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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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Returning from California, US citizen and UK immigrant Kate Finlay reflects on how faith and politics mix in the aftermath of the Presidential election in the USA.
I wish I could say I slept last week. I woke up every 15 minutes on Tuesday night to check my phone as if refreshing the vote tallies would change anything.
I’ll never forget the night when Trump was first elected in 2016. I was fresh out of uni, in my first big girl apartment in San Francisco with my roommate and our “the Future is Female” and Beyonce posters. We organized a big watch party with all our friends to celebrate the election of the first female president. We bought as much sparkling wine as we could afford and stocked the fridge, promising a big champagne toast when Hilary crossed the finish line. Hope turned to despair as state after state called for Trump and reality sunk in. The night ended with friends in tears, holding each other, and 13 bottles we couldn’t bear to open in the fridge.
There’s something I’ll never understand about the human heart’s propensity to choose hatred. For control as a response to fear, for oppression as a response to slight. To do real violence to each other without understanding or caring. Every time, no matter how familiar, it knocks me on my back and throws me into grief. My familiar friends, anger, bargaining, denial, depression, all talk over one another. And where I’ve got to is that 72 million hearts made peace with bargaining 68 million bodies.
Over here in the UK, US politics can feel deliciously distant. And for many Brits, there can be a propensity to say, “not my circus, not my monkeys”. Apathy is one tool. Superiority is another. A poem shared in my neighborhood whatsapp group begins, “Pity the nation whose people are sheep” (from “Pity the Nation” by Lawrence Ferlinghetti).
But is it so distant? I don’t think so, the UK has experienced divisive political moments itself: I’ve heard many stories this past week from the night of the Brexit vote. Where you were, how it felt, how unfathomable but how real it was. This year alone we saw racist riots in August, the success of Nigel Farage’s reform party, and motion on the Rwanda Policy. Looking at Trump’s overwhelming victory, many are asking how this happened again, didn’t we learn? But the truth is that American voters spoke clearly — and the two most important issues deciding the election were consistently reported to be the economy and immigration. According to YouGov, the very same issues are the top two concerns for UK voters today.
Those beliefs are here. The violence they do is here. The people they hurt are our neighbors and so are the perpetrators.
When I am fighting despair, I find Stephen Covey’s Circles of Concern, Influence and Control model provides both comfort and direction.
It’s a helpful practice to distinguish between what I can control and all the things I’d like to. This echoes in the Serenity Prayer:
Lord, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
the courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference.
I’m not sure that I want serenity exactly. Right now I want to scream at God, but I also want breaks from my feelings, the ability to rest when I need to, and be supported when I can’t stand anymore. And I never want so much serenity as to remove the things I care about today from my active concerns tomorrow. I also want God to do something about the things I cannot change. I want my prayers to reach further than my hands can.
Prayer isn’t the only gift we’re given for the things we cannot change, God gives us community. Community with which we can grieve, lament, question, draw wisdom, and most critically, act. And the power of God is to give us communities with which we can do more than we can alone.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer said:
“In a Christian community everything depends upon whether each individual is an indispensable link in a chain. Only when even the smallest link is securely interlocked is the chain unbreakable. A community which allows unemployed members to exist within it will perish because of them. It may be well, therefore, if every member receives a definite task to perform for the community, that he may know in hours of doubt that he, too, is not useless and unusable. Every Christian community must realize that not only do the weak need the strong, but also that the strong cannot exist without the weak. The elimination of the weak is the death of fellowship.”
And I believe that when God gives us communities of all faiths and none, She collects together a specific combination of people so that we may uphold and reinforce each other as links in the chain. So that our ideas, lived experiences, and talents weave and combine and create something more than we can ever be alone. ta
Trump may be more capable of executing his vision this time, but so are those of us who wish to defend human rights, combat xenophobia, and protect services for the most marginalized. Each of us have lived experiences, wisdom, and skills we’ve earned in the last 8 years that make us better able to enact change than we were then. For many young people the difference between 2024 and 2016 is staggering. The threats aren’t going away. The task is to look at everything that resources us and recognize what we can influence and what we can change. And who we will do it with.
So while I spent most of Wednesday morning on the couch, I spent most of Wednesday evening on the phone, processing and listening and learning. And I pray that my concerns will continue to propel me towards my community and towards cohesion, support, and resistance. As Audre Lorde said, “without community, there is no liberation”, and that is what I will continue to pray for.
