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8 June 2023

6 min read

Eden in the East End

Belle Tindall writes of her afternoon in an East End kind of Eden, and tells the stories of how, through All Hallow’s Church, Christianity is being lived out in Bow.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

A neo-Romanesque church sits at the acute corner of two roads. To its side a tower block rises over a row of low-rise flats.

All Hallows,Bow. 'Ahaba' is an old Hebrew and Arabic word for love.

Google.

Feeling increasingly restless in the comfortable confines of West London, Rev. Cris and Beki Rogers, along with their family and seven others, decided to take on All Hallows Church and make Bow their home.

Fast forward thirteen years, and here’s Cris, sat with a coffee on the corner of an intersection in the heart of London’s East End, flanked on every side by blocks of flats and talking over the sound of heavy traffic: this is Cris Rogers’ Eden.

‘I love this place’, Cris delightedly declares, ‘I love the sounds, I love the smells, I love the people’.

And why wouldn’t he? This is the place where Clara Grant, the infamous ‘Bundle Woman of Bow', founded the Fern Street Settlement in 1907, ensuring that thousands of children were warm, fed, taught and loved.

It is where, in 1913, Sylvia Pankhurst established the East London Federation of Suffragettes, fighting for the rights of working women.

It is where, in 1985, the profoundly influential grime music artist, Dylan Kwabena Mills (perhaps better known as Dizzee Rascal) was born and subsequently raised.

It’s not hard to see why Cris describes his home as a place of profound justice, of resilient compassion, of innovative creativity and of rich community. In ways that we’re likely to be unaware of, we exist in the cultural ripple effect of places such as Bow. We owe them a great debt. And yet, there is, of course, another way to perceive and speak of Bow; a perception which places its focus upon slightly different identity markers.

It is, according to the Government’s Deprivation Indices, one of the most deprived communities in the UK. It has an above average crime rate, with a particularly high number of home break-ins. The percentage of home ownership in the area is 17 per cent, which is dramatically lower than the national average of 65.8 per cent. It is also a community that, because of the establishment and closure of St. Clements Mental Health Hospital, has an increased number of residents who live with mental illness and addiction.

It is true, in many ways, Bow struggles.

And it’s not that Cris and the community at All Hallows ignore these facts. On the contrary, they’re on a crusade against poverty in the area, working to eradicate it entirely. They’re also relentlessly pursuing justice and offering support to those in their community who need it most.

No, ignorance is not the source of Cris’ perspective - Jesus is.

I’m aware that such a sentence is in serious danger of sounding eye-rolling-ly twee, so allow me a moment or two to explain further.

The playwright himself took the stage, the author jumped inside the page, the architect inhabited the plans. Admittedly, it’s downright strange.

John, one of Jesus’ four biographers, opens his work with a prologue of epic proportions. Nestled into this prologue is this line –

‘The Word (that’s Jesus) became flesh and made his dwelling among us’.

In John’s original Greek writing, the words ‘made his dwelling’ can be more literally translated as ‘tabernacled‘, or rather, ‘pitched his tent among ours’. Author Eugene Peterson subsequently paraphrases it this way:

‘The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighbourhood.’

The belief that God squeezed himself into the confines of humanity is certainly one of the more mystic elements of Christianity. The premise is that the playwright himself took the stage, the author jumped inside the page, the architect inhabited the plans. Admittedly, it’s downright strange.

And yet, this is the bedrock of what theologians call Incarnational Theology, a theology of Jesus’ embodied presence on the earth. Or, what Cris Rogers would call ‘moving in and living deep’. It's the astonishing idea that Jesus is present amongst, he is present alongside.

If the Incarnation happened, as Christians believe that it did, if Jesus really did pitch his tent next to ours – in that, he literally entered into time and place – then the implications of such aren’t only spiritual. The gospel (for want of a less Christian-ese word) is also a physical encounter, it is intent on changing one’s day, one’s week, one’s life, in tangible and practical ways. It must still be found in time and place. The church (as in, the people, not only the building) is one of the most obvious ways through which this could happen, as they take their lead from the one they represent and they themselves ‘move in and live deep’.

So, with that in mind, back to Bow.

For the residents of Bow, this thing called ‘Christianity’ is not a set of ideas that floats in the ether. On the contrary, it’s the people that teach them to speak, read, and write English in their ESOL lessons. It’s as tangible as the presence of the food banks, as obvious as the building on the intersection, as relentless as the recovery courses that run week after week.

Of the people who flow through All Hallows Church 40 per cent are in varying stages of recovery from addiction. It’s not surprising, therefore, that a major focus of Cris’ team is helping people through those often-complicated stages. Whether that be through the AA/NA courses (including one delivered in Russian), or visits to Pentonville Prison when addiction has taken hold once again and paved the way for behavioural mistakes to be made. After all, recovery from addiction is anything but linear.

And then there’s the recovery service. Every Tuesday evening the building hosts around 40 people who attend a specifically recovery-oriented service, held by Raf, the curate at All Hallows – who himself is ten years clean and sober. This service combines the twelve step programme with the Bible, week after week after week, building a community upon the power of these two liberating texts.

Moving in and living deep means that the team at All Hallows can take Jesus’ instruction to ‘love their neighbour’ completely literally. Even when that neighbour is breaking into their church’s coffee shop for the fourth time. It means that, together, those neighbours can love their home well and refute the notion that someone has made it when they finally have the means to move out of it. It means that Cris was right where he needed to be when someone walked past their church building on the way to take their own life, and decided to ask for help instead.

This is what incarnational theology looks like on the ground. This is how Christianity makes itself known in Bow. As Cris says, ‘we are called to love the hell out of our estates as no one else can’.

An East End kind of Eden

I’m telling this story through the vehicle of Cris, his family and his team, but this piece really isn’t about him or them; it is about Bow. A beautiful place filled with beautiful people. It’s a story of a group of people living in and learning from a community they know and adore. It’s a story of the mystic nature of incarnational theology looking like a Russian recovery course. It’s a story of being enchanted with one’s home.

I say this because, as Cris has observed, words matter. The story you tell about a place matters. This is the reason that they have re-written the words to a hymn from 1885, the third verse of which goes like this:

When through the woods and forest glades I wander

And hear the birds sing sweetly in the trees.

When I look down, from lofty mountain grandeur

And see the brook, and feel the gentle breeze.

Then sings my soul, My Saviour God to Thee,

How great Thou art, how great Thou art.

Beautiful as these words are, the story they tell to residents of places such as Bow, is that beauty is elsewhere, that God is more present, and somehow easier to find, in places that look nothing like their home. In order to counter that, these are the words that ring out from All Hallows on a Sunday morning:

When through the estate and shaded parks I wander

And see the shops and people in the streets

When I look up and see the tower blocks’ grandeur

And hear the cars and the sound of dancing beats. 

Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee, 

How great Thou art, How great Thou art.

There is a kind of Eden in the East End, in fact, there are numerous. And while I can’t speak for them all, I can say that Bow is one of the most special places I’ve ever found myself (with some of the best coffee).

Article

Change

Mental Health

2 April 2024

4 min read

Don't try and cope on your own

The company of those who care helps when handling traumas.

Katherine Amphlett

Katherine is a counsellor based in the West Midlands.

a man in a wheelchair sits in a subway station holding a sign reading 'seeking human kindness'.

Michael, Boston, 2018.

Matt Collamer on Unsplash.

I did a horrible piece of training at the weekend. You have to do a lot of continual learning if you’re a counsellor, and some of it is hard going. This particular session (with Cruse, a national bereavement charity) was about self-harm, and it contained sheets and slides and lists of the ways in which people hurt, damage and punish themselves. Usually as a way of expressing another kind of pain or because it’s the only thing they can control in a chaotic world. Six hours of it, on Zoom.

All of us have topics that we struggle with – areas that we find difficult to contemplate – and self-harm is one of mine. It is so far from my own experience of reality that it makes me feel square and naïve and overprotected, and every part of me revolts against it in some way. How terrible that people who are already suffering can only find relief by inflicting further harm on themselves! And some of the injuries are so grievous. Mortifyingly, my main reaction on this occasion was an urge to put my fingers in my ears and tell everyone to STOP IT... not just the trainer, but the poor souls involved in hurting themselves too. Training can be humbling, in the way it reveals the limits of your own compassion to you.

Clearly though, telling people to ‘stop it’ is not an option, however you might feel! So what to do?

Christianity, usefully, offers quite a lot of different options for coping with difficult life stuff, so I started considering some of these as I attended to the trainer. The peaceful, thoughtful series of Lent reflections I’ve been listening to recently, for instance… might they help? Um no, not suitable really. Too meditative. You can’t ‘gather the scattered pieces of your consciousness and centre them on God’ when someone is talking about teenagers cutting themselves in ‘risky places, or too deep’ I found. Tranquillity of mind is too passive a response.

So then I thought about people talking sometimes of being able to hand over their troubles to Christ. He ‘takest away the sins of the world’, as the communion service puts it... his arms are open and he is God, so he can bear the weight. But that didn’t work either. Too mystical. It felt as if action was required, not meek handing over of sorrows because I couldn’t bear to contemplate them. I don’t think we’re meant to dodge responsibility and simply go, ‘Ugh, you have these ones Lord because I don’t want them’.

So, I sat there writhing inwardly and feeling sweaty and miserable and wishing I was somewhere else.

This kind, accepting, unshocked conversation was immensely comforting and reassuring, I found. There was safety in it, and daylight, and hope.

But then I started wondering how everyone else at Cruse copes with such things. I began looking at the other faces on my screen… the 21 of my colleagues who were also attending the training, almost all of them volunteers.

There was the strong, calm face of Manju, an Indian doctor lady, and Suki, a smiley gappy-toothed African lady, who both work on the triaging team, assessing callers as they come in and assigning them to helpers. There was Richard the First and Richard the Second, both white, one younger than me, one older, both friendly and knowledgeable and kind. There was Naga, a retired nursing sister who looked Scandewegian, and Christina, ditto – except she’d been a teacher. And Nick, not much more than a teenager by the look of him, and Sat, a big Brummie taxi driver in a turban. William looked as if he might be an academic, with his leather elbow patches, and Keith had his sound off due to the presence of a large cat on his desk, which leaned over periodically to miaow into his mike. Lots of others too.

And suddenly I realised that there was my answer: all those good people, giving up their Saturday because they cared. Listening to stories of suffering because they wanted to understand better, in order to be able to help – to do something for the broken and the sad among us.

That’s the presence of God, surely: that an army of people turn out, day in, day out, to do things simply because they are good. There is no payment, no special recognition. They have to listen to some very difficult things and contemplate darkness that they wouldn’t necessarily in their own lives. But there they all were that morning, one small group among thousands of others all over the country no doubt – ready to serve, and cheerful and friendly and attentive.

They talked matter-of-factly about cases they’d encountered and situations which can lead people to injure themselves, and about self-harm as a phenomenon in certain social groups. About how it can be treated, about how it can heal and disappear with the right care and compassion. About how sometimes it can even be preferable to other alternatives. It is much easier, for example, to stop self-harming than it is to recover from an eating disorder.

This kind, accepting, unshocked conversation was immensely comforting and reassuring, I found. There was safety in it, and daylight, and hope. A feeling that even if someone is suffering, there are others who are able to meet them there, to keep them warm and hold them up. That people do act as the hands and feet of God actually sometimes, regardless of creed or faith or fallenness.

Looking at them all I felt so much better… and that if they could do it, I could. We only need to work in company together and our collective strength will keep us all afloat, rescuers and rescued alike. ‘Be not afraid’ the Bible says over and over again. It is very much easier not to be, when you’re not trying to be brave by yourself.