Harrison knocks at a door on the fifth floor of a Vauxhall Estate and waits. He’s used to waiting. This isn’t his first time door-knocking, and he’s in no rush to move on to the next. No one answers. It’s not unusual – with 2,000 homes on the estate and an estimated 5,000 people living in them, plenty will be out or at work. We move on, flyers in hand, hoping for a conversation and a chance to extend an invitation to church.
The open air hallway is narrow. We squeeze past a toddler’s pink bicycle propped against the brick, navigating the walkway like a shared front porch.
Before we get the chance to knock on the next door, a man steps out of a flat further along to collect laundry drying on the balcony railing. Harrison sees his opportunity. He introduces himself and Alex, a member of Hope Church Vauxhall, and explains why they’re here – they’re from the local church and wanted to invite him along. The man, mid-fifties, looking tired and a bit reluctant to engage, responds, ‘I know who you guys are. I’ve been to your church. I actually see your pastor most days chatting with people from the estate.’ Harrison asks what he thought of it. ‘I don’t know if church is for me, mate. It’s a bit too happy-clappy for my style.’
Harrison doesn’t flinch. He just keeps talking, asking questions, getting to know the man. Within a few minutes, what began as reluctant small talk opens into something else entirely. The man’s children have all grown up and moved out, his closest companion these days is his dog, and last year he was diagnosed with cancer and has spent the months since recovering from treatment. Harrison gently raises the subject of church again. ‘It’s nothing against your church or anything,’ the man says. ‘I just struggle with the songs. But I am interested in Christianity.’ Harrison asks whether he’d ever consider a Bible study, which the church runs several times a week. The man answers immediately, ‘I would definitely be open to that. When’s your next one?’ Harrison passes him a leaflet.
Alex, Hope Church Vauxhall member (left) and Harrison (right) on the estate.
Conversations like this have become routine for Harrison and Hope Church Vauxhall. The estate is surrounded by luxury high-rises and glass offices, but Harrison’s work isn’t in the skyscrapers. His office is the landings, the stairwells and the courtyards. Through weekly Bible studies, a lunchtime ministry, football clubs, toddler groups and a free coffee at Hope Café, the goal is straightforward: to reach the people who, statistically, are the most underrepresented group of practising Christians in the United Kingdom.
The Evangelical Alliance’s research suggests that roughly 80 per cent of practising Christians in the UK hold a university degree, at a time when only around 35 to 40 per cent of the broader population does. When I put it to Harrison that the church might be doing something wrong, his answer is not the one you might expect. He isn’t frustrated or defeated – he sees an opening, ‘I think it’s less about doing something wrong because I think it’s amazing that so many students and middle class people are coming to the church, but it’s just how to expand on that, and how to expand on evangelising to the working classes.’
That instinct runs through everything Harrison does. When he talks about how the church has designed its outreach, he is direct, ‘I think in our apologetics, in our evangelism, a lot of our resources have been bent towards Western middle class liberals.’ But the questions tend to be different where people aren’t from this background. ‘One of the elders, Shane, says when he wasn’t a Christian he was more okay with God judging evil because he saw evil in where he was from.’ The shape of the church’s outreach sends a message about who the church is for.
But Harrison is clear-eyed about the limits of what any single church can do, however well it adapts. ‘We just need more small, local churches,’ he says simply. It’s a point he grounds in something very concrete: many people on estates like Vauxhall rarely leave them.
Hope Church is already acting on that logic. Harrison talks about an upcoming church plant in the early stages at the Ethelred Estate, roughly a ten minute walk from Vauxhall Gardens. To an outsider, ten minutes might not sound like much. But there is a main road cutting between the two estates, and that, Harrison explains, is enough. ‘We’re planting at the Ethelred Estate because it’s not that likely that somebody from that estate would ever travel over and come to Vauxhall Gardens – because it has a main road in the middle of it. It’s that simple.’
It’s not a grand strategy, just the recognition that if you want to reach a community, you have to go to the people where they are.
Back on the estate, the door-knocking is done. Harrison and Alex are walking back to Hope Church encouraged – not by the volume of conversations, but by their quality. The man who said he’d come to a Bible study. The others they’d spoken with along the landings. We sit down together and reflect, then pray for the people behind every door we’d knocked on, answered or not.
It is watching Harrison in moments like these that you begin to understand what brought him here. Kicked out of school at sixteen on suspicion of selling drugs – a suspicion that was not true – already vulnerable, hurt and feeling forgotten, Harrison fell into online far-right culture. He joined the European New Right, where he took part in provocative demonstrations across Europe, advancing the group’s views on anti-immigration, anti-Islamification and anti-wokeness. I ask whether the appeal was partly about searching for purpose. ‘I was vulnerable,’ he says. ‘But it gave me purpose and meaning. I wouldn’t have said it then, but I was very willing to give my life to something like this.’
What followed were the more common rhythms of someone trying to outrun themselves: drink, drugs and late nights. His grandmother had become a Christian some years earlier, after someone knocked on her door and shared the gospel with her. She had given him a Bible. It sat under his bed for years collecting dust.
Then one morning, hungover after a heavy night, something told him to pick it up. He opened it and started reading, and kept reading, and in those pages encountered something he hadn’t been looking for and couldn’t explain away. He saw the reality of who Jesus is. For his first few months as a Christian he had no church, no community, no one to speak to – just the Bible and the slow, private work of belief. Eventually he found a church in central London, was discipled, and discovered that what he wanted to do with his life was share the gospel in the same way that someone once went to his grandmother.
80 per cent of practising Christians in the UK hold a university degree, at a time when only around 35 to 40 per cent of the broader population does
At half past twelve, the lunchtime ministry begins. The room fills quickly – warm welcomes, loud conversation, locals from the estate who move through the space with the ease of people who feel they belong there. Some of them are here because someone knocked on their door. Everyone is fed a hot, healthy meal. People arrive early, others drift in later. There are no disappointed looks, no quiet judgement. Just welcome.
Kev, an elder at the church who works for London City Mission, is giving the talk. Before he begins, he pulls me and Harrison aside and asks us to keep talking to each other when he stands up – to carry on as though we’re not listening, whatever he does. He walks to the front. We do as we’re told.
What follows is immediately obvious to everyone in the room. Two people are plainly ignoring the man trying to speak. Heckles come from the tables. We carry on. Kev gets louder. We carry on. More heckles and shouting from some tables telling us to shut up and listen. Then he tells the room he asked us to do it. His point: sometimes people don’t want to listen, even when the message is loud and obvious. That is what it is to be human before God – choosing not to listen, even when the communication could not be clearer. ‘The world we’re living in,’ Kev says, ‘doesn’t want us to listen to God’s word.’
It is direct, visual and impossible to miss. No theological vocabulary required. Questions get called out from the tables during the talk and Kev doesn’t brush them aside – he answers them, opens them up, invites the room in. The dynamic here is not a speaker and a passive audience, but a room in genuine dialogue and engagement. The welcome is tangible, locals moving through the space with the ease of people who belong there. But it’s more than simply an open door, what’s striking about this welcome is how it stretches out into the community.
The talk over, Harrison is already moving through the room. He pulls up a chair beside a man to his left who has a question still turning over in his mind – if someone had never encountered the Bible, could they have known God at all? Could those truths have found them another way? Harrison listens, then walks him through Paul’s argument in Romans: that no one is without excuse, because God has made himself plain through the very fabric of creation – through nature, through the world as it is, through the things that have been made. The man sits with it for a moment, quietly working it through. Then he nods.
Harrison Clewes (pictured above) in front of Hope Church Vauxhall
By two o’clock the lunchtime ministry is over, but the room hasn’t emptied. Outside, small clusters of people linger and I stop beside a conversation between an elderly woman and a young man. The woman has lived on the estate for forty years. ‘As soon as the church came,’ she says, ‘I was there.’ The man has only been coming for the past year. Neither of them look like they’re in any hurry to leave.
Harrison has a one-to-one Bible study arranged with a young person from the estate. Before I leave him to it, I ask whether he’d ever want to plant a church of his own. ‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘Well, God willing. But yeah.’ I ask if it would be on an estate. The answer comes without a pause. ‘Oh yeah, definitely. I’ve got a heart for estates. This is where I think the Lord wants me.’
Harrison Clewes knocking on doors on the Vauxhall Estate isn’t a strategy. It’s just who he is and it’s what Hope Church Vauxhall does
Harrison Clewes knocking on doors on the Vauxhall Estate isn’t a strategy. It’s just who he is and it’s what Hope Church Vauxhall does. And if the church wants to reach the people in this city and the church keeps leaving behind, it needs more people like him – willing to go, willing to knock, willing to wait. I walk on towards Waterloo, the estate behind me, thinking about the man recovering from cancer – praying that he will go along to a Bible study or church, and invite Jesus into his life.
Please Pray
Pray that many people from different backgrounds, people who are searching for purpose, and people on the outside might be reached by the good news of the gospel, and discover the true and better hope found in Jesus. Pray that the Lord might raise up many more like Harrison, who long to love their community with the gospel and boldly proclaim Jesus to everyone they encounter.