of a culture war which has pitted the decaying remnants of what you might describe as Churchill’s Britain against protagonists of the Sensitive Self. Churchill’s Britain achieved a high degree of unity under challenge with a dominant national story which emphasized the virtues of patriotism and established institutions. People of great dignity and spiritual beauty were formed in this atmosphere and I am eagerly looking forward to the privilege next week of accompanying some of the veterans who participated in one of the last epics of Our Island Story, the Normandy Landings.

There were of course always dissident voices in the old dispensation and with the revolution of the 60’s the old order was displaced and a new elite of anti-elitists established itself in the media and in education. The achievements of this cultural wave in widening social inclusion and in opening up freedom of consumer choice in goods and lifestyles are obvious.

The problem is that both cultural waves are loath to see the virtues in one another. Both tend to absolutise themselves. Human flourishing is promoted by the right balance between order and freedom.

In some quarters there is marked complacency about the stability of the Western cultural achievement. It has been suggested that with the advent of democracy and market economics a stable conclusion to the process of historical change has been reached.
Aristotle had a different view. A flourishing democratic state needs a demos, a people with shared values and common objects of love to preserve them against fear induced gusts of majoritarian injustice. There is always the danger of a demos degenerating into an ochlos, an aggregation of individuals, a fragmented crowd who lack shared objects of love and common vision and so are exposed to transitory passions and the manipulation of sophists [Aristotle-speak for spin doctors in the media].

Paradoxically the advent of the ochlos requires more surveillance and regulation from the state level to prevent collisions between individuals who have exaggerated their autonomy at the expense of their relations with one another. When the therapeutic structures of society disintegrate, when families no longer incubate the human skills and stories necessary to the flourishing of the demos, then there is a proliferation of codes and contracts. We find that we need to regulate our relations with one another with the assistance of lawyers.

Where does the church stand in such times. We are of course touched profoundly by these currents. Some say that we should be more hard line and some insist that we should accommodate ourselves more to changing social mores. There is in some quarters a survival of a mysticism about revolutionary action which asserts that the church will only survive if it is purged of traditions and becomes radically demotic in its culture.

There has certainly been overmuch concentration on techniques of communication as if we were entirely clear about the message for our times and our only problem is in putting it across. This is a very shallow and unaware point of view but it should not be an excuse for not engaging with the new opportunities. I tried to do so myself at the recent Christian resources Exhibition by preaching the first sermon in the Cyber Church of Fools. The Church permits you to log in from all over the world and some people who entered the site claimed that they had never been in a church building in their lives. You take over some caricature that appeals to you and you can move around and contribute to the service. Most people were polite during my sermon but one interloper was intent on mischief. He was able to inject a four letter word before the site moderator, a cyber churchwarden used his “smite button” and the offending character was expunged. One day last week 41,000 people logged into the Church of Fools.

I may preach in the Church of Fools but I do not believe that people are fooled for very long by mere technique. No church flourishes or can serve effectively without real spiritual depth. The story over the past 1400 years has always been about knitting all sorts and conditions together without establishing a communal egotism but rather opening the new community to wider and even universal loyalties and values - bonding and bridging.

As we face the challenge of contemporary London, we must note a development which was familiar to some of our predecessors but which has not been so much part of our own experience in the past quarter century. London is a philo-genitive place by the standards of most of the rest of Europe. There is of course inward migration both from abroad and other parts of the UK but renewed population growth owes much to the natural increase among Londoners. Already the population is 3 million more than Scotland. London has a larger economy than either Greece or Portugal. The election of the Mayor involves the largest direct electorate for any office in Europe except for the French Presidency. Much of the anticipated development will take place south of Bent Cross in the Edmonton Area and also along the Thames Gateway on the borders between Stepney and our old East Saxon allies in Chelmsford.

In such a diverse city state where more than 200 languages are spoken in our 150 church schools there is no possibility of a one-size-fits-all strategy for the 21st century church.

It is right to celebrate the story of the Church in London in a way that helps us to raise and answer the question about our own contribution to the story. But we must also recognise the negative parts of our inheritance with humility and repentance. I have suggested that the agenda for repentance includes the over bureaucratisation of the Church, the over definition of mystery and the tendency to polemical sectarianism. We should also recognise the damage that has been done with an over close identification with the secular economic and social status quo and not regret the demise of Christendom.

The great themes remain however to be re-energised in ways that are appropriate to 21st century London. As demos gives way to ochlos, the role of face to face eucharistic assemblies in helping people to bond in a new community independent of race or status becomes even more significant.

This is being pursued in all kinds of ways. We have remarkable examples of network churches in London. In the summer one of the many deacons I am to have the privilege of ordaining in St Paul’s is someone from Moot an experimental Christian fellowship, many of whose members have had a rather negative relationship with the conventional church in years past but who recognise the continuing freshness and power of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Their level of commitment to worship and developing a Christian lifestyle is deeply impressive.

There is no one formula but it is vital that such experiments are part of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church to which Anglicans have always claimed to belong. The healthful communion between different ways of being the church keeps the fellowships from idiosyncratic exaggerations and refreshes the church catholic.

We shall need to revisit the tradition of minster churches with which our story began. There must be places and thank God they already exist in the Diocese of London where resources and energies can be concentrated to provide an encouraging training environment for tomorrow’s church leaders and to take advantages of the opportunities that serving Christ in a world city give us. The international reach of the Alpha course, developed in London, never ceases to astonish me. Alpha is a pass-word to friendship throughout the world. It is used in Alma Ata in Kazakstan to train Korean missionaries who are destined for work on the Silk Road into China. It is even used in the Diocese of the West Saxons across the river.

Everyone is understandably concerned about engaging with the generations that will follow us in the Christian story of London. We have youth churches like “Ignite” and await with enthusiasm the arrival of the young people associated with the Soul in the City programme this year in London. Soul in the City will be concerned not so much with telling people about Jesus Christ but modelling his compassion for all the people of this great city in practical service, cleaning up graffiti and repainting flats for the elderly.

There is sometimes the assumption however that there is something monolithic which can be described as “youth culture”. I think that this is a rather patronising notion and that there are many youth cultures. The idea that worship must be strictly informal and led by people in lounge suits looks rather dubious in a generation that is queuing for Gandalf and Dumbledore. The Church would be mad to discard what Milton memorably and, I must confess, critically described as “guegaws fetcht from Aron’s old wardrobe”.

A preoccupation with style and image however is just as shallow as the emphasis on techniques of communications to which I referred earlier. There is a huge intellectual battle raging and I am glad that gradually churches in London are responding with initiatives like the revival of the Boyle lectures at St Mary le Bow which explore the relations between science and religion. The first of the new series involved a consideration of the relation between Darwinian concepts of evolution and our ideas of God.

As we re-organise our resources for training and study, I believe that it would not be too ambitious to think of the foundation of a new Christian College affiliated to other universities but able to offer the range of courses required by the 132 people in the Diocese of London who are currently in training for the priesthood as well as the countless others in our region who wish to develop their Christian understanding. We are already far advanced in shifting the centre of our training work closer to the centre of London along the Highway in Tower Hamlets and this is just the beginning. The St Paul’s Institute in this Cathedral is another example of a positive response to the new demands of the 21st century world city.

An intellectual training is of course only part of what is required. I have been impressed by some of the young women, in particular, who have found dignity and purpose in conversion from religious indifference to Islam. The demands involved in being a follower of Jesus Christ have sometimes been unhelpfully understated.

There is no spiritual progress without clear commitment to some particular spiritual path. Toying with various “spiritualities” does not really lead to growth and indeed is close to the invention of a new religion where our own tastes become the Supreme Arbiter. But people need help in developing their life of prayer in particular and that is why we are investing in the development of the London Centre for Spirituality here in the City in the church of Edmund King and Martyr.

There is however one matter which concerns me deeply and where we seem to have made little progress. We began as the Church of the East Saxons and we now find ourselves in a global hub serving Londoners with very diverse cultural traditions. As a church we still look too East Saxon and we must evolve by penetrating more effectively the varied ethnic groups that make up our City. Modest but exciting beginnings have been made. Father Paul Cho’s work with Korean students is significant. The long established Chinese Church in St Martins in the Fields should be celebrated. The Diocese benefits hugely from the service of African and Afro-Caribbean priests but it is not enough. The Petertide ordinations in this Cathedral still are very far from reflecting the face of modern London and we must take every opportunity for Christ’s sake of matching the leadership in our Church to the various communities we are seeking to serve.

I am sometimes astonished by the privilege of working here. A month ago the Mayor of Beijing came to see me at his request. We had the kind of conversation I rarely have with any Mayor. He wanted to know what I would do if a terrorist confessed to me that he was going to blow up a plane. Would I break the seal of the confessional and inform the police or would I keep quiet? There followed some very tough questions which nevertheless made it clear that the Mayor had read the New Testament and that the channels of real communication were open with a newly confident and prospering China. In such circumstances we cannot behave as if we were still chaplains to the East Saxons.

This necessary global vision also lay behind the great gathering we welcomed to St Paul’s to consult with the Chancellor of the Exchequer about the challenge of the most heavily indebted countries in the world. Christians have no monopoly of political wisdom but they can do service in pointing out the madness of a world which spends so much on military hardware and drastic cures for conflicts which we are spending so little to prevent. Churches can enlarge the room for manoeuvre so that sympathetic politicians in democracies like ours can take action knowing that there is constituency which supports what could look dangerously like altruism.

My theme throughout has been the changes necessary to stay true to the historic calling of the Christian Church to be a community which is concerned with bonding and bridging. The symbolism of this Cathedral helps us to appreciate the synergy of bonding and bridging. Underneath the great dome there is a table around which we are invited to gather by God to participate in his life without distinction of race or status. The table stands beneath the Dome which is itself a symbol of the whole globe. The Dome is supported by eight figures, four from the Eastern World and four from the Western World. The Church is where we relate to one another in the power of the Holy Spirit and where we grow into universal loyalties and values.

The civilisation of which we are a part has achieved much but depends on spiritual foundations which are eroding. The City depends on trust and the capacity to have faith together which is of course the root meaning of the word confidence. This is so obvious that it is always in danger of being forgotten. The spiritual is not the mould grown on the rock of economics but the foundation of flourishing markets and a functioning democracy and indeed as Christ promised, “life in all its fullness”. My Lord Mayor locum tenens, I hope that you will find the Church an active partner in the future in the work of building enduring foundations for this city as it has endeavoured to be over the past 1400 years.