Member

Also in Southwark diocese, let us take St Philip’s on Queenstown Road. The Southwark diocese website says that it is closed. Drive past it on a Sunday, as I do, and it is so busy with young and old from the Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox churches in their wonderful white costumes. That is the saddest fact of all, if we look back to 1878: the Coptic Orthodox Church, the Orthodox Church of Ukraine and the Syriac Orthodox churches, some of whose adherents were crucified by IS. I know that your Lordships’ House loves ceremony, and the non-conformists that I have mentioned, and the Pentecostals, can be quite relaxed, but the Orthodox church has robes that put the present Bishops’ robes to shame. It is so sad that we have not honoured those communities with representation here.