Article
Change
Community
Hospitality
6 min read

“We’re amongst everybody.” The novel communities serving London

The city's intentional communities live in, and love, particular places.

Robert is a journalist at the Financial Times.

 

A man stands in a relaxed way on the doorstep of a brick building.
Mark Bishop at HOP East.

Mark Bishop has an unusual view from his home in Stepney, east London, at Friday lunchtimes. Because the nearby Stepney Shahjalal mosque has insufficient space for worshippers at its busiest weekly service, neighbouring Shandy Park turns into an impromptu outdoor worship space. For the main Friday service, more than 500 men alternate between standing and kneeling in prayer in the open air. 

The scene has seized the attention of Bishop, an ordained Church of England priest, because his home is the House of Prayer for East London (HOP East), a community that he and Carrie, his wife, founded in 2023. From its base in Faith House, built as a 19th century mission outpost on the edge of Shandy Park, it is seeking to bring the power of Christian prayer to the same area. Bishop and Carrie live at HOP East with their children and another couple. 

The community is one of multiple Christian “intentional communities” worldwide engaged in concerted efforts to develop new forms of monastic or communal living to minister to an increasingly secular world. The trend has had particular attention in the UK because of the decision of Elizabeth Oldfield, a Christian writer and podcaster, and her husband to live in an intentional community with another couple. In Germany, Johannes Hartl 20 years ago in Augsburg founded a community called the House of Prayer where there is always at least one community member praying, 24 hours a day. 

HOP East was partly inspired by Hartl’s community. The Stepney community shares with many other Christian intentional communities both a strong sense of ministering to a particular place and a focus on the importance of prayer. As well as the residents, there are a growing number of non-resident members who regularly come to Faith House for prayer, worship and to eat together. 

The open-air prayer highlights both the contrast between HOP East and its many non-Christian neighbours and their shared commitment to prayer, according to Bishop.  

“We’re amongst everybody, to be good Christian neighbours,” he says. 

Kirsten Stevens-Wood, a lecturer in Cardiff Metropolitan University’s school of education and social policy who has a research interest in intentional communities, says Christians have a particular affinity for communal living. 

Stevens-Wood points out that sociologist Rosabeth Moss Kanter – better known for her later management writing – concluded after researching intentional communities that Christianity’s mixture of shared commitment and rituals was highly compatible with communal living. 

“It enables communities to be more stable and endure longer periods of time,” Stevens-Wood says. 

New communities such as HOP East coexist with the survivors of previous waves of idealism about communal living. In the UK, they include Northern Ireland’s Corrymeela Community, which seeks to heal the polarisation caused by the political conflict in the region. Bishop himself was born in the Lee Abbey community in Devon, a Christian community linked to Anglicanism founded after the second world war. 

The London outpost of Lee Abbey runs a hall of residence for international students in Kensington, on the other side of London from HOP East. 

“They definitely come in waves,” Stevens-Wood says of intentional communities. 

HOP East’s focus on prayer is manifested in multiple ways, according to Bishop. They include a commitment for members to say the Lord’s Prayer daily at noon, wherever they are, and to engage in “prayer-walking” – praying in the streets as they walk along them. 

“To our Muslim neighbours, it really helps to be more serious about how we pray, because they’re really serious about prayer,” Bishop says. “This is very much a neighbourhood where prayer is strong.” 

He and Carrie had long felt a calling to pray for London and East London in particular before setting up HOP East, he says. 

“We began, out of lots of different activity, to ask a question: ‘What would it look like to form a community as an expression of church?’” Bishop recalls. “We’re a new monastic expression. We’re living out, working out a rule of life and other things that might define what a new monastic community is.” 

Members of the community range in age from school-age children to older, retired people, Bishop says. He describes the community as “both gathered and scattered”, with only a few of the community members living in Faith House. 

But he says living in a relatively small number of East End neighbourhoods – including Limehouse, Mile End and Shadwell - unites them. 

“Everybody else has a level of proximity to us,” Bishop says. 

The points of contact between apparently contrasting communities are clear visiting the imposing Kensington townhouses owned by Lee Abbey London. 

Sue Cady, Lee Abbey London’s chaplain and deputy director, says the site is home to 150 international students and around 25 team members who form the community on the site. 

The students living at Lee Abbey London are mostly not Christians while the team members who serve them make up the community. Team members consist of a small core of longer-term workers like Cady and one-year volunteers who are single and share rooms. While Cady would like to welcome more British volunteers for the one-year positions, nearly all at present come from overseas on charity worker visas. 

Cady shares with Bishop the sense that a place where Christians live and pray together is special. Lee Abbey London expresses that partly by training up a new generation of Christian leaders, she says. 

“The young Christians are being grown and developed and then after their year with us they’re going all over the world as stronger Christians, grown in discipleship and leadership,” Cady says. 

She is also clear that the life of the community affects the students. 

“Our mission field is the international students, who are really open about UK life and asking us questions about our faith and the difference our faith makes to us,” she says. “They notice something very different about us that’s peaceful and kind.” 

At the heart of both communities, however, is a sense that prayer is a vital, sustaining, communal activity. 

For Cady, that manifests itself in Lee Abbey London’s distinctive atmosphere compared with other halls of residence. 

“People comment on the sense of God’s peace and God’s presence here, which I think is due to the fact that our team worship and pray daily for the residents that live here, and that the majority of our team are on gap years themselves,” she says. 

At HOP East, meanwhile, prayer is partly a manifestation of the members’ practical desire to help impoverished and disadvantaged people in their area. Community members pray for the area’s many refugees and those working with them, for victims of modern slavery and for many other social causes. 

However, the pledges to engage in prayer-walking and saying the Lord’s Prayer daily reflect Bishop’s conviction that prayer is a sustaining activity regardless of any practical need. Bishop insists prayer is a vital part of relating to God, of mission and ensuring people have opportunities to encounter the love of Christ. 

“We always try to remind ourselves… that prayer is always worth it, in and of itself,” he says. “We’re really aware of a hunger in this cultural moment we find ourselves in for healthy spiritual practice.” 

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Article
Awe and wonder
Community
Creed
4 min read

Cathedrals are making a comeback, here’s why

From soft toys to crisis moments, these flagships hold much more than our stories.

David was the Dean of St Paul's Cathedral for ten years until retiring in 2022.

A puppet donkey peaks over the edge of a cathedral pulpit
Family carol service, St Paul's Cathedral.

What is it about cathedrals?  Under a secular French government, €700 million has been spent on renewing Notre-Dame Cathedral after the 2019 fire disaster. The money hasn’t however come from French taxpayers, but from donations large and small by people in France and from across the world.  And the number of people entering cathedrals to visit, or pray, or meet with others keeps going up, even as church attendance declines and religion seems out of fashion – so what’s going on?  

Building a large church is a long and very costly process, and Christian communities could take a century or more to build or upgrade a cathedral as resources became available. In lands where Christian faith was embraced by those in power, governments would help to build and endow cathedrals. They were not only central points for worship and church life in their area, but were large covered meeting spaces which were also used by the state for synods, coronations, meetings or services which supported political life and enhanced social cohesion. Communities and rulers wanted to have the best and biggest building they could, to the glory of God (and also that of its builders): and cathedrals were a focus for the best that could be found in architecture and art, sermons in stone and stained glass, colourful high-rise marvels inspiring the inhabitants of an often ugly and dingy low-rise world. 

So what explains the enduring attraction of cathedrals, and the emotional bonds between these buildings and us which the rebuilding of Notre Dame has highlighted? 

For a start, these buildings are the holders of stories and identities. We humans love a good story.  We want to hear, see and tell stories; to make a story out of our own life; to be part of a bigger story which gives us identity and meaning. In cathedrals, I’ve met visitors and pilgrims eager to know the history, in other words the story of such an amazing place and all it contains. There are the visitors writing their own stories who take a picture of their cuddly toy at each tourist destination. And there are the men and women at a crisis point. in their own story who come in search of forgiveness or hope or love, and begin to find it in the great story of God, Jesus and the Christian faith to which a cathedral bears witness.  

That holding of identity isn’t only individual, of course. The tragedy of 2019 in Paris was felt across the world, because Notre Dame with its glorious architecture and its treasures is a part of the world’s story with which millions of people have become engaged through their visits and understanding; a tragedy felt of course most deeply in France, where the cathedral is entwined with French history and identity. Each cathedral, whatever its age or size, carries the story of its community and people, is part of our human story, of yours and mine. Their heritage is ours too. The story a cathedral tells about identity, faith and hope can enliven and inspire. 

Then again, cathedrals are witnesses. Cathedrals don’t only host state occasions: their role is to be a place for people from a wide geographical and social area to meet and celebrate, worship, mourn, listen and learn. They are places where we are both affirmed and challenged. Whether it’s a local charity concert to help those in need, a major company anniversary, a seminar or a protest venue for people concerned about a hot political, social or religious topic, the mourners of a significant public figure, or a homeless person seeking dignity as well as shelter – cathedrals witness to the value of human life before God. As a cathedral Dean I went from greeting the monarch to talking with Terry the Big Issue seller: for a cathedral, all are beloved by God, and there to be welcomed. 
While cathedrals hold story and identity, looking backwards, and witness to and focusing of a local or national community looking around them, you might imagine another axis of attraction as looking forward and upwards, ‘flagships of the Spirit’.  

Cathedrals, like all churches, are metaphorical footprints of God in the world: spiritual space set aside to step outside ourselves and our everyday lives, to reflect, to pray and worship, to seek an encounter with the presence of God. When I worked at St Paul’s Cathedral in London, our aim was to enable people in all their diversity to encounter the transforming presence of God in Jesus Christ, whatever that would mean for them; and sometimes we succeeded. A survey of visitors entering cathedrals found that only 10 per cent of them were intending to do something spiritual; but when they came out, 40 per cent of them had prayed, lit a candle, spoken with a priest or gone to worship.  

The authorities in Paris are expecting their visitor numbers to go up to 15 million a year after re-opening. Even Donald Trump and Elon Musk were in Notre Dame. Next time you're near a cathedral, why not go and explore the story?' 

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