Common prayer: when churches become mosques

A Presbyterian minister, a Pentecostalist pastor and a Sunni imam come to worship in the same place. It’s not the start of a joke: this is literally what happens at my local church in east London which, strangely, now encompasses a mosque. It was in danger of being closed, but instead the walled church complex has been partitioned, with a chunk of it sold off to Muslims while the main church building remains the home of two different Christian denominations. The site serves as a sanctuary for followers of rival creeds, a kind of suburban Temple Mount.

The shared use indicates an unlikely chapter in the life of a once-renowned institution, founded in 1642 when Protestant nonconformists met in Stepney amid civil war. The then Wycliffe Chapel ministered to generations of poor east Londoners. But since relocating to Ilford, the congregation has dwindled to about two dozen parishioners. The other churchgoers who meet there are followers of a black pastor, who struggles to fill the pews. There’s no trouble filling the mosque, with queues stretching to the end of the street on Fridays.

The conversion of churches into mosques, potentially a radical reconfiguring of our urban geography, has yet to receive any serious attention. The National Churches Trust reports more than 2,000 church closures over the past decade — a period in which weekly church attendance decreased by a fifth — but it’s unknown how many of these buildings are now mosques.

But even if there are just a few, the historical symbolism is immense. In conflicts between Christendom and Islam, usurping enemy places of worship marked the consummation of conquest. Byzantium was definitively lost when the largest church in the world, Hagia Sophia, became a mosque in 1453.