Article
Change
Community
Hospitality
6 min read

“We’re amongst everybody.” The novel communities serving London

The city's intentional communities live in, and love, particular places.

Robert is a journalist at the Financial Times.

 

A man stands in a relaxed way on the doorstep of a brick building.
Mark Bishop at HOP East.

Mark Bishop has an unusual view from his home in Stepney, east London, at Friday lunchtimes. Because the nearby Stepney Shahjalal mosque has insufficient space for worshippers at its busiest weekly service, neighbouring Shandy Park turns into an impromptu outdoor worship space. For the main Friday service, more than 500 men alternate between standing and kneeling in prayer in the open air. 

The scene has seized the attention of Bishop, an ordained Church of England priest, because his home is the House of Prayer for East London (HOP East), a community that he and Carrie, his wife, founded in 2023. From its base in Faith House, built as a 19th century mission outpost on the edge of Shandy Park, it is seeking to bring the power of Christian prayer to the same area. Bishop and Carrie live at HOP East with their children and another couple. 

The community is one of multiple Christian “intentional communities” worldwide engaged in concerted efforts to develop new forms of monastic or communal living to minister to an increasingly secular world. The trend has had particular attention in the UK because of the decision of Elizabeth Oldfield, a Christian writer and podcaster, and her husband to live in an intentional community with another couple. In Germany, Johannes Hartl 20 years ago in Augsburg founded a community called the House of Prayer where there is always at least one community member praying, 24 hours a day. 

HOP East was partly inspired by Hartl’s community. The Stepney community shares with many other Christian intentional communities both a strong sense of ministering to a particular place and a focus on the importance of prayer. As well as the residents, there are a growing number of non-resident members who regularly come to Faith House for prayer, worship and to eat together. 

The open-air prayer highlights both the contrast between HOP East and its many non-Christian neighbours and their shared commitment to prayer, according to Bishop.  

“We’re amongst everybody, to be good Christian neighbours,” he says. 

Kirsten Stevens-Wood, a lecturer in Cardiff Metropolitan University’s school of education and social policy who has a research interest in intentional communities, says Christians have a particular affinity for communal living. 

Stevens-Wood points out that sociologist Rosabeth Moss Kanter – better known for her later management writing – concluded after researching intentional communities that Christianity’s mixture of shared commitment and rituals was highly compatible with communal living. 

“It enables communities to be more stable and endure longer periods of time,” Stevens-Wood says. 

New communities such as HOP East coexist with the survivors of previous waves of idealism about communal living. In the UK, they include Northern Ireland’s Corrymeela Community, which seeks to heal the polarisation caused by the political conflict in the region. Bishop himself was born in the Lee Abbey community in Devon, a Christian community linked to Anglicanism founded after the second world war. 

The London outpost of Lee Abbey runs a hall of residence for international students in Kensington, on the other side of London from HOP East. 

“They definitely come in waves,” Stevens-Wood says of intentional communities. 

HOP East’s focus on prayer is manifested in multiple ways, according to Bishop. They include a commitment for members to say the Lord’s Prayer daily at noon, wherever they are, and to engage in “prayer-walking” – praying in the streets as they walk along them. 

“To our Muslim neighbours, it really helps to be more serious about how we pray, because they’re really serious about prayer,” Bishop says. “This is very much a neighbourhood where prayer is strong.” 

He and Carrie had long felt a calling to pray for London and East London in particular before setting up HOP East, he says. 

“We began, out of lots of different activity, to ask a question: ‘What would it look like to form a community as an expression of church?’” Bishop recalls. “We’re a new monastic expression. We’re living out, working out a rule of life and other things that might define what a new monastic community is.” 

Members of the community range in age from school-age children to older, retired people, Bishop says. He describes the community as “both gathered and scattered”, with only a few of the community members living in Faith House. 

But he says living in a relatively small number of East End neighbourhoods – including Limehouse, Mile End and Shadwell - unites them. 

“Everybody else has a level of proximity to us,” Bishop says. 

The points of contact between apparently contrasting communities are clear visiting the imposing Kensington townhouses owned by Lee Abbey London. 

Sue Cady, Lee Abbey London’s chaplain and deputy director, says the site is home to 150 international students and around 25 team members who form the community on the site. 

The students living at Lee Abbey London are mostly not Christians while the team members who serve them make up the community. Team members consist of a small core of longer-term workers like Cady and one-year volunteers who are single and share rooms. While Cady would like to welcome more British volunteers for the one-year positions, nearly all at present come from overseas on charity worker visas. 

Cady shares with Bishop the sense that a place where Christians live and pray together is special. Lee Abbey London expresses that partly by training up a new generation of Christian leaders, she says. 

“The young Christians are being grown and developed and then after their year with us they’re going all over the world as stronger Christians, grown in discipleship and leadership,” Cady says. 

She is also clear that the life of the community affects the students. 

“Our mission field is the international students, who are really open about UK life and asking us questions about our faith and the difference our faith makes to us,” she says. “They notice something very different about us that’s peaceful and kind.” 

At the heart of both communities, however, is a sense that prayer is a vital, sustaining, communal activity. 

For Cady, that manifests itself in Lee Abbey London’s distinctive atmosphere compared with other halls of residence. 

“People comment on the sense of God’s peace and God’s presence here, which I think is due to the fact that our team worship and pray daily for the residents that live here, and that the majority of our team are on gap years themselves,” she says. 

At HOP East, meanwhile, prayer is partly a manifestation of the members’ practical desire to help impoverished and disadvantaged people in their area. Community members pray for the area’s many refugees and those working with them, for victims of modern slavery and for many other social causes. 

However, the pledges to engage in prayer-walking and saying the Lord’s Prayer daily reflect Bishop’s conviction that prayer is a sustaining activity regardless of any practical need. Bishop insists prayer is a vital part of relating to God, of mission and ensuring people have opportunities to encounter the love of Christ. 

“We always try to remind ourselves… that prayer is always worth it, in and of itself,” he says. “We’re really aware of a hunger in this cultural moment we find ourselves in for healthy spiritual practice.” 

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Article
Awe and wonder
Comment
Holidays/vacations
Monastic life
Psychology
5 min read

You can find the awesome in the everyday not just on holiday

The sources of awe are not scarce, but we do overlook them
A colourful street food van
Awesome in Singapore.
Swaroop Satheesh on Unsplash.

Are you starting to think about holidays? Have you heard yourself trotting forth the old clichés?  

“We’re looking forward to getting away from it all.”  

“We’re planning something special to take us out of ourselves.”  

“Well, it might not be that relaxing with the *kids/dogs/relatives* – but a change is as good as a rest!”  

Even if going for the budget-friendly ‘staycation’ this year, there is something about stepping out of our everyday busyness and chores that we find distinctly appealing. We hope that a change of routine, if not a change of place, will afford us some kind of renewal. On holiday we are freed to move to the edges of our lives, even if we can’t escape them entirely, and gain the view from the terrace over the box-hedge-maze of all things quotidian.    

But would it help us to visit that terrace a bit more often? This has long been the recommendation of scientists, poets and prophets alike. Most recently, a 2025 study from Yale University researched experiences of “awe” in the everyday. They recruited Long Covid patients and instructed them over a three-month period to slow down several times a day, paying attention to something that they valued or found amazing, whilst breathing and noticing any tangible responses or reactions in their body. The researchers called this process “awe”: Attention, Wait and Exhale. Amongst the participants in the study, the practice of AWE induced a measurable improvement in mental health.  

Of course, there have always been people who pause multiple times per day to turn their thoughts away from the mundane. In the Sixth Century, an Italian monk known as Benedict devised a “rule” for those living the monastic life, wherein brothers were required to pause for prayer eight times in every 24 hours – including in the middle of the night! This connected the members of the order not only with God but also with each other. Even if a brother found himself temporarily outside the cloister, going on a journey or working with the poor in the wider community, he was still expected to “join” his community in prayer at the regular hours, stopping whatever he was doing to pray in solidarity.  

There are still Benedictine orders today, and others who seek to “pray the hours” based on brother Benedict’s rule. But for most of us, our lives are far from this monastic ideal of community and regularity, even if we do practise the Christian faith. Within a busy schedule, stopping once or twice per day to pray can be a challenge, let alone eight times and regardless of convenience! No matter how much the scientists tell us that it will lift our spirits and do us good, such timefulness is the medicine that the modern life denies. But perhaps this is where the poets can supply deficiencies?  

In her great work, Aurora Leigh, Elizabeth Barrett Browning once wrote: 

“Earth’s crammed with heaven, 
And every common bush afire with God; 
But only he who sees takes off his shoes— 
The rest sit round and pluck blackberries.” 

It’s a brilliant reminder that sources of awe are not scarce, even if we are prone to overlooking them. In speaking of “he who sees” Browning suggests that there are some people who see the world in a way that anticipates moments of wonder, and that such people are willing to “take off their shoes”. This is an allusion to the story of Moses in the Bible, who, when he encounters the miraculous mystery of the burning bush in the desert, is commanded by God to take off his shoes because the ordinary desert has now become sacred and holy ground – a place of awesome encounter.  

Perhaps we should take our cue from brother Benedict, and simply stop and kneel where we are, by the side of the path, in amongst the box-hedge.

This type of atunement is available to any of us, no matter how full the schedule. Even as I write – and you read – this article right now, any of us might pause to take in our surroundings and be able to find something to value and find amazing, a little bit of heaven crammed into earth. It might be a large thing, like the view from the window, or small thing, like the curling steam rising from a cup of coffee on the desk. Anything can become meaningful if we choose to observe its meaning; anywhere can become holy ground if we make it a place of encounter with all that is awe-inspiring and that transcends our daily lives.  

What stops us, I wonder? Is it that for me writing this article, and for you reading it, this is just another task that we feel we must finish so that we can hurry along to finishing something else? We must keep pressing on, threading our way through the box-hedge-maze today, because the time for visiting the terrace is not now, it’s later – in a few weeks’ time, when the schools break up and we can finally “get away from it all”. 

Perhaps we should take our cue from brother Benedict, and simply stop and kneel where we are, by the side of the path, in amongst the box-hedge. If we look closely, we might even notice that it is made up of a thousand million tiny leaves, each with its own little leafy life to live, each patterned with tiny, intricate veins. Beautiful, and for no obvious reason. Most people will never notice this – but we have seen it now. In the middle of all things quotidian, here is a common bush, and it is afire with God. There is nothing to stop us noticing this, and when we have done so, we can get up, take off our shoes, and continue to walk.

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