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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.
Sunday 6 April 6.30pm St Pancras Church
Join the music scholars of St James’s, Piccadilly as they celebrate women composers throughout the ages.
Wednesday 16 April 6:30pm
In this special collaboration for Holy Week, St James’s Piccadilly brings together the music of composer Rachel Chaplin and spoken word presented by The Revd Lucy Winkett.
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 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.
The work of St James’s, it costs us £5,000 per day to enable us to keep our doors open to all who need us.
New walkways, a restored courtyard and re-landscaped gardens will provide fully accessible, beautiful spaces for everyone to enjoy as well as improving our environmental performance.
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.
