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We offer daily services and a cultural programme of talks, events and concerts. We seek to be a welcoming space for people to reflect, create and debate
St James’s Piccadilly, The Sixteen and the Genesis Foundation have joined forces in a five-year partnership celebrating the power of music to inspire, connect and bring people together. Discover extraordinary performances, new music and opportunities for the next generation of musicians.
At Christmas, St James’s is a place where everyone is welcome. For people facing loneliness, homelessness, poor mental health, financial hardship or displacement, our doors can offer something as simple – and as important – as a warm welcome, practical support and a place where they are known and treated with dignity.
St James’s hosts inclusive services and a cultural programme. We seek to be a welcoming space for people to reflect, create and debate.
St James’s is a place to explore, reflect, pray, and support all who are in need. We are a Church of England parish in the Anglican Communion.
We host a year-round creative programme encompassing music, visual art and spoken word.
We offer hospitality to people going through homelessness and speak out on issues of injustice, especially concerning refugees, asylum, racial justice, and LGBTQ+ issues.
St James’s strives to advocate for earth justice and to develop deeper connections with nature.
We aim to be a place where you can belong. We have a unique history, and the beauty of our building is widely known. Our community commits to faith in action: social and environmental justice; creativity. and the arts
We strive to be a Eucharist-centred, diverse and inclusive Christian community promoting life in abundance, wellbeing and dignity for all.
St James’s Piccadilly has been at the heart of its community since 1684. We invite you to play your part in securing this historic place for generations to come.
It costs £5,000 each day to keep the doors of St James’s open to all who already need us.
A reimagined St James’s realised. A redesigned garden, courtyard and new building capacity—all fully accessible— will provide beautiful spaces for all as well as improving our environmental performance.
Whether shooting a blockbuster TV series or creating a unique corporate event, every hire at St James’s helps our works within the community.
St James's Church 197 Piccadilly London W1J 9LL
Directions on Google Maps
For Black History Month, Chine McDonald, who is the Director of Theos, shares 10 things she wishes people knew about theology and race.
The way we imagine God has been shaped by race, culture, history and power. It’s better to own this and interrogate it and change it than to deny it and pretend.
It’s a religion that is being followed the world over in all sorts of contexts in all regions of the world. People of many different backgrounds and cultures find hope in the story at the heart of the Christian faith. It’s a liberating message for all, not just for white men.
I know you know this, but… Jesus was a brown-skinned Jewish man who lived from the Middle East, living in the first century. He wasn’t a blue-eyed, fair-skinned, hippie-looking man that could have walked out of a Levis advert. But much of European art over many centuries, including the image Head of Christ by Warner Sallman – is an archetypal representation of Jesus. Why?
Black theology gives us profound insights into justice, liberation, suffering and power. These should matter to us all. I’ll never forget hearing this powerfully communicated at Comment magazine’s Understory festival in Washington DC, with a spine-tingling sermon from Charlie Dates.
Yes, scripture has been used to keep people in chains, but it was also the inspiration for freeing them. Church leaders were slave owners and members of the Ku Klux Klan, but they were also leading abolitionists. How we interpret scripture is a matter of life and death. We need to have grown-up conversations about the uncomfortable truths of our Christian heritage.
The accounts of people in the Bible tell stories of a geographically and culturally diverse people across many generations. The Bible’s epic stories span Africa, Asia and Europe, including Egyptians, Ethiopians, Israelites, Greeks and Romans. But centuries of European Christian art have left us thinking that everyone in the Bible – from Moses to Esther to Mary to Jesus – were white. They were probably not.
Ethiopia was one of the first regions in the world to officially adopt Christianity – in around AD 330, just before Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire in around AD 380. The idea that Christian history begins in Europe and spreads outward is historically misleading. European missionaries began arriving in parts of Africa about a thousand years after it had been adopted in Ethiopia. If this makes you feel angry/defensive, then maybe ask yourself why?
Sometimes we call out the Church because we love it. My book God Is Not a White Man isn’t just a condemnation of the Church, but a call for us all to do better.
Many underestimate how much European theological perspectives are presented as universal, while perspectives from Black, African or Asian thinkers and theologians are seen as contextual. While studying theology at university, I never encountered a black academic, nor did I hear anything spoken about ‘black theology’. It was a long time ago – a lot has changed since then. Right…?
Our ideas about God shape what we believe about what it means to be human – about dignity and power, about who’s in and who’s out. History shows us that Christian theology has been used to both justify racial hierarchies but also used to dismantle them. When whiteness is seen as the default for how we goodness, perfection and power, it distorts how we see others. But it also distorts how we see God.
This Black History Month blog post is featured on Chine’s Substack, ‘Faith in the Unmaking’. You can sign up here: https://chinemcdonald.substack.com
To watch Chine’s sermon at St James’s Piccadilly as a guest preacher, click here.
