Bishop Steven gave the following sermon at the ordinations services at Christ Church Cathedral on Saturday 5 July 2025. You can watch those services online.
Pray therefore that your heart may daily be enlarged….
Let love be genuine
Romans 12.9
It’s a real privilege to share in this service of ordination. We gather to surround the candidates with our love and prayers. But I wonder how you are praying for them, and how they would want us to pray.
Nine years ago, I was called to move from Sheffield to become the Bishop of Oxford. A number of people were kind enough to ask how they could pray for me.
I gave different answers at first, depending on how I was feeling that day. It was a time of mixed emotions, as ordination day will be for our new deacons. I felt very inadequate, as they will. There were so many things to pray for. But my answer eventually settled down to a single request. Please pray that God will give me a bigger heart. A bigger heart to love this new diocese and its people.
Bearing the weight
The prayer is drawn from one of the lines in this ordination service. In these ordination services, Bishop Dave and Bishop Mary set out all that the church understands a deacon to be. Then our ordinands are asked a series of formal questions. And they will be reminded of the greatness of the trust in which they are now to share: the ministry of Christ himself.
Then come the words I struggle most to say in every ordination service I have led (and I will struggle to say them now):
You cannot bear the weight of this calling in your own strength but only by the grace and power of God. Pray therefore that your heart may daily be enlarged and your understanding of the Scriptures enlightened.
All those of us who are ordained are to ask God every day for bigger, wider, softer hearts to love God’s world and to love God’s people. This whole ordination service is a prayer for bigger hearts.
Open wide your hearts
The image of the big heart is taken from a text in 2 Corinthians. St Paul is wrestling to win the trust of a proud and difficult and divided community. He lays bare his own heart, his weaknesses, his affections, his calling. He holds nothing back. And he ends his profound reflections on ministry with this appeal:
We have spoken frankly to you Corinthians; our heart is wide open to you. There are no restrictions on our affections but only on yours. In return, I speak as to children, open wide your hearts also.
2 Corinthians 6.11-13
Love is absolutely the heart and centre of what it means to be a Christian and at the heart of what it means to be deacon, or a priest, or bishop. All too often we lose that focus on love in all the complexity of our task. As a church we need to see again more clearly that the primary calling of the ordained is love.
The service reminds us deacons are ordained as agents of God’s purposes of love. The candidates will be asked:
Will you strive to make the love of Christ known through word and example and have a particular care for those in need?
God has called these wonderful people into ministry because God’s world needs more love. More people with big hearts, to love this broken, hurting world in practical acts of care and kindness. God has called these candidates into ministry to show us all how to love in deed and in word. The Church and the world can be very, very hard to love. Each of us will need every day a bigger heart.
Bring your heart to God
How do we ensure that our hearts grow bigger every day across every year of ministry? There is only one way.
We have to bring our hearts daily to the God who made us, who loves us, who redeems us. We have to come each day ourselves to the love of God who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, to join again the dance of love which is at the very heart of creation.
We need to hear God speak to us every day the word beloved; to know how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ for the world. We need to lay our sins and shortcomings, the narrowness of our hearts, at the foot of the cross. We need the daily grace and gift of the Holy Spirit to make us new within and to kindle and rekindle holy fire.
We do not come to God by navigation but by love, according to Augustine – by the widening and renewal of our hearts, our whole selves.
After their ordination, the deacons are given a New Testament. It’s important to understand something else about the prayer for big hearts. When we pray that our hearts may daily be enlarged and our understanding of the Scriptures enlightened we are not praying for two different things but for one thing.
For we need big hearts, we need love, to understand the Scriptures. We are to work at our understanding of the Scriptures until every part of our understand builds love of God and love of neighbour. St Augustine again:
So anyone who thinks that he has understood the divine scriptures or any part of them but cannot by his understanding build up this double love of God and neighbour has not yet succeeded in understanding them.
Love will endure
Love is the centre and the means of this ministry, and it is love which will endure as each of us is called deeper into the love of God which endures beyond and through death and for eternity.
So we pray for our deacons – that they will be women and men with big hearts and those hearts will grow bigger and wider every day.
And whoever we are, whatever our calling, this must be our prayer for ourselves as well. God needs more people with big hearts to love God’s world.
The bishop led us in prayer at the beginning of the ordination service, that each of us in our vocation and ministry would be an instrument of love.
You and I whatever our vocation and stage of life, whatever our gifts, are instruments of love. Every one of us needs to draw near. Each of us needs a bigger, wider, softer heart to understand that we are loved and to love God’s world.
Amen.