Dr Parker introduced the speaker, the Right Honourable and Right Reverend Doctor Richard Chartres, Bishop of London. The 'Right Honourable' denotes the Bishop's membership of the Privy Council, the private council of the Sovereign. This was all very impressive, as was his track record: he left Trinity College, Cambridge to become a teacher in ancient history; following ordination he was first chaplain to a bishop, then chaplain to an archbishop. Only eight years later he himself joined the episcopate as Bishop of Stepney, having spent the intervening time in a London parish while also Gresham Professor of Divinity. Another three years and he was elevated to his present post, at the same time acting as Dean of Her Majesty's Chapels Royal and Privy Counsellor. Clearly Richard Chartres has been in the fast stream of the Church of England from the beginning, and some of us began to wonder what other distinctions he might attain.

The only thing missing from David Parker's introduction was Dr Chartres's height. This also turned out to be impressive, and he hardly needed the elevation he gained from mounting the pulpit: at something around six feet three inches he towered over his audience. But it was his voice that was his most striking feature. Not only is the Bishop highly articulate but his words flowed through the Abbey, rising and falling in rich cadences; we listened spellbound, even the hardness of the pews for once forgotten. It seems that his only acting experience was at school in Hertford, but he did not need RADA. He is a natural performer. He could even 'do' Ken Livingstone (and might yet have a field day with our own dear Boris).

So what did he tell us? It took him a little time to get around to the nub of the subject: 'Robing our Destiny in Stone: Church Buildings in Modern England'. He began with a few stories-his Stepney predecessor was known informally as 'Big Jim' but he himself drew the line at 'Big Dick', although happy to be addressed in the neighbourhood as 'Bish' or even identified as the grim reaper from his bishop's crook-before getting down to business. The modern world, he told us, began in Victorian times, and religion was forced on to the back foot; the 1950s 'revival' was only a blip. But at last a sea change is taking place, and Christians need have no fears; to continue the maritime metaphors, the tide will turn, indeed is already turning, witness what is happening in London-and even in Dorchester. Even so the church is still not part of mainstream thinking and often not even mentioned in debates on society's failures. It is time for the sleeping giant of the Church of England to awake. We must be confident as well as caring. And then he got on to the role of church buildings in all of this: we must ensure that we keep to the old values embodied in our buildings; they represent an ordered world and give meaning to our worship. He gave an example: the layout enables stately processions towards the High Altar in the East, exemplifying the steady progression of Christians to what lies beyond.

At the practical level even redundant or under-used church buildings must not be secularized but given a diversity of purpose so that they embrace all human life. And here we were able to make use of the splendid screen suspended from the high beams of the Chancel (constructed and installed by Tim Cook) to enable the Bishop to show shots of church interiors ingeniously adapted to double as conference centres or host activities from play groups to luncheon parties. There was a kind reference to the improvements to Dorchester Abbey, but it was clear that others are as much in on the act, even if at least one of the Bishop's slides showed what looked like a cross between Noah's Ark and a chicken coop apparently suspended from a nave ceiling, its purpose undisclosed.

Then the Bishop took questions. On the impact of Muslim activists on Christianity in this country he thought that we should take a leaf from their books and get out into the streets as they do, although not perhaps indulge in self-flagellation; another questioner-a Roman Catholic-asked him to kick-start a revival of Christian unity; the Bishop suggested we might begin by celebrating each other's martyrs.

While the talk might not have been exactly what some of us had expected, we had been hugely entertained by a fine orator, and he deserved his warm applause.

Robing our destiny in stone: Church Buildings in modern England
Rt Revd Richard Chartres, Bishop of London

You will have recognised the echo of Philip Larkin's poem "Church Going" in my title. I suppose that the poet would have described himself as an agnostic but his final stanza has more spiritual gravitas than many a pious paperback.

A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognised and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which he once heard was proper to grow wise in
If only that so many dead lie round.

I am very grateful for this invitation to visit Dorchester Abbey and to meet The Friends. As someone entranced by gossip from the muniment room, I have long wanted to be a pilgrim to the shrine of St Birinus and to muse in the first capital of Wessex. As Chairman of the national Church Buildings Division, I know that your recent achievements building on the success of your Millennium fund raising campaign have inspired and encouraged the vast army of volunteers who care for our church buildings up and down the country. Your new history edited by Dr Kate Tiller makes thrilling reading.

But also congratulations in these dark times on taking the risk of inviting a bishop to address you. Bishops as risible figures. You will be shocked to know how often they have been lampooned and mocked. During the recent French Presidential visit I was reminded of Voltaire's letter on the English bishops.

[But religion is funny. God is not funny but there is such a distance between what his worshippers do and what the Almighty is that religion is a proper subject for humour. I agree with Rowan Atkinson's campaign against additional laws to protect religion. One can understand the motive but fear the effects of such a change.

I am personally grateful to Rowan Atkinson. My talk to the Electrical Engineers.]

Why do I say "dark times"? The state of the church. Mixed. In some places "we are on our way out". "Inertia keeps us going." Improving figures in London sustained over a ten year period. 150 people in training for the priesthood. 45,000 on electoral rolls in 1990 - nearly 70,000 today. Recognition factors not always high - Grim Reaper.

As we think of the role of church buildings we cannot confine ourselves to a pure heritage or an aesthetic agenda. The social and cultural context. Focus groups in the last General Election. Who is to blame?

Larkin, who wrote the poem which inspired my title, identified 1963 as the watershed year when "sexual intercourse was invented". Churchill's Britain crumbled with bewildering rapidity and the church which had been in many ways at home in Churchill's Britain fell prey to angst and confusion about its task and identity.

It seemed that this was just the closing act of a drama which Matthew Arnold had seen unfolding on Dover beach in the 1850's. In a melancholy fit, staying in a Dover lodging house just after his marriage, Matthew Arnold pictured the sea of faith "retreating to the breath of the night wind down the vast edges drear and naked shingles of the world". The tide was going out. Europeans became convinced that modernisation would proceed hand in hand with secularisation and that what had begun to happen in our part of the continent of Europe was setting a pattern which would be followed by the rest of the world. In England where to call someone an intellectual has had the potential to wreck a political career the full realisation of this process was long in coming. The mini religious revival of the 1950's for a time obscured what was happening [and incidentally misled some church leaders into thinking what was a blip was in fact the norm] but by the sixties and seventies even we were beginning to see the writing on the wall of our church buildings.

Larkin in his poem wondered,

"When churches fall completely out of use
What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep
A few cathedrals chronically on show
...
And what remains when disbelief has gone?
...
I wonder who
Will be the last, the very last, to seek
This place for what it was."

The tide was going out but perhaps unnaturally far. There was one child on a Thai holiday beach who read the sign correctly and saved her family. Run she shouted because such a dramatic recession of the tide is a sign of an approaching Tsunami.

In a cosmopolitan place like London, "a world in a city", there are many signs of increasing turbulence and of the spiritual tsunami that is building among the very youthful population of the world in places like the vast housing projects in greater Cairo and in the megalopolises of South America. Ken Livingstone, not an uncritical admirer of our holy faith said to me that as he toured London two things were obvious - the population was still growing and "It's a more religious place".

Mark Thompson the Director General of the BBC was making a similar point in his address on "Faith and the Media" last week in Westminster Cathedral. Reflecting on his 20 years in television he traced the collapse of the consensus that existed when he started that Nietzsche was right - there had been an Entzauberung; a breaking of the spell in Western European civilisation. Falling church rolls and innumerable sociological studies were seen when he began his broadcasting career as irrefutable signs of the imminence of God's funeral. Now the comfortable consensus that the story of religion could only end in retreat and fragmentation in the face of modernity has evaporated.

In a way that bewilders members of yesterday's Anglo-American avant garde it is already clear that the four to five billion people in the world, who follow some kind of spiritual path, are not going to conform to what until recently was seen to be the inevitable consequence of modernisation - that is the relegation of religion to the margins of life.

Exceptionally in North Western Europe this is what has happened and this is what Arnold saw on Dover Beach. The resulting lack of seriousness about the quality of our spiritual education has of course resulted among other things in a new credulity and people who have few defences against the peddlers of the cults of unreason.

There was an amusing example in the Economist not so long ago. The astrology correspondent on one of the tabloids failed to turn up one morning to cast his horoscopes so a rather cynical senior hack was pressed into service. Somewhat bored with his task he decided to spice things up and wrote under the sign of Cancer this prediction - "All the ills of yesteryear will be as nothing to what will befall you today". He thought that it was harmless fun but the switch board was jammed with panicking readers and he was sacked.

But it is another sign of a sea change that the editorial team at the Economist has recently decided that the reality of the contemporary world cannot be described without reporting its religious news. Five years ago ink would not have been wasted on something which was seen to have no value in understanding the daylight world. In the autumn there was an eighteen page special supplement on faith and politics and now hardly an issue goes by without some serious reporting of religion.

We do not live in a country that can be simply described as secular. On the other hand we do not inhabit a religious country and, still less, can we be described as a Christian country although every single week in the Greater London Area there are 630,000 Christians assembling for worship in more than 4,000 churches. If that were true of any political party we would regard it as a non trivial fact. The truth is that London is secular, religious and Christian all at the same time and this will become increasingly true of the whole of the UK. If we are to bequeath a creative culture and good country in which to live then conversation between these different perspectives on life has to be sustained and deepened. If we are not in respectful and strenuous conversation then there will be more destructive conflict.

Some people of course like the fundamentalist secularists, whose shrillness is yet another sign of approaching spiritual turbulence, want to close down the conversation by asserting that there is only one valid way of looking at life.

Every child deserves an education for the 21st century which includes religious literacy; ethical clarity and spiritual awareness. Every church should recognise the duty and the opportunity to assist in this kind of education and here at Dorchester Abbey you have equipped yourselves to play a creative part.

It is time for the sleeping giant of the Church of England to recover a non exclusive confidence in our place in the future of our country as well as in our past. At a time when the choice is between conversation and the kind of ghetto-isation which leads to conflict we should rejoice in the presence of churches like Dorchester Abbey which have aspired to serve the whole community and not just the pious and observant part of it.

Extinction is one of the subterranean themes of our time. It may be why people are so fascinated by dinosaurs. The extinction of species and the loss of bio -diversity is certainly one of the challenges we shall face in the 21st century.

We even have cause to ponder our own extinction as a race. The Astronomer Royal recently published a book about the human future entitled "Our Final Century" worryingly without a question mark.

On a visit to Berlin as part of our link with the Diocese of Berlin Brandenburg, I was shown the private meditation room used by German members of the Reichstag. The walls are hung with six oblong panels. The first is simply earth coloured with protuberant flints. In the second panel there is a scattering of white painted nails on the same background. It was explained top us that the nail were the first human beings. By the third panel the nails had been arranged in the pattern of religious symbols - crescent, cross, star and the like. By the fourth panel the nails covered the entire surface. By the fifth something had happened and the nails had receded and formed one or two scattered groups. In the sixth panel the earth and the protuberant flints had reasserted their dominance but if you looked carefully you could see a stratum within the flints of fossilised nails.

The series is crying out for a seventh panel - new creation, resurrection - but it is missing. Will Europe hear the news from us and see the glory in our life together?

Let us come closer to home. My great predecessor at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, Mandell Creighton, devoted many of his addresses to the vocation of the National Church. That was before he was worried to death by ritualists.

It is not a description of our church I hear very frequently now and it right that we have moved on to thinking in pan Christian rather than in denominational terms. But we can still be inspired by the vision of a church without a sectarian gene that is determined to embrace all those who live in the parish and this England irrespective of whether or not they are electoral roll members.

The Government clearly sees national identity as problematical - hence the Goldsmith proposals. Paradoxically the one thing that seems to unite us is derision at any attempts to provide unifying rituals.

There is much to love and cherish in the old story of Churchill's Britain as well as episodes for which there should be proper penitence but we are serving a country in which the students at one of our Church Secondary Schools the Greig Academy in Haringey speak 70 mother tongues from Albanian to Zulu. Identity and cohesion are real questions in such a context.

One part of the extinction theme which I find especially elegiac is the extinction of human languages. I was told the sad story of the last two speakers of some indigenous tribal language who fell out, they argued acrimoniously and finally did not speak to one another years before they both died and their language passed into oblivion.

Our identity as a people has been decisively shaped by the words and the gestures of Jesus Christ on his way to the cross. His story has been able to relate Jew and Gentile, slave and free, male and female. His story made a people here in Wessex as Alfred faced the pagan Danes and rallied the English.

We are called in our own time to practice the language he taught us and to assemble to re-member his story - not in the weak sense that we remember an event of long ago and far away but to be fed by him and to re-member his body in the present. Too many people seem to be intent on dismembering. If we continue in this way, then we shall mince ourselves into atoms and our part of the language of God will be lost. The words of Christ can never be destroyed nor the community in which they are spoken but the church in particular places can lose the capacity to speak the language in a convincing way.

What is happening in our own time, despite our attempts to disestablish nature and to re-engineer the world as a theatre of individual human willing, is that we are being reminded of some enduring truths which have been more obvious to previous and future generations than they have been in the immediate past.

I was brought up at a time when churches were described opprobriously as "plant", when my predecessor as a parish priest in Westminster wanted to abandon the church building to worship in tents as befits a pilgrim people. {There is a place for tents and I have established one myself in Bishopsgate as a focus for interfaith encounter but that is another story}. There was in those far off days enthusiasm for the abolition of sanctuary screens and the multi-purpose worship space was in vogue. It was clearly inefficient to set aside a dedicated space to represent a next worldly dimension. We were told to admire churches that doubled as basket-ball courts. Altars had to be dragged out of their position in the east and placed in the midst and the Christian community was taught to prefer the introverted life of gathering around the table to the traditional procession into the new dimension of the kingdom.

I believe that this has led to a sense of the real absence of the infinite possibilities of heaven, and a profound disorientation. The sanctuary has been evacuated and the blood supply to the symbolic life has been cut. In consequence as the poet Robert Lowell puts it,

"In this small town where everything is known,
I see his vanishing emblems,
His white spire and flagpole sticking out above the fog,
Like old white china doorknobs, sad slight useless things to calm the mad."

Let us go back to fundamenta.

The scientific understanding of space as infinite expanse with no centre has little connection with living in a meaningful world. Human beings have never actually lived in the space conceived by mathematicians as isotropic, having the same properties in all directions. The space experienced by human beings is oriented.

Space is not homogeneous for the person who is spiritually aware. Such a person experiences manifestations like Moses in Exodus III. God called to him out of the bush and said, "Draw not nigh hither; put off thy shoes from off thy feet for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground."

Sacred space is a revelation of what is real in the midst of the formless expanse. It reveals the fixed point, the pole, the central axis for orientation. In doing so it permits a cosmos, an ordered world to be constituted. In profane space there is no fixed point and no true orientation. There is no possibility of a cosmos only the fragments of one, like the debris of a stellar explosion.

A universe comes to birth from its centre. Jesus Christ was crucified at Golgotha, the place of the skull. Whose skull? The skull was that of the first human being Adam made from the dust of the earth.

The lifting up of Christ on a tree in this central place in the history of human life provides the vertical axis to which the new humanity is drawn. As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so whosoever believeth may in him have eternal life. [John III,14-15]

The new axis stands on a table, the mensa mystica around which the new people is assembled and nourished. The Christian sanctuary then has a central vertical axis, an orientation towards the east, the next worldly dimension of the divine kingdom and a horizontal invitation, a space within which the new humanity is assembled and nourished.

Christians invest matter with dignity.
Manichees hate matter.
Pagans worship matter.

Materialists are [ironically] indifferent to matter. Christians give thanks and refer matter to the Creator. Church buildings are an embodiment I stone of this thanksgiving and this reference.

It is a reverence has to be continually re-appropriated as we see the casual way in which people can contemplate destroying sanctuaries and 11th century churches to make way for further runways in Harmonsworth. We do this so light heartedly because we have ceased to live in an oriented world as conscious participants in a sacred cosmos and instead treat matter not as bearing the divine signature but as mere matter to be exploited by those who have themselves absurdly aspired to be gods.

Exodus XXV,8 "And let them make me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them".

But the truth of the sanctuary must be balanced by the warmth of the invitation to come in and since so many who have been invited like the guests to the wedding feast in the gospel are too busy to come, we have to go out into the highways and the hedgerows with out invitation.

I hope that I have said enough to make it clear that I would not be a party to secularising our buildings in any way but we should not be afraid to return to the tradition of earlier centuries and use the nave to embrace all human life.

Larkin reflects that the church building,

"...held unspilt
So long and equably what since is found
Only in separation. Marriage and birth
And death, and thoughts of these."

The building itself can set a context for our activities which opens up their depth.

Conclusion

I believe that there are great Christian centuries to come and that you have equipped this church to serve the community of Dorchester and the pilgrims to the shrine of Birinus at a time of painful re-awakening.

Many people experience the way we live now as existing in the flatlands with a suppressed fear of death and a hectic lifestyle in the hope that living faster will mean that we get more out of this short life.

It will become more and more obvious that there are two ways out. There is the broad highway which leads to a reversion to the pre-rational. Much of the new spirituality is in fact a new credulity which flourishes in an atmosphere where it doesn't matter what you believe as long as you are sincere.

Worldwide and certainly in America there is a new literalism in religion and religious institutions and convictions are more salient for good or very often for ill.

There is another path which involves the Church recovering her nerve and putting first things first.

It involves very hard work not to revert to the pre-rational but to transcend the logic and agenda of the flatlands without denigrating all that has been achieved in our astonishing technological achievements and social transformation to build a democratic and prosperous society.

Above all we have to see that our flourishing as human beings has everything to do with our relationships with Meaning/God, nature, with one another and with ourselves. This means keeping our vows and promises, building a civilisation of trust because we are trustworthy, honouring family life.

Then there has to be a scrupulous respect for the word at a time when there are so many beguiling images in circulation. If our words are not heartfelt and precise then we are poisoning the wells of civilisation.

We have to relearn that wisdom and meaning come with a progressive diminution of egotism and the discovery that serving others is the road to freedom and fulfilment. The more you let go of self the more you grow in soul. You cannot live in this way by mere wishful thinking there has to be spiritual practice with just and generous living.

Some of the most popular TV series at present are concerned with makeovers and instant transformations.

Public figures are also intensely concerned with image and employ spin doctors to make them "accessible and cuddly". Many in London think for obvious reasons that I should employ one.

Likewise there is a great preoccupation with the image of the church and the idea that if you change the look of the thing, the church will become popular again. Worship in particular it is said should become more accessible and led by people like you and me in lounge suits. People, it is said, are put off by anything that is difficult to grasp at first hearing.

What is to be done? Shout louder? Compete in the market place?

God is not a commodity. There is nothing holy about muddled or naff communication. But the Church is concerned with depth before décor. In the end we trust in God and in his capacity to invite people to detect the still small voice which follows on the great tempest.

Larkin again with his representative 20th century voice,

"...though I've no idea
What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth,
It pleases me to stand in silence here".

It is time also to remember the wise words of St Ignatius of Antioch that a bishop never more resembles Jesus Christ than when he has his mouth shut.