Parish Profile Christ Church & St Stephen, Battersea This month The Bridge welcomes Rosemary Furber, a member of St Luke's, Charlton, who has joined the team to share in profiling the parishes of the Diocese.

Looking for an unfamiliar church on a Sunday morning can be a hazardous business. Ask somebody the way and they tend to look as if you want to mug them for the collection plate.

I had been exploring Battersea's Victorian terraces in several directions for a while, with no sign of Christ Church, when I decided to risk asking an elderly couple. They directed me cheerfully to a modern building just beyond Latchmere Road. I had already passed it several times.

The original Christ Church would have been hard to miss. Built in 1849 in the Victorian Gothic style, it had a spire apparently rivalling Salisbury Cathedral. It caught the eye of Hitler's bombers and both church and vicarage were razed in November 1944.

The new Christ Church, consecrated in 1959, may not be conspicuous but the interior is a masterpiece of modern design. Canon Peter Clark, the incumbent since 1983, says 'Perhaps Hitler did us a favour. People are struck dumb once they cross the threshold.' Light pours in from both sides, concentrating the eye on a magnificent mural behind the altar by Hans Freibush, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany. (His work is also in Chichester Cathedral and St. John's, Waterloo.) In subtle, calm greys and blues enhanced by incense, it features several figures, most spectacularly a well nourished young lady in scanty drapery. The Ven. David Gerrard, Archdeacon of Wandsworth, who preached on the day of the profile visit, said 'You must be the only parish in the diocese with a naked lady looking down on the altar'.

Peter Clark would be reluctant to go back to a Victorian or medieval building now. There are so many advantages. A low roof makes heating easier. The barrel ceiling provides good acoustics that, with the choir stalls at the back, stiffen the congregational singing wonderfully. 'Most important,' he says, 'is that modern liturgy can be seen by everybody in that open space.'

Although it is only ten minutes walk from the King's Road, Christ Church is in an Urban Privation Area, one of the most deprived in Wandsworth. The majority of the congregation is African-Caribbean, with a growing constituency from Africa. Many are single mothers. Obi Obuka is secretary of the PCC, Vice-Chair of the Black Forum and has been co-opted onto the Bishop of Kingston's Area Council; she says 'It's a good family church. Father Peter is very approachable, very down to earth and in touch with everybody'.

Before settling in Battersea, Peter worked for seven years in Notting Hill. His bishop sent him to Grenada to meet the families of some of his parishioners and he stayed at St. Patrick's, Grenada in the Diocese of the Windward Islands for four years. 'I'm very happy to work in a multi-racial environment' he says. Trevor Huddleston's return from South Africa while Peter was at Cambridge was, he says, 'a seminal moment in the development of my vocation.' It was at Peter's suggestion that Obi and her friend Jane Yiadom joined the Black Forum when it formed eight years ago. The Forum has an emphatic presence in the church and as a result, people from racial minorities are active in every aspect of the church's life. As Obi says, 'Encouragement is the key word'.

About a year ago Christ Church courted controversy when they chose, not only to pray for loved ones in Ghana on its Independence Day, but to fly the Ghanaian flag from the church flagpole. 'It was to make everybody feel this is their church, that they are extremely welcome,' says Peter.

That evening a vehement telephone call informed him of an obscure, ancient ruling by the Lord Chancellor forbidding an Anglican church to fly any flag except the cross of St. George. However, the Bishop and Archdeacon supported Christ Church's action, members of the congregation regularly produce flags of their home countries to be flown and their lead has been followed in other parishes.

On the day of the profile visit the church was nearly full. The second reading was appropriately Revelation 7, 9 - 17: 'After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne.' The Archdeacon gave us a detailed biology lesson about conception, heavy with statistics, in an attempt to explain how beauty and life can only flourish in a world of waste and suffering. A Eucharist followed with Anglo-Catholic dignity, which seemed to comfort him more than his own words.

The many children of the congregation had been sifted off to children's church at the time, having received the obligatory interactive talking to first: 'Who knows what the candle means? Thank you, the light of Christ.' I was impressed to see three youngsters of between twelve and fourteen without an adult in the pew in front of me, clearly of their own volition.

Last year the Bishop of Kingston invited this parish to pilot his One Step programme, an attempt to hold the interest of young people after their confirmation, and in Christ Church it has been a great success. 'Luckily most of the ones we confirm don't lapse because they're coming with families,' says Father Peter, although that does not guarantee continued interest elsewhere. 'Of the children we confirm here, the majority have been baptised here. I'm baptising children of people I baptised as babies'.

A vital part of Christ Church's work is with their primary school, which has tried to serve the local community for over 130 years. The school roll contains 87% ethnic minorities, and five years ago it was condemned by OfSTED and put into Special Measures. The previous Head had resigned six months before, and staff were transient and demoralised. Peter says: 'I was in despair. There was no Head for a year. We had to advertise four times'.

Prayers were answered in January 1996 when Mrs Frances Bussy arrived from an inner city school in Walworth. Thanks to her, two recent OfSTED reports have been fulsome: 'Every adult in the school - teachers, support staff, governors - are excellent role models for the children and are respected by them'.

For the past three years Peter has been supported by his curate, Luis Rodriguez, a former primary school teacher from the United States. Luis graduated from St. Stephen's, Oxford in 1996 and adores Battersea: 'It's a supportive place where people will ask "Are you OK today?"' He leads two enthusiastic Bible groups, and is guiding them through a broad reading list including Holloway and Spong.

The 'team' at Christ Church, Battersea

Everywhere the welcome is warm. The sides-women wear name badges, and the word that keeps cropping up is 'friendly'. They are proud of their church and take care of it, but its fresh tarmac in the car park and newly refurbished kitchen make them look more prosperous than they are. 'Money is a constant struggle,' says Peter. Obi and Nigel Cox, their churchwarden who is Battersea born and bred, are organising a black tie dinner dance later in the year to find £2,000. But well-off, professional people in the congregation are few. The many young, professional whites in the locality show up rarely, except to hear their banns called for weddings elsewhere. Of these Seventh Day Absentists Peter says: 'the only local organisation they seem to support is neighbourhood watch'.

Women are visible in all aspects of Christ Church except one. Peter is personally against the ordination of women and soon after the Synod vote, a two-thirds majority of the PCC voted not to accept a woman as minister presiding, nor as incumbent or priest-in-charge. 'Some of the strongest opponents were our African-Caribbean women on the PCC, for all sorts of reasons,' says Peter. 'It's not a misogynist line,' he goes on, 'being against women's ordination does not mean that we're against women's ministry. We have a woman churchwarden (Joanna Carew from the Gambia), they do intercessions and are sides-women, and we have four girl servers.' The able young women I spoke to after the service, who had joined in the last five years, were unaware that this was their policy and they did not seem to mind.

One vital woman at Christ Church is their organist, Charlotte Kirwan, and pretty hard pressed she is too. The minute the service finished she gathered up her music and headed off to play for the Methodists. Christ Church needs a replacement.

'We can't offer much remuneration,' Peter says, 'and there aren't a lot of weddings, but there's just the one Sunday service and we'd love to start a gospel group with the young people' - and, of course, the people are very friendly.

Christ Church 'catering department'