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We offer daily services and a creative programme of talks, events and concerts. We seek to be a welcoming space for people to reflect, create and debate.
Come and celebrate the hope and light that Christmas brings each winter
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. This is a place for everyone who’s wondering about life’s big questions and striving for a better world.
We host a year-round creative programme encompassing music, visual art and spoken word, drawing on St James’s rich cultural history including artists, writers and musicians Mary Beale, Mary Delany, William Blake, Ottobah Cugoano and Leopold Stokowski.
We try to put our faith into action by educating ourselves and speaking out on issues of injustice, especially concerning refugees, asylum, earth and racial justice, and LGBTQ+ issues.
We aspire to be a home where everyone can belong. We’re known locally and globally for our unique history and beauty, as well as faith in action, creativity and the arts, and a commitment to social and environmental justice.
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 us £3,500 per day to enable us to keep our doors open to all who need us
Your donation will help us restore our garden in Piccadilly as part of The Wren Project, making it possible for us to welcome over 300,000 people from all faiths and walks of life seeking tranquillity and inspiration each year.
St James's Church 197 Piccadilly London W1J 9LL
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Deborah reflects on the worldwide Season of Creation ( Sept to 4 Oct) with ideas for participation and a foretaste of St James’s activities.
The international, ecumenical Season of Creation is upon us again, encouraging churches to act at their contextualised, localised best in building communities of celebration, creating networks of solidarity for life on earth and taking radical action against environmental racism. The season is sponsored by the Anglican Communion Environmental Network among many others – do have a look at their resources, including some strong liturgical materials, and join us at St James’s this Autumn in a Season of Creating together.
The 2022 film ‘Everything, Everywhere, all at Once’ gives us Michelle Yeoh as laundromat manager Evelyn, a tax-bewildered Chinese immigrant to the US. Evelyn learns that she is the only person who can save the multiverse from annihilation by the Everything Bagel, a monstrous singularity (black hole) of consumption, loaded with literally everything that exists. To realize her destiny, Evelyn will have to go ‘verse-jumping’ to gain access to all her parallel selves in all parallel universes. Much action takes place in the Alphaverse, where things are very ugly, and Evelyn’s Alpha-daughter Joy (yes, her name is significant) is hell-bent on self-and-world destruction. Meanwhile tax-collector Deirdre Beaubeirdre (Jamie Lee Curtis) ranges terrifyingly across the multiverse in all your worst nightmare guises.
The film is overwhelming and hilarious, genre-bending, absurd and very touching, deeply personal while encompassing the entire multiverse, somehow holding out hope of transformation. Much like life on earth in the 21st Century as we charge headlong into climate chaos (see me for science-based evidence for this truth!). In this Season of Creating when it sometimes seems as though the self-destructive Alphaverse is all there is, and where everything is at stake, I’m inviting us to go verse-jumping: visiting places we didn’t know we belonged, opening up to novel connections, seeking patterns of redemptive metanoia and moments of life-giving encounter on roads less travelled. Like the gleaming moment in the Ecozoic garden on Jermyn Street last week where a conversation about culinary traditions involving courgette flowers totally trumped the incidental identities and sectarian tendencies of those involved – Sara Mark and I (both committed would-be influencers!) and two friendly Italian Jehovah’s Witnesses. There are many such world-making encounters to be had in the garden on Jermyn Street, I recommend hanging out there for an hour or two.
I’m suggesting this verse-jumping precisely because life is not a pick ‘n mix smorgasbord and the planet a playground for one species, but because we need everything, everywhere, and we need it made new. I am learning from Australian Indigenous theologian Anne Pattel-Gray how Indigenous folk have to go walking in at least two worlds as a matter of course: their own multi-millennia rootedness in the planet and each other, and also this brief, late-capitalist colonising era that continues to be so destructive of their lifeways. Aunty Anne walks tall, strong and authentic, and generously opens a door for we non-indigenous folk to walk with her in a partnership of repair and renewal. Our own Penelope Turton backs this up with another wide-open door in the next two Thoughts for the Week, asking whether our economic system really has to be the way it is.
As well as conversation, the Ecozoic garden this year features millet, a crop of hotter climate zones that may well become important in Europe in the coming decades. Come to lunch on 22nd September to sample some millet-dishes made from our own harvest. On this day we will welcome friends from The Council of Protestant Churches of Nicaragua and Amos Trust to speak about how women are taking the lead in building sustainability, climate resilience and hope in Central America. The Ecozoic garden is also the ground from which the Changing Our Minds programme grows, and a new book group will run throughout the Autumn to which all are welcome.
Safe to say that fashion-universe is a complete mystery to me but it turns out if I verse-jump across I find friends there as well. St James’s is supporting the One Dress: PLANET initiative by local couturier Lucy Tammam in partnership with Stop Ecocide International. Lucy Tammam is a fashion designer who thinks there are enough dresses in the world already. Now that’s inspiring, and I have sponsored a beautifully embroidered square for the One Dress depicting a Meadow Foxtail plant, to raise awareness of plants and ecosystems at risk. I have dedicated this to everyone at St James’s who acts on behalf of Earth Justice. There are many of you – the wise and faithful steering group, all who make and participate in liturgy, organise, create, change the way we do things, tell new-old stories, campaign, and get out on the streets to march and pray. If you would like to join us or do more, or are not yet a member of our WhatsApp group, please email ecochurch@sjp.org.uk
Jonathan Sutton, PhD student at Kings and member of Young St James’s, opens up another whole universe unfamiliar to many of us – data science and modelling. He’s also a whizz at electronic world-making and will gather very localised air pollution data on site using ‘home-made’ sensors. Verse-jump: air pollution is a justice issue; technology and data are worthy of theological reflection. We’ll hear from Jonathan later in September.
What about the worlds we all inhabit daily? We all shop and eat and try to maintain the spaces where we live. Dee Hetherington, our churchwarden, world-maker and allotmenteer (the comfrey in the Ecozoic garden is courtesy of Dee’s allotment) will provide us with a tip for a greener domestic life each week in the newsletter. Many of us are familiar with Penn Smith’s unshakeable commitment to prayer and campaigning, but do you know about her sustainable sewing workshops? Penn will be offering a reflection one Tuesday evening at Sanctuary – and contributing a Thought for the Week.
On 6th October, our harvest festival, Kate Rigby from the University of Cologne and Laurel Kearns from Drew University will be here to interview us for their research project ‘Multispecies World-making on Sacred Ground’. As we each do our thing this season (that’s our thing, not our bit – this redemptive creating needs all our God-given talents and delights participating fully) we can also be thinking of stories to tell them.
