As much as ever, London is home to people whose everyday experience is one of rejection, helplessness and often shame – those who are overlooked, struggling, and pushed to the edges of society. People who face daily challenges, often invisible to others – they lack resources, forced to get by from one day to the next.
But it goes deeper than that.
They lack status, connections, community… options. Things many of us take for granted.
They lack the family member to call when they face eviction from their home. The friend waiting for them outside the prison gates. The community they once enjoyed, now replaced by loneliness in their older age. They lack the knowledge of ‘the right thing to say’ when they enter a new environment. The language skills to find help for their family.
Perhaps more than anything, they lack hope.
It’s clear throughout the Bible that God has a heart for people who are marginalised and overlooked – people whose physical poverty can help expose their helplessness before Him.
We know it’s here, and only here – recognising our helplessness before a Holy God – that Jesus meets us and invites us to repentance and into eternal hope in Him.
Tragically it’s in London’s most deprived communities that people are least likely to hear this invitation. Here, Jesus is someone they once heard about a long time ago, just another prophet, a myth… or a complete mystery.
And yet it’s also here, often on the doorstep of these communities, or just around the corner, that a source of eternal hope exists.
The local church.
