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Good morning. ‘On a scale of one to ten how likely are you to recommend this service to your family and friends?’ It is the kind of question most of us expect after using a website or spending a night at a hotel. It is a standard customer survey. When, a few years ago, I was asked that question, along with a dozen others, as I prepared to leave hospital after treatment I was stunned. This was the NHS, after all, not a visit to the Savoy. I’d been ill, not on a night out at the theatre. The NHS remains an icon of British national identity. It was memorably celebrated as part of the 2012 Olympics’ opening ceremony. Whether they love it or loathe it, whether they think the strikes are necessary or are heedlessly damaging patient care, the NHS is the monolith no one in the British political classes can avoid. Its staff are seemingly applauded on doorsteps one day and told they’re not efficient enough the next. Nigel Lawson once claimed that ‘the NHS is the nearest the English have to a religion’. That experience of filling in a hospital customer satisfaction survey raised huge questions for me about how the NHS sees itself. Is it, now, less of a health provider or even part of the nation’s scaffolding and more of a national brand – the national brand – of a country that wants to market its own institutions to itself? In the Church of England I’ve witnessed a not dissimilar dynamic in which we have become obsessed with our own branding, our unique selling points, and about how we can tell our story to a nation that some say has largely become indifferent to God. I prefer to see the NHS as more of a national myth than a brand. By myth I don’t mean something widely believed, which is actually false. Rather, I mean ‘myth’ in the religious sense as a foundational idea from which a religion or culture’s truths flow. For Christians, the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is the founding idea or myth from which every other of its truths flows and which becomes a story worth living by. Much as the NHS is a complex organisation of people seeking to deliver the best healthcare they can, it is also mythic. It has offered a foundational idea about how we should care for one another. While fewer seem to trust the story of Jesus, the NHS story has proven resilient. Both the future direction of the Church and of the NHS is going to tell this nation and the wider world much about who we think we should be and where we’re going.