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Good morning. The story is told of a king who, many centuries ago, became a Christian. Moved by the message of forgiveness in the Gospel, he was delighted to hear that when he was baptised the water poured over him would wash away all his past misdeeds. There was just one snag. He’d been king for a while. He knew that staying in power would involve actions hard to reconcile with the teachings of his new found faith. So he came up with a pragmatic solution. He would delay his baptism until his death bed, so that newly free from sin, he could be sure of his place in heaven. I’ve no idea whether he got the kind of death that made such planning possible, after all, kings were prone to die suddenly in battle. But in wanting to be good, but not until later, he was echoing sentiments first attributed to St Augustine, who famously prayed, “God grant me chastity, but not just yet!” Today, I’ll be attending the meeting of the Church of England General Synod in London. Climate change is one of our biggest concerns. And a major item on our agenda is to agree the year by which we want the Church to reach net zero carbon. The main motion stipulates 2045, slightly ahead of the government’s 2050 target. An amendment proposes a date significantly earlier, 2030, barely a decade from now. I expect the debate to be passionate and well informed. We will hear of the plight of those who live in parts of the world where climate change is not merely a future threat but a present day reality. Places where lands are beginning to submerge below the seas or, conversely, where good agricultural zones are drying into desert. But that takes me back to St Augustine and my medieval king. There are issues that can be very hard to sort out immediately, even for kings and saints. However they, along with governments, businesses and even churches, can be lured into procrastination, imagining they’ve solved the problem simply by making a commitment to start being good at some point in the future. Christian ethics entirely supports my setting myself demanding long term targets, but it is at least equally concerned with the steps I’m going to make towards them today. Increasingly businesses, encouraged by global alliances of investors including Church of England funds, are being pressed not just to commit publicly to a final date for falling in line with the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, but to set out the short term interim targets that will give shareholders confidence they can get there. Today, at Synod, we turn our attention to our own performance. And the success of the debate, in my view, will be less in how demanding a date we eventually set, than in whether we are prepared to be as rigorous at measuring our own progress towards our goal, year on year, as we are with that of the business and commercial world.