Third Sunday after Trinity (Stewardship) 21 June 2026
Third Sunday after Trinity (Stewardship) 21 June 2026
As many of you know, I didn’t grow up in a churchy family, and came to faith in my early twenties. As I discovered more about following Jesus, in the company of the other disciples known as the Church of England, there was a particular quote I heard a number of times. It goes like this: ‘The Church is the only society that exists for the benefit of those who are not its members’. These words are attributed to William Temple, all too briefly Archbishop of Canterbury during the Second World War, who had a rare combination of intellectual brilliance, and popularity with the wider public.
‘The Church is the only society that exists for the benefit of those who are not its members’. These precise words are not found in any of Temple’s many books, but can be traced back to addresses and sermons he delivered during the 1931 Oxford University Mission. Speaking to secularized or agnostic students, he was seeking to reframe the Church not as some kind of holy club for self-righteous insiders, but as an outward facing body for social justice, both locally and internationally.
Although I hear the quote less often these todays, it still expresses something profound about the nature of the Church of England, and what it means for the ‘disciple to be like the teacher’ as Matthew puts it in today’s Gospel reading, to ‘walk with him in newness of life’ as our second reading has it. If William Temple had been present at the recent National Cathedrals Conference, mentioned by Canon Jo in her sermon last week, I hope he would have been pleased to hear presentation after presentation giving real evidence that to this day the really is a society that benefits those who are not its members.
Canon Jo mentioned the new Theos report, Living Stones: English Cathedrals as Sacred Spaces in Changing Times, launched at that Cathedrals Conference in Bristol. The report, freely available online, draws on a whole range of qualitative and quantitative research to demonstrate the remarkable vitality, and extensive impact, of the forty two Anglican cathedrals, of which of course, we are one. Do seek it out and read it!
The starting point, as you would expect, is that Christian worship is foundational to our identity and purpose, as with every cathedral. From this worshipping heart, however, flow a range of other things benefitting the whole of society: for example world class music and art, the marking of the civic calendar in all kinds of ways, learning opportunities for schoolchildren, hundreds of millions of pounds contributed to local economies, the mobilization of thousands of volunteers, and being amongst the most visited heritage sites in the country.
77% of English adults have visited a cathedral in the past three years, with 37% visiting more than once in the past year. So around seventeen million in the past year, and thirty six million over the longer period. And in a country where less than half the population identifies as Christian, cathedrals (to quote the report) ‘remain places where stillness, beauty and wonder can gently draw the spiritually open toward an experience of the sacred.’
The Bristol conference also saw the announcement of a new way for cathedrals to demonstrate their social value, as places of beauty and hospitality open every day, all year round, and welcoming to all, usually without charge. Where, for example, someone in crisis can come and sit and weep, and if they would like, find a listening ear. Places people can come in and light a candle and leave a prayer to be offered at the altar on their behalf, as happens here all the time. In this sense, said Will Watt from the organization State of Life, they are ‘houses of good’ as well as ‘houses of God’. He wants cathedrals to be able to show the financial impact on the National Health Service and wider nation if Cathedrals were not there.
Why would you want or need to put financial numbers on social value, some of you may be wondering. Cathedrals will surely always be there, and everyone knows they are wealthy places backed up by the billions of pounds held by the Church Commissioners. Well, like many things that ‘everyone knows’ there are grains of truth here, but the perception is wide of the mark. We are now in the unprecedented situation that despite the support we do receive from the national church, more than three quarters of English cathedrals, including us here in Portsmouth, are running deficits. And that pattern of funding is not going to change any time soon.
Which is where the third report delivered at Bristol comes in. This was by the accountancy firm BDO, commissioned to have a thorough and forensic look at the operations and finances of the nations’ cathedrals. When they came to Portsmouth, their analysis and advice was both encouraging and sobering. Encouraging, as in their judgement we are well run, making good use of the resources we have. Sobering, because BDO say our issue is structural. Our expenditure is greater than our income, not because we are inefficient, but because delivering what our community and city and diocese and nation expect of us – a massive contribution to the common good – simply costs more than we are receiving.
This despite the fact that, like other cathedrals, we have professionalized our management and operations, diversified our revenue, expanded our events programme, invested in digital communications, deepened our partnerships with local institutions, and broadened the range of people who come through our doors. All while staying faithful to our core purpose as a place of worship, and our commitment to the Anglican choral tradition. There are, by the way, around one thousand cathedral choristers across the country, of which we here in Portsmouth contribute an astounding seventy, well above the average. All part of our offering of worship – and also a very rare thing: an unbroken English cultural tradition that goes back continuously for nearly five hundred years to 1549, more than forty years before the first staging of a Shakespeare play.
So yes, we here this morning, in William Temple’s words, really are a society existing for the benefit of those who are not our members. We are disciples of Christ, like our teacher always looking beyond our own needs, to how we might serve our wider community and wider world. And those Bristol reports can help us to see just how significant the cathedral contribution is to the wider life of our nation: houses of good – the common good – in ways that flow out of our being houses of God, to an extent that might surprise even us who worship in them day by day and week by week.
All this gives a particular context and meaning to our invitation last Sunday and this, for you to reflect on your financial giving, which after all is a key component of being a disciple of Christ. Somehow it is very English to resist any too explicit mention of money in public. I’m not exempt from that, but will at least go so far as to say that in our household we give a lot of thought to our charitable giving, usually with a sense that we ought to be doing more. The charities we support are a mixture, related to our own personal experience, and our sense of the needs of the world. Many of you, for example, were kind enough to sponsor me when I ran the Great South Run for the National Deaf Children’s Society; I wanted to support them because of how much we appreciated their help with our youngest child, who is hearing impaired. As for the Cathedral, we do have our own monthly direct debit, and this year are increasing it by 10%.
Your own pattern of giving personal to you, as will your personal circumstances. But as your Dean, with overall responsibility for every aspect of the life and work of this your cathedral, and hugely grateful to the volunteers, staff and ministry team here, not to mention our wonderful choir, it is my duty to hold before you how much we need your support. What I have tried to show this morning, with reference to the Theos and other reports, is that any support you do give will have an incredible and wide-ranging impact. Yes, it will benefit those who worship here regularly, but also so many more, right across our nation. This is not a vague sentiment, but what the evidence actually shows: we really do continue to be ‘a society that exists for the benefit of those who are not its members.’
In 1931, during the Oxford Mission in which he uttered those words, Archbishop William Temple famously stopped the singing of a hymn, challenging those present to sing the final verse loudly if they meant the words with all their hearts, to stop singing if they did not mean them at all, and to sing them softly if they meant them a little, and wanted to mean them more. The hymn was ‘When I survey the wondrous cross’, and the last verse is as follows: ‘Were the whole realm of nature mine, That were a present far too small; Love so amazing, so divine, Demands my soul, my life, my all.’ But all accounts almost every student present sang it softly, and with real emotion. They wanted to respond more fully to the overwhelming generosity of God.
So I end by saying to myself and to all of you, I suspect we mostly know at least in part the overwhelming debt we owe to God, and the model of loving self-sacrifice we see in his Son. We know at some level that this rightly demands, ‘our soul, our life, our all’, but are not yet able to completely live out and practice what that means. That is certainly true for me. So I say to myself as well as to you, that there are many ways of taking the next step on our journeys of faith and commitment, as we seek to be disciples whose lives really are fully shaped by our teacher. One vital way, however, is surely reviewing and increasing our financial giving, in the light of the one who gave his very life for our sake, and taught us to lose our life in order to find it. AMEN
