Mayor’s Civic Service
St Giles’ Sunday May 2nd  Sunday 2010 

Can I say again how delighted we are, here at St Giles’, to be able to host our Mayor’s service, to celebrate his year in office. He is of course well known to us because Gilesgate is his home, and he is our local councillor. I had not been here long when I saw a man marching through our churchyard at high speed issuing instructions to a group of officials with clipboards hurrying to keep up. That was our Mayor – and thank you for your help.

We should also be grateful that this service is taking place at all. I noticed that because of the election, some of the Mayor’s other public engagements had to be curtailed, on the grounds that they might bring political advantage. I smiled at the idea that a charity fashion show was thought to bring political advantage but a church service was not. We’ll have to see about that !

Don’t worry, I am not going to tell you how to vote. The days when the Church intervened in politics in that crude way are rightly over. Not that the Church has nothing to contribute to political life. It was Archbishop Desmond Tutu who remarked that when someone says that the Church should have nothing to do with politics, they are clearly reading a different Bible to the one he reads ! As we have found in our service already, the Christian Faith has a great to deal to share when it comes to considering some serious questions like, “what makes a good city ?”

I want to be precise when I talk about the Church sharing in this debate. It was Archbishop William Temple, the great wartime archbishop who contributed so much to the creation of the Welfare State, who said that if the Church is asked to consider the building of a bridge, it doesn’t advise on how the bridge is to be built. That is the job of the engineer. But the Church will say that those who design and build it have a responsibility to build it well and hold them to account. The Church does principles not detail.

So what might the Church say to our discussions about “what makes for a good city ?”
Before I answer that question I want to reminisce a little. I’m getting to that age ! When I was a young man I was a youth worker in Bermondsey in SE London – for those of you who know your football, it’s Millwall’s home area. And the youth work back in the 1980s, in the aftermath of the closure of the docks, was demanding. It was especially demanding because we were at odds with our local council. I was working in a Christian youth club and that was unpopular with some of the Council. But then there was a change….

In 1985 the Church of England produced a major report, Faith in the City. The report had carefully studied the quality of life in our cities and made a series of recommendations to the government and the Church. You may remember that its sales were much boosted when a member of the government described it as “Marxist”. In our youth club, we suddenly found ourselves being invited to important conferences in the town hall about the future of our bit of the city.

In 2006 the Church produced another report about urban life, Faithful Cities. It made a bit less of a splash, for lots of reasons. Not being rubbished by the government didn’t help sales !

I want to reflect briefly on that report to help us think about this question – ‘what makes for a good city ?’

The report noted that in some ways things were better than in the 1980s. Cities are ok now. Back then no-one wanted to live in our blighted de-industrialised cities. Now, the city centres – including our own – are full of new developments and urban living is cool again. And for some people that has meant new jobs, new homes, new opportunities. Others – and we feel this in Gilesgate – have felt pushed out of the city centre to its margins. Now, our urban poor are more likely to live in the big estates on the edge of the city – out of sight and out of mind.

The report also noticed one of the fascinating processes of the last 20 years - the way language has changed. Who would have thought that ‘regeneration’ would become a mainstream political word ? When it is of course, primarily, a theological word.
Part of the journey has been the realisation that the government – local and national – and the Church share so many of the same concerns and even use this same language. ‘Regeneration’, ‘empowerment’, ‘participation’ – these words all describe the values which church and state bring to the task of making our cities good places to live. We are all committed to making our cities – our city here – a place where everyone feels that they belong and can have a voice and a future.

Not that this is an easy task. You’ll know better than I, that it is in the urban constituencies where the rates of voting and participation are lowest, where the threat of political extremism is at its greatest, and where, despite some progress, we still see lives and families blighted by poor health, educational problems, joblessness, and the consequences of all this in terms of damaged lives.

I wrote only last month in our parish magazine about the steady trickle of young lives lost in the communities we serve here; so often lost because of drugs and hopelessness. There is still much to be done.

So we share a common agenda and often a common language, but the Church, unlike some of our politicians, does “do God” ! What difference does that make ?

I remember being challenged once by an academic in Durham University – we were helping him prepare for ordination – “Why is the Church talking about politics or urban life ? What does the Church bring that is distinctive, that earns it a place at the table ?” It was and is a good question.

I want to offer a phrase and a word to answer this question. The phrase is ‘faithful capital’. Those of us familiar with the language of urban regeneration know the phrase ‘social capital’:  which people and institutions are helping to build ‘social capital’ – that almost unseen network of relationships and good will which does so much to sustain real community life. ‘Faithful capital’ is something similar, but it explores community life more in terms of values and spirituality. Who is helping to make our city a good place ?

And I want to say – quietly and modestly because local churches do not have huge resources –that the Church is an important builder of ‘faithful capital’. A 2005 report produced by the NW Regional Development Agency estimated that there were in that region, over 45,000 faith volunteers contributing around 8.1 million volunteer hours per annum. That was worth over £60 million, the equivalent of almost 5,000 full time jobs. The NE will be no different.

I am constantly amazed by the contributions made by members of our churches to local life. In our congregations you will find school governors, hospital visitors, prison visitors, charity shop workers, parent and toddler group leaders, music coaches, pastoral visitors, counsellors, good neighbours – all done for free, from love.

But almost more deeply than that, how many places are there where people can gather to think and talk and pray about the really big words in life – ‘love’, ‘trust’, and above all ‘hope’.  We do that here, routinely, every week.

The word I want to finish with is ‘hope’.

This election campaign is taking place in the shadow of a financial crisis whose impact on our lives or institutions, clearly, none of us knows yet. The statements from our politicians and even more so from the commentators are very worrying. This is a big election.

It is a big election also because the respect in which our politicians are held has perhaps never been so low in the modern era. If this next period of our political life goes wrong, I really do fear for the future. So there is a huge weight on our politicians’ shoulders. That is why we pray for them, every week.

But where then is ‘hope’ ?

The hope is that we are not alone. The Church believes that God is with us. Not in some “magic wand” sense, but working to support that which is good; to guide, to encourage, to strengthen, to challenge. God’s help is there for us, if we seek it.  We are not alone.

And our future is not fixed by our past. The Church is especially beautiful today, in honour of this special service, but also because we are still celebrating Easter: that remarkable series of events which turned utter defeat into victory and hope. Hope, both that good does triumph, and even more, that all that is good will not be wasted but will be kept and treasured for eternity.

That hope makes all the hard work of church and of political life worth while.
Amen.