Search...
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
Sunday 21 April 6pm BST (10am PDT)
Indigenous sciences of sustainability: ancient native food systems and their lessons for the future
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 cultural 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 door open to all who need us
We know that spiritual sustenance comes in many forms: we hope you enjoy this one. £12 from the sale of each bottle will go directly to St James’s, Charity No. 1133048
St James's Church 197 Piccadilly London W1J 9LL
Directions on Google Maps
Listen to Lucy’s ‘Thought for the Day’ on BBC Radio 4 which was broadcast on Tuesday 8 March 2022.
BBC Radio 4’s Religion & Spirituality podcast providing reflections from a faith perspective on issues and people in the news.
Today, International Women’s Day, was founded by the German activist Clara Zetkin, a day when the situation of women, especially the inequalities they experience receive some focus and attention.
But the reason it’s this day 8th March is because of the women of St Petersburg in Russia. In 1917, women went on strike and took to the streets on this day demanding ‘Peace and Bread’.
If the women of Ukraine were able to leave the underground shelters they are in today, they might demand the same.
Today Russian and Ukrainian women find themselves on opposite sides of a brutal war. Any war polarises, separates, brutalises. It makes liars of truth-tellers, killers of pacifists: teachers, journalists, scientists become simply refugees.
Women across the world in Iraq, Myanmar/Burma, the Central African Republic, and many more places, know what it is to be shelled, assaulted, to be left, to have said goodbye for the last time.
Christian spiritual practice has a way of demanding I pay attention to this suffering by encouraging deep connection with it. It’s not about trying to assume some kind of false solidarity: that I as a woman somehow know what every other woman experiences: that would be foolish.
Of course the experience of Ukrainian women today is in some ways unimaginable. But Christian tradition says this in itself isn’t good enough. Declaring another woman’s experience just ‘unimagineable’ produces more separation, more assumptions of irreconcilable difference. But reconciliation is the core of Christian living.
And so, as one Russian orthodox monk teaches, part of a Christian commitment is to ‘keep your mind in hell and despair not’. Both of these halves are important. Don’t look away. Go to that hell in your imagination. At the same time, do not despair.
And so, alongside the practical donations and solidarity events, I commit to listen, to imagine, to pray. To insist to the woman of Ukraine that she remains a mysterious, precious soul, not a statistic, whose distress I have witnessed, whose voice I have heard. And that I will remain forever stricken, complicit in the knowledge that this cruelty is part of our shared humanity.
To the women of Ukraine, holding unfamiliar weapons, queuing at the border, shepherding your children and your elderly parents, bracing yourselves for the next siren, for the next shell: I am you. You are me.
There is no them. There is only us.
