Called to Both And
’Called to Both And’ The Very Reverend Nicholas Papadopulos, Dean of Salisbury
27 April 2026
Evensong with Installation of The Revd Neil Traynor as Canon Treasurer
Deuteronomy 9: 1–21
Ephesians 4: 1–16
‘He gave gifts to his people’ Saint Paul reminds his audience in Ephesus but, sadly, he does not always give the gifts that today’s clergy would find most useful. The gift of operating in at least two modes at once: offering pastoral care to the parish school; serving on its governing body; and parenting twins in Year 5 and their sibling in Reception. The gift of doing at least two jobs at once: healthcare chaplain and rural dean and chair of the Deliverance Network and adviser on rural ministry and member of the Bishop’s Council. The gift of being in at least two places at once: behind the altar and by the bedside; in the care home and in the playgroup; at the computer and at the Food Bank.
I’m guessing, Neil, that any combination of those three gifts would have served you well in Holland Park. The bad news is that they are no more available to those who work in cathedrals than they are to our sisters and brothers in parochial and chaplaincy ministries. If anything, their lack is even more evident, for tonight in liturgy and in legalese you have very explicitly been given two places to be in, two jobs to do, and two modes to operate in.
Bad luck. Donning your new cassock (in its eye-catching Sarum Green) does not convey super-powers. But if you allow it to, it will keep you alert to the double-edged nature of your priestly vocation, a double edge that our Church and its ministers are called to inhabit, and which has never been of greater importance for the world. You are called to the local; you are called also to the global. You are called to the particular; you are called also to the universal.
For you have been placed in the Treasurer’s stall, and you have been placed in the prebendal stall of Calne (don’t try to occupy them both at once: the medieval woodwork is very unforgiving). You have been placed in two stalls because alongside the copes and the processions and the dignity of being a ‘principal person’ of Salisbury Cathedral you are also just one of fifty-plus members of its College of Canons, a body of colleagues lay and ordained from across the Diocese and beyond, called to support one another in doing God’s work here and (if not exclusively in Calne) beyond. Your Thesaurarii stall (inaugurated more than 900 years ago) recalls you to the immediate task before you; your prebendal stall to our shared vocation. Yours has brought you here and will ultimately send you from here. Although not, we trust, for some little while.
You have been appointed Residentiary Canon and Treasurer. The Treasurer, as the Statutes stipulate ‘…shall endeavour to promote the dignity and beauty of the Cathedral’, having oversight of the fabric and care of our sacred vessels, vestments, furniture and ornaments. You will work with exceptional people like Jackie Molnar and Gary Price and will with them and others lead our ambitions to develop our whole estate and secure its zero-carbon future. But you will also keep your days of residence, responding to the urgent pastoral need that presents itself within these walls every week, supporting our volunteers and, where necessary, representing the Cathedral to the community. Again, your office as Treasurer requires you to care for stone, glass, timber and those who work them; your appointment as a Residentiary requires you to care for this Close, this city, this Diocese and all its people.
And you have (in the unpoetic language of the Cathedrals Measure 2021) become an Executive Member of the Chapter. So around the Chapter table you will argue robustly for the Works Department, you will represent us to the Fabric Advisory Committee, and you will report to us on the business plan of Cathedral Enterprises. But you will also, with all your Chapter colleagues, take ownership of our whole life, live out our shared values, and accept responsibility for our common decisions. Your position as an Executive compels you to speak for your team; your position as a Trustee to have regard to the whole.
The scholarly polymath Iain McGilchrist has devoted his working life to the argument that in our generation our genius for analysis, appetite for data, and mania for process has displaced our facility for perspective, our capacity for reflection, and our instinct for wonder. Consumed by the need to manage the immediate we are at risk of neglecting the cultivation of its broader hinterland. A Church which – a priest who – ignores the immediate has no legitimacy in speaking of what lies beyond it. Yet a Church which – a priest who – ignores what lies beyond it is fated to perpetual anxiety. Local, global: each must inform the other, for the sake of the Church and for the sake of the world. Work with us, Neil, and pray with us, that we might learn this afresh. Amen.