30 things about St Lukes
As a church we’ve borrowed or inherited or invented many approaches to worship – and they often turn up in the same service. We love the ancient, the modern and the post-modern. You might find some C17th liturgy next to a South African chant. Or a previously redundant hymn next to a music video. We are Church of England in London in the 21st Century and, like you, we have no idea what it means.
Currently we have one service Sunday at 11am, including a crèche and activities for children, features our choir and the eucharist. It finishes as the smell of freshly brewed coffee drifts across the church. On the first Sunday of the month at 11am we hold a Celtic prayer service inspired by The Iona Community (no communion).
Fun fact: St Luke is the patron saint of artists. So we've always had a bit of a thing for painters and poets, musicians and dancers…anyone who feels the need to create. We have people in and around the church buildings most days of the week making music or rehearsing plays or painting pictures. (It can get a bit noisy.)
Jimmy Nail once came to our vicarage for a few days to make a film for the big screen about rock music. (Didn’t break any box office records.)
At St Luke’s we aim to be a warm and inviting congregation and want to welcome people with any disability. The church has step-free access from the front door, into the main body of the Church and there is a wheelchair-accessible toilet. In the main space we have an induction loop fitted. Our Inclusion Group are working on further improvements to make us a church accessible to everyone.
We have a mixed congregation averaging 120 or so (in numbers, not age). We have nurses, administrators, gardeners, social workers, engineers, teachers, musicians, shop assistants, photographers, care workers, artists, people who are mainly raising families, people who are mainly retired and people who mainly look forward to being retired. We have had a lot of kids in the recent past… but fewer lately as families find it more difficult to be able to afford to stay in our area. (One of the things we think about is how we can help with affordable housing.)
You can find out more about the kind of folk who call this church a home in The Gospel According To Everyone a little book edited by our Associate Vicar Martin Wroe. The books feature stories of people in our community which we’ve used in our services. They’re all saints because none of them realise it.
St Luke’s has a long connection with St Mary Magdalene Academy, about a mile away on Liverpool Road. Lots of young people from the church have attended the school and several of our members are governors.
At the ‘sharp end’ of the church, on the chancel under the window, you’ll see a beautiful triptych commissioned from the artist Paul Martin. It features heaven at the end of time, where all kinds of saints – ordinary people like us – are in heaven with Jesus Christ. Churches often had portable pictures like these – to help people think visually about their faith. Some of the saints are painting or listening to music, some are wearing badges, spectacles – even Converse All Stars. If it was painted today the saints would have headphone wires dangling from their ears, they’d be lost in the shining screen of their iPhones.
A relatively unknown Robbie Williams recorded an early demo of a song in our church. It was called Angels.
Sam Murphy with Jean & Norman Willson look after the gardens at St Luke’s, which is one of the reasons we have so many weddings here. Our clergy are asked to lead lots of weddings. And funerals.
St Luke’s was established on the corner of Penn Road and Hillmarton Road in 1860. 2010 was our 150th birthday. Parts of our building were bombed in World War II and have been rebuilt. Other features began life in different churches – our organ, refurbished in 2011, was originally the organ at St Paul’s Church in Covent Garden. For 150 years local people have gathered here – we’re just the current crop.
We are a church where people who want to get involved can. People lead services, write and say prayers, take on the sermon-slot, make coffee, manage the sound system, engage with local groups, do the gardening, organise the fairs… you get the idea.
On the last Sunday of the month we have a community lunch at 12.30pm, open to all! No preaching, praying or paying just good food and company!
There are nearly 200 people on the Electoral Roll (that’s the number of people who sign up to say they’ve joined) which has doubled in recent years. (This may be because it’s free.) People on the Electoral Roll get to vote for people to be on the Parochial Church Council (PCC), which is the group that works with our Associate Vicar Martin, our PCC Chair Ceri and the Church Wardens – Jacqui and Joy – to keep St Luke’s on the road.
If you’re standing in the chancel and look up – right up above your head – you’ll see the golden branches of a tree spreading across forty panels embedded in the ceiling. A Bible verse runs along either side, taken from Revelation, where the writer has an ecstatic vision of a holy city with a river running through and trees alongside: ‘The leaves of the trees,’ she writes, ‘Are for the healing of the nations…’
People from St Luke’s worked with the artist Rob Pepper to create this huge piece of community art. Springing from the branches are thousands of greeny-grey leaves – but what you can’t see from the ground is that every leaf has a name written on it. The name of someone who has been part of St Luke’s, the name of someone loved and lost, the name of someone venerated because of their lives – from Dorothy Day to Martin Luther King, from Mary Davies to Garry Rutter. One day we will put up scaffolding again and add more names.
Although your neck may be aching as you look up into the roof, if you focus carefully on the centre of the tree, where are all the branches meet, you see three blue shapes. These are hares, chasing each other around and never catching up. Look closely and you’ll see each hare has two ears but there only three ears between them. This is a picture from before Christianity, later adopted as a sign of the trinity – one in three (geddit?)
At the top of North Road (turn left out of the tube, coming down Cally Road, turn left again on Hillmarton), you’ll find a sixties building now called The Gower School – a nursery for pre-school children. For many years this was the St Francis Church Centre, a sister church to St Luke’s, an initiative in the 1980’s to establish a Christian presence on the local estate. It was opened by Bishop Trevor Huddlestone. Nowadays we rent the premises to the school and use the funds to help St Luke’s own initiatives in the parish.
Sunday morning service at 11am includes ‘communion’ (except the first Sunday of the month) – where people are invited to share bread and wine and wonder if God is in the house. You don’t need special qualifications to participate. It’s for everyone without exception. (If we were asked to name our ‘core values’ that would be one of them.)
On weekday mornings you can join us online from 9.30am for daily prayers. It began at the start of the pandemic and it’s a much loved start to (or end of) the day joined by people from all over the world so we’ve kept it going.
It costs about £3,500 a week to run St Luke’s – we have an annual budget of more than £180,000. The biggest item of expenditure is the ‘quota’ – the figure we pay the central body of the Church of England. In return we get a vicar and the vicar gets a vicarage. They also help us with other things, like raising funds to keep the building up. Contrary to popular impression, the Church of England is virtually broke. We can usually pay our bills because the people who are part of St Luke’s are generous. (And we rent out our spare spaces.)
The playwright and composer Justin Butcher is our Music Director and Choirmaster, sometimes working in partnership with the singer-songwriter Rick Leigh. If you want to get married – or buried – these are the people to help you name those tunes.
On weekdays you’ll often find a theatre group rehearsing a play in the main church space… or an orchestra or a dance troupe. We like to keep the place busy and it helps pay the bills. If you’re interested in hiring space at St Luke’s please get in touch with Federico.
Most Tuesdays Vox Holloway Choir meets in the church.
Not so long ago we re-faced the Tower of St Luke’s, which was falling down. Not only does it look quite good now but as an added bonus you won’t get hit on the head by falling masonry when you pass by. It cost more than half a million quid but fortunately we won the lottery. (We used to have a Lottery Syndicate at St Luke’s which along with a few million other lottery players, funds The Lottery Heritage Fund. They gave us 90% of the money for the job.)
If you want to keep up with what’s going on at St Luke’s West Holloway, subscribe to our email newsletter. You can get an email update every week.
At St Luke’s we always try to be open. Even when we’re closed.
In the summer of 2023 we installed an air source heat pump. It works like an inside-out fridge. It captures heat from outside – even in below-zero temperatures - and moves it inside. It’s powered by electricity and we’ll help generate that by installing solar panels on our south facing roofs to be completed in February 2024.
Our new green scheme is set to reduce our carbon emissions by about 80% and take us a small step forward into the future… and a small step backward to a world where people understood how everything was connected.
We’re looking for a new vicar, could it be you?