The Church in London's East End
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In 2022 I moved into post-work liberation (my preferred description of what is commonly called retirement). I also returned to live in London's East End. I first lived there, in Poplar, in 1983. Later, after a time in Hackney, I moved to Halcrow Street in Whitechapel, to a flat immediately opposite a Victorian terrace house occupied by Anglican Franciscans. Not long after I had been ordained they kindly invited me to preside at the 8am Eucharist in their small, front room chapel every Monday morning on my way to work, something I valued enormously. At that time I was manager of a social work team in the area. I became interested in the East End and its history (facts as well as myths) and in the history of the Christian presence in these parts.
The Salvation Army had been founded in 1865 just along the road, and the Church of England in the East End ("Stepney Episcopal Area") had, over the centuries, produced a fair crop of men and women doing what the Gospel asks of its followers, some of them heroically and sacrificially. From 2005 to 2022 I lived just south of the Thames, in Lambeth. When I returned, the East End showed further signs of gentrification (not a universal evil, but often destroying some communities whilst creating others, usually at the expense of the poorer amongst us). It also revealed, it seemed, a diminished Christian presence. A clutch of people I admired had died (Fr John Rowe, Fr Ken Leech, Olive Wagstaff, Daphne Jones, William McCrossan ("Liturgical William"), Fr Gonville ffrench-Beytagh, Bishop Colin Winter, Bishop of Namibia in Exile, and Fr Michael Peet. The Franciscans had packed up and left, and the venerable Royal Foundation of St Katharine which I had known under the direction of the Community of the Resurrection had developed into something of a B&B with spiritual trimmings - a change no doubt forced upon it by financial necessity. Even so, it was a distressing loss to those of us who had known RFSK in its earlier days. In addition, a number of East End churches had been colonised by evangelical elements of the Diocese of London. This trend is explained as a way of saving diminishing and dying congregations. 'Church Planting' is the jargon. It seems to occur at the cost of a major change to the character - the historic DNA - of such churches. Anglo-Catholic and middle-of-the-road Anglican churches become evangelical in the mould of HTB, full of seemingly happy arm-waving congregants and ever-smiling 'MC' clergy vested in T-shirts and chinos, talking of little else but Jezus in a way which (to my mind) is sentimentalised and unrooted. Some may regard that as good, and no doubt it has staved off closures. To others, it is a depressing loss of something indigenous and often self-sacrificing and courageous in the history of the Church of England in the East End. I hope to gather here information about the various strands of what I have claimed made such a contribution to the church in London's East End. Here are some to be going on with - see right. FURTHER THINKING September 2026
Maybe what we are witnessing is best understood as a reconfiguration of the Church of England’s institutional, theological and cultural presence in the East End. In some cases, a declining parish is not being closed: its building, legal identity and Anglican status survive, but its ecclesial culture is substantially replaced by that of the incoming church. I’ve seen this described as “mission-led ecclesial succession”. And I have seen a more critical description being “institutional preservation accompanied by confessional homogenisation.” Doesn’t sound very appealing. Contexts change. We must change in response. In the 2021 Census, 22.3% of Tower Hamlets residents identified as Christian, down from 29.8% in 2011; 39.9% identified as Muslim, and 26.6% reported no religion. Tower Hamlets had the highest proportion identifying as Muslim of any English local authority. The Diocese of London has adopted growth strategies involving planting, revitalisation and new worshipping communities. In 2022 it received £1.8 million specifically for the Tower Hamlets Mission project, aiming for six new worshipping communities and more than 500 new disciples. Its 2026 Statement of Needs reports new communities in Stepney Green, Shadwell, Bethnal Green and Poplar. There is an identifiable evangelical planting DNA in the borough. St Paul’s Shadwell describes itself as part of the HTB Network and records plants or partnerships at St Peter’s Bethnal Green, All Hallows Bow, St Luke’s Millwall, Christ Church Spitalfields and elsewhere. Christ Church Spitalfields explicitly describes itself as part of the HTB network. Church planting itself is not alien to the East End. It has occurred repeatedly in East London. St Paul’s Shadwell itself began as a chapel of ease from St Dunstan’s Stepney in the seventeenth century. Bishop Blomfield's nineteenth-century programme created a remarkable series of new Bethnal Green churches. The Anglo-Catholic mission associated with Charles Lowder was itself, in effect, an audacious missionary intervention into an inadequately churched district. Nor was historic East End Anglicanism uniformly Anglo-Catholic. There were evangelical, Protestant, broad-church and Catholic traditions, sometimes in bitter conflict. Anyone remember the bitter "ritualism wars" in the East End of 1859–1860 when liturgical protests and riots raged against Anglo-Catholic practices at the parish church of St George-in-the-East? I thought not. What developed over two centuries was something broader: a distinctively parochial East End Anglicanism, in which different traditions became embedded in particular neighbourhoods and acquired histories of service, relationships and local memory. An example is St Peter’s London Docks. Historic England describes its special significance as combining the Anglo-Catholic “beauty of holiness” with a programme of social welfare amongst the poor. Lowder and his colleagues remained during the 1866 cholera epidemic, caring for the sick at considerable personal risk. (Historic England). Later figures such as John Groser represent another strand: sacramental Christianity joined to tenants' struggles, Christian socialism and opposition to fascism. Groser worked in Poplar and Stepney and was injured at the Battle of Cable Street before subsequently serving at St George-in-the-East. (thcatalogue.org.uk) That history generated a particular understanding of priesthood: you belonged to a place before expecting the place to belong to your church. That seems important. What about the newer changes? The contemporary resource-church model begins from a rather different ecclesiology. The Church of England itself has acknowledged this. Its own explanation of resource churches says that their starting point is ordinarily a relatively clear prior conception of the church to be created — its leadership, programmes and strategy. By contrast, the Fresh Expressions approach begins with the particular context and allows the resulting form of church to emerge from it. The national Church observes that having a predetermined model can make contextual adaptation more difficult. (Church of England). The change can be represented like this: Older parochial instinct
Resource/planting instinct
Neither approach is intrinsically Christian or un-Christian. But they represent significantly different conceptions of church. The revealing language is “resource church”. The successful congregation becomes a centre possessing money, personnel, leadership capacity, training systems and an exportable ecclesial culture. It then resources weaker churches. By some measures, that can be highly effective. But inevitably the donor culture travels with the resources. The striking asymmetry of churchmanship A 2024 theological study of church planting across eleven Church of England dioceses found approximately 900 “new things”, including forty resource churches. Of those roughly 900 initiatives, the researchers could identify only five as belonging to the Catholic tradition. They specifically recommended investigation of the “absence of Catholic engagement” in this activity. (cranmerhall.com) That is an extraordinary imbalance. The report also observed that ten of the eleven dioceses talked explicitly about “culture change” and warned that dioceses risk thinking too much at the macro level and imposing narratives from above which do not correspond to what is happening locally. It explicitly relates this problem to the Church of England's historic theological commitment to place and parish. (cranmerhall.com) The Diocese of London appears aware of the danger. Its more recent Hackney and Islington programme includes a deliberate Catholic Renewal workstream, with Catholic clusters and a Catholic Mission Enabler, precisely alongside planting, youth and estates initiatives. (Diocese of London) That is important evidence that the Diocese itself does not now regard evangelical resource-church planting as the only possible form of renewal. A question: what exactly has been “saved”? This is where the issue becomes clearest. Suppose a parish church has fifteen elderly worshippers. An incoming team brings forty or fifty younger adults, establishes children's work, Alpha, contemporary worship, employs staff, raises considerable money and eventually has 150 attending. It is perfectly reasonable to say: The church has been saved. But another statement may simultaneously be true: The church that was there has disappeared. The building survived. The parish survived. The legal entity survived. Congregational numbers recovered. Yet its spirituality, liturgy, ecclesiology, devotional practices, collective memory and relationship with previous generations may have been fundamentally altered. This is why attendance figures alone cannot settle the argument. It is analogous to saving a historic institution by replacing almost everything except its name and premises. Sometimes that is unavoidable. Sometimes it is highly successful. But it should not be confused with continuity. Interestingly, research commissioned by the Centre for Theology & Community into five East London plants argued that this was not simply hostile takeover: in the cases examined, PCCs or incumbents were involved in agreeing the partnerships, most pre-existing members remained, and the interventions kept churches open. (ctcuk.org) That evidence should be taken seriously. But it does not dispose of the deeper question about what happens over the following ten or twenty years. The principal risks
The danger is not evangelicalism as such. This distinction is essential. The problem would be misdiagnosed if it became: Anglo-Catholic good/HTB bad. The evangelical churches in Tower Hamlets undertake serious pastoral and social work. St Paul's Shadwell explicitly couples making disciples with transforming communities; the Tower Hamlets network supports homelessness work through GrowTH; St Peter’s Bethnal Green currently provides traditional Communion alongside its contemporary gathering rather than simply abolishing inherited worship. (St Paul's Shadwell) Nor is Catholic mission inherently incapable of growth. St George-in-the-East provides a particularly interesting counterexample. It remains sacramental and recognisably Catholic while undertaking community organising, Choir Church, social justice work and church multiplication; it is itself now described as a resource church. (St George-in-the-East). That may point towards a much more genuinely Anglican model of renewal. The issue is monoculture If every weak evangelical church were systematically converted into Anglo-Catholicism by wealthy Catholic churches, evangelicals would rightly recognise the ecclesiological problem immediately. The reverse deserves the same scrutiny. What exactly is at risk in the East End? Not primarily buildings. Strategic planting may actually save buildings. Not even Christianity itself. Successful evangelisation could increase the number of practising Christians. What is endangered is something subtler: the Church of England as a received, plural, territorial Christian presence which belongs to a place rather than to a network. The great East End priests did not simply operate successful congregations. They acquired authority because, over years, they became identified with neighbourhoods and their people. Lowder and Wapping. Groser and Stepney. The parish priest became part of the social landscape. That is different from operating an effective church organisation located in the same geographical area. How might we describe what is happening in the East End? The Church of England in the East End is moving from an inherited model of locally embedded, territorially based and ecclesially diverse parish Christianity towards a more intentional, networked and growth-oriented missionary model. This has rescued some institutions from numerical collapse and produced genuine new Christian life. But because the most powerful networks are disproportionately evangelical, rescue can simultaneously produce theological homogenisation and rupture with local ecclesial memory. The danger is that the Church succeeds in preserving Anglican churches while progressively losing the historically distinctive form of Anglican presence that made them East End parish churches in the first place. There is an irony here. The historic East End tradition was intensely missionary. Lowder was not conserving a genteel liturgical inheritance. He was experimenting radically with how the Church should inhabit industrial poverty. Groser was hardly an ecclesiastical preservationist. So the strongest critique of contemporary planting is not that things must never change. It is almost the opposite. The question is whether contemporary renewal possesses the same willingness to allow the East End to change the Church, rather than merely allowing a successful form of Church from elsewhere to change the East End. That distinction — between planting a successful church in a place and allowing a genuinely local church to grow out of a place — may be the central ecclesiological issue. Who, in the higher-ups of Stepney Episcopal Area and the wider Diocese of London, are engaging with these issues I wonder? Below: wrestling with similar issues. 1983. Bishop of Stepney Jim Thompson on Thames TV |
The Church in London's East End (Stepney) See also -
Other East End Christian figures |
Below, images from a 1974 Bishop Of Stepney's Commission on the state of the Stepney Churches. Click image to enlarge.
