News from Friends of the City Churches

’Endow a sermon’ seems to have fallen off the list of potential good works in modern Estate Planning, yet it was once literally the last word in benefaction to ensure that an annual sermon would be preached in your name, on a theme or at a time or in a place of your choosing.

The history of the City churches is spiced with such bequests, but most have had a fitful history. At least two City merchants were among the several Jacobeans who endowed sermons in their own parishes to commemorate the nation’s deliverance from the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. In the event, their legacies were short-lived, for all sermons came to decisive end at St. Martin Orgar and St. Pancras Soper Lane in the devastation of the Great Fire.

Not that an annual Fire Sermon would have saved them – one such was endowed at St. Magnus the Martyr in a bequest of 1640, after the church was spared a conflagration that damaged London Bridge in 1633, but a generation of preaching was no defence against the greater fire of 1666. Yet the Fire Sermon is once again preached at St. Magnus: last February’s was given by the Rev. Stuart Hoke of Trinity Church, NYC, with a topical reading of the traditional theme in ’Theology and Mission in the Wake of 9/11’.

But prize – for continuity, efficacy and ingenuity – surely lies with the Lion Sermon, which has been preached at St. Katherine Cree annually, on or about October 16, since the time of Charles I, always with reference to the power of faith … and lions. It celebrates the ’wonderful escape’ of Sir John Gayer from a predatory feline while on a trading mission to the east in 1643: he prayed, fervently, and it left him in peace. It is a story ripe with possibilities, but fraught with precedent, for there are only 119 Biblical references to lions from which to draw a text, and three times that many previous sermons.

Yet Sir John’s bequest has clearly worked a treat, for he went on to become Lord Mayor in 1646, and his descendents prosper still, quite free of leonine harassment; some have even ventured abroad, and now thrive in the Antipodes. Moreover, the complementary benefaction of bread for the poor after the sermon has been translated into a buffet lunch for the congregation, another pleasant modern spin on an old tradition, to which all are welcome. Please refer to the pages within for details of this year’s Lion Sermon – and pray remember the City churches in your will.

Friends of the City Churches, St Magnus the Martyr, Lower Thames Street, London EC3R 6DN tel 020 7626 1555

e-mail      www.london-city-churches.org.uk