All Saints Margaret Street.

Dear friends,

Across the street from All Saints there is a language school. People come to it from many countries to learn English, now the world’s common tongue, in the way that Greek – the language of the New Testament – was then.

Those who heard, each in their own language, were pilgrims in Jerusalem for the feast of Pentecost.

Ours is a city to which people come from an ever greater spread of nations. Some come to study, many as tourists, others to work, some to make their homes here.

This is not a new phenomenon. Last week, I was in Wales to baptise a great niece. The service was bilingual: English and Welsh. Just over a century ago, services were conducted in Welsh at All Saints, for those who had come to our city from Welsh-speaking areas. A small Welsh-speaking Baptist congregation still worships in Eastcastle Street. It plays host to a larger and younger Korean group in the afternoons. The Welsh language has undergone something of a revival in recent years, after a long period in which it seemed doomed by the onward march of English.

The challenge which the coming among us of people of so many languages and cultures presents to us is one of communicating the faith to them. At the same time, we must seek to keep alive that which is of enduring value in our own religious culture; not because it is English, as if the Church of England was the spiritual arm of an English nationalism, but because it speaks the truth to us about Jesus Christ.

Happy Pentecost. 

Fr. Alan Moses