WHEN members of the congregation of St James’s, Alperton, in Brent, north-west London, meet for worship at Pentecost, they may sing hymns incorporating eight different languages, hear the Bible read in Chinese and Tamil, hearken to the eucharist liturgy in French, and be invited to hope “within the language of your heart”.
While it could appear particularly apt, given the feast day, this approach is now the norm on the church. While for many years it has welcomed worshippers from different cultures, and enabled them to hope and worship of their mother tongue (Features, 2 June 2017), the “intercultural approach”, through which the parish’s diverse communities worship together in multiple languages, is a comparatively latest direction. What Professor Andrew Root might call the “watchword” at St James’s (Features, 25 August 2023) is Acts 10.34: “I now realise how true it’s that God doesn’t show favouritism.”
REFLECTING on the journey so far, the Revd Ali Taylor and the Revd Steve Taylor, who joined St James’s as joint vicars in 2012, recall a way that “God was asking us to go further.” They inherited 4 congregations, including Hindi-speaking and Tamil-speaking ones, and, while these groups got here together recurrently to worship, they remained distinct gatherings.
As time passed, further joint services were added, and worshippers were encouraged to go to each other’s services. But, Mrs Taylor says, some within the church felt inspired to contemplate a more radical change. One model was the Trinity, through which “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are all equal.”
In the top, it was the Covid-19 pandemic that proved the catalyst. The church was advised that it could have one service. But methods to select? In the top, the choice was taken to have one service that incorporated elements from each of the 4.
The English congregation was the primary to ask for the reinstatement of their very own service. But by this point, latest people had joined the one service at 10.30 a.m. “We didn’t feel it was right to cancel it, in case more English people got here to an English service,” Mrs Taylor recalls. “So we had an exodus of English speakers who didn’t prefer to hear other languages. And that’s effective; there are numerous English churches that folks can go to. But that is what God is doing here.”
An analogous thing happened with the Hindi-speaking congregation, who had been travelling for miles. “For bums and seats and for money, it hurt,” she says. “But, for the soul of the church, it felt like the precise thing to do.”
TODAY, the church is growing again. Two weeks before Pentecost, the service begins with coffee and pastries behind the constructing, while, on the front, a big screen proclaims “Welcome” in English, Tamil, and French. Playing within the background is worship music sung in Hindi, Farsi, Tamil, and English.
Among the worshippers arriving are an Iranian family. They bring excellent news: their visas have been granted, they usually can remain within the country. The mother tells a delighted Mr Taylor that they’ve been waiting for this morning to bring him their news.
The service begins with a prayer, before the congregation are invited to share something for which they’re thankful, “within the language of your heart”. This, Mrs Taylor tells me later, is a legacy of the pandemic, when such prayers replaced the singing that was prohibited.
Mrs Taylor plays the guitar, accompanied by ten-year-old Heidi, as we sing “God is so good”: a hymn by the Namibian minister Paul Makai, with each line in a unique language. In total, worshippers will hear ten different tongues spoken: English, Hindi, Tamil, Gujarati, Farsi, Afrikaans, Bulgarian, French, Chinese, and Yoruba.
The first reading is Acts 10.44-48, read in Farsi by the daddy of the family with newly granted visas. An English translation is accessible on screen. The second reading, 1 John 5.1-6m is read boldly by eight-year-old Tabitha.
”As a family here, we speak different languages; we have now other ways of being well-behaved; we have now other ways of showing kindness; but we have now one Father, one Spirit, one Son, and one baptism; and, look, all of us need the Holy Spirit,” Mrs Taylor explains in her sermon, which emphasises the love of God and the ability of the Holy Spirit.
In a time of prayer, the invitation to hope in our own languages, and to hearken to those of others, is repeated. And, after a time of prayer, communion, and a final blessing, the congregation is invited to hitch either an English “worship space” or a prayer walk out within the parish. The space rotates across the languages week by week.
OVER within the church kitchen, a Sri Lankan feast is being prepared. In the past, Mr Taylor says, a “bring and share” lunch was in place, but resulted in people eating their very own food, and sitting with those that spoke the identical language. Since the pandemic, only one cuisine is ready so that everybody has the chance to each serve, and be served.
The experience might be transformative, he suggests, recalling how an Iranian, together with her family, spent hours one Saturday evening, cooking within the church kitchen. “The difference it made to her sense of self, her sense of dignity — that she could offer something of her culture that everybody was having fun with: she glowed. It was beautiful.”
Today, the meal is prefaced by a brief talk by Anishkaa Worthington, who was born within the UK and attended St James’s before leaving for Sri Lanka when she was five. The family returned in 2017, and he or she now works for the organisation Southall Black Sisters. In her remarks, she asks for prayer for greater religious freedom in Sri Lanka, where she is aware that, in certain areas, it may be “very, very difficult to practise Christianity”, partly due to its association with colonialism.
Life as a Christian might be different for individuals who grow up in communities where it is just not the bulk religion, she tells me. She describes St James’s, which her father attended for 30 years before their departure for Sri Lanka, as a “secure space: the one place they’ve in their very own lives where they don’t have to satisfy the expectations of being a superb immigrant and having to mix in, especially after they can express themselves to God in their very own language.”
ST JAMES’s is working against a backdrop of increased commitment to racial justice within the Church of England, and wider conversations in society about the mixing of immigrants. At their last awayday, the PCC discussed “the difference between assimilation and integration”. English is the common language on the church, and English-language lessons can be found (through which some participants have come to faith); but, Mrs Taylor says, “the church service is there to honour God, to not implement a language.”
MADELEINE DAVIESThe Revd Ali Taylor presides on the eucharist
“This whole colonialism — ‘You have to be like us’ — stuff is so close behind everybody’s thoughts,” she says. “I believe St James’s is on the option to attempting to heal a few of that. But I believe that some people don’t like the liberty that that may possibly give. They would moderately slot in, assimilate, hide, and you then’ve got nothing to lose when actually you’ve already lost a lot, since you are usually not bringing yourself, and God loves your self.”
Edna Emmanuel, who has been coming to the church since 1989, and has since served as a churchwarden, agrees that the transition to an intercultural service “hasn’t been smooth. We have lost people along the best way, whether or not they didn’t like the several languages, or it was just different to what that they had. But we’re growing again; so the people who are actually coming, that’s all they know.” Her hope for the long run is for “people to are available in and see that they’re accepted”. She thinks of a latest Chinese worshipper who prayed aloud in Mandarin the very first Sunday he attended.
Around the church, the parish is growing in population. Between the 2011 and 2021 census, it grew by multiple third, and further construction is clear: the council has plans for 6000 latest homes in the realm. The latest growth within the church is coming from people looking for out “their local church”, Mrs Taylor reports, and a few of this will be transient. Those granted visas, for instance, could also be rehoused outside the borough.
This is where the intercultural approach works well, she suggests, “because we add in”. The service itself is a type of preserving memories: departed worshippers are remembered through the retention of their language. The congregation still sings “God is nice” in Bulgarian, despite the indisputable fact that “Dima” now lives elsewhere.
WHEN the ten.30-a.m. service was began through the pandemic, it was simply called the “common service”. The language of “intercultural” is one which the church has acquired more recently, and something that’s growing in resonance, the Taylors consider. In March, 200 people attended the three-day Anglican Intercultural Mission Conference, a partnership between the Anglican Network of Intercultural Churches and the diocese of Leicester.
This 12 months brought the publication of Intercultural Church for a Multicultural World: Reflections on gift exchange (Church House Publishing), by the Bishop of Leicester, the Rt Revd Martyn Snow, and his co-authors (Comment, 3 May).
Interculturalism is, he argues, a 3rd choice to assimilation and multiculturalism, “a narrative that not only combats fear, but in addition makes love of 1’s neighbour tangibly real, seeing them as a present to you, just as you may be a present to them”.
Among his co-authors is the Area Bishop of Willesden, the Rt Revd Lusa Nsenga-Ngoy, who might be presiding in Alperton on Sunday. St James’s is exclusive, but not exclusive, he says. While various monolinguistic church communities are emerging, there’s also, he says, “an enormous appetite, particularly from second- and third-generation communities wanting to be part of creating churches that aren’t built around ethnic or linguistic lines”.
But he’s conscious, too, of “the temptation of painting things positively. We must recognise among the pressures that it also puts by way of community cohesion, and the opportunities to then become involved in conversations that result in creative initiatives.” The evidence suggests, he says, that turning a church into an intercultural space is “generally not the quickest way towards growth, since the default for all of us in some ways is to be in practically homogeneous spaces.
“So, it’s about constructing latest institutional muscle-memory, and developing latest patterns of relating with each other, and renegotiating among the dynamics of power that always assumes once you walk right into a space that has a comparatively homogeneous and monocultural shape to it . . . that whoever is available in will assimilate into the norm. What the intercultural church does is to redistribute the entire normative cards and invite everyone to take part in shaping the brand new dynamic.”
In recent years, he reports, the Church, “each locally and globally, is finding higher ways of articulating a theological rationale for intercultural ministry. Once your eyes have been opened to that, it’s very difficult to assume a church otherwise than intercultural.”
IN ALPERTON, the PCC will shortly be drawing up a parish profile, because the Taylors prepare to maneuver to latest posts at St Paul’s, Harrow. What has their experience to date taught them?
“It’s reinforced our sense you can’t dictate what’s going to occur,” Mr Taylor says. “For us, it’s that sense that everyone seems to be journeying; so that you treat everyone with dignity, and also you trust that God is at work in these different people.” For Mrs Taylor, it has led her to ask, “What’s my culture?” The child of fogeys from two different countries, she moved around while she was growing up, and has been prompted to ask “What is it to not fit? And where do you discover your house?”
Leaving Alperton, the couple don’t feel anxious in regards to the recruitment of their successors.
“I actually have every confidence that somebody will come, go searching, and go ‘Oh, this is gorgeous,’” Mrs Taylor says. “I don’t think the church will select any person with their old colonial hat on that claims you would like a white skin tone, you would like a male moderately than a female. I’m fairly confident that they’re able to recognise themselves as a bit more, and God in themselves a bit more.”
During the service, we sing “Good, good Father” by Chris Tomlin and Pat Barrett, and I spot the Iranian father, newly granted permission to stay here, sing with evident joy the road in Farsi.
A free webinar, “Intercultural Church for a Multicultural World”, organised by the Church Times and Church House Publishing, might be held on 28 May at 6 p.m. For more information and to order tickets, click here
