Celebrating 60 years of hospitality

This article was published in the January to April 2025 edition of Rapport magazine.

HOSPITALITY – to reveal God’s kindness through serving others with excellence – this is one of our core values at Lee Abbey London, and it has always been at the heart of what we do here, right back since the beginning, in 1964. The act of offering and delivering hospitality is a wonderful way to both serve – imitating Jesus (Matt 20:28) – and build relationship. Of course, as we all know at Lee Abbey, building relationship always precedes communicating Christ, and enables us to communicate Christ.

As you may recall, the Lee Abbey International Students’ Club was launched 60 years ago, a few hundred yards from the current premises. The original idea came, not so much from the desire to evangelise students, but more to provide a safe haven for international youngsters arriving to study in London for the first time. One can only imagine the bewilderment of a youngster travelling overseas alone, perhaps having been brought up in a remote village in a Commonwealth country and arriving at Imperial College in Kensington. In those days, many – but not all – of the students would have been Christians, but all would have welcomed care, company and support from a collection of kind Christian families.

Those families were an informal group of Lee Abbey Friends, who got together to organise these homestays, and over time the idea grew into taking on premises and starting an international students’ club staffed by a Christian community.

Whilst there have been changes over the years, there is much that remains the same and true to this original vision. We still communicate Christ through relationships, and ‘contribute to the welfare of students’.

We remain as relevant as ever. Now, most of our 150 students are – sadly – not (yet!) believers; many are from wealthy families and are well travelled. However, they are still young and inexperienced, they still need our help in navigating London’s pitfalls, in growing up and learning life skills, and they desperately need Jesus.
We are still equipping young Community saints with a firm foundation for a lifetime of service back in their own countries, and for 60 years we have sent young international students back to their countries – where many might take up positions of leadership in which they could be able to advocate powerfully for Christian hospitality, and perhaps even give their lives to our Lord.

We now have the added ministry of hospitality to numerous short-stay tourists, most of whom have no faith at all, but all of whom can sample a taste of ‘somehow just feeling comfortable here’ – we all know what and why that is!

All of this stems from our own love of the Lord, demonstrated through this gift of hospitality to all who come here. The Lord has blessed us with a fantastic multicultural and multigenerational management team, who are all part of our Community. Sue Cady has led our London Community over the last few years and I commend to you the amazing journey she has taken us on, as she teaches us to wait on the Lord and meditate on his precepts (Ps. 119:15); then to demonstrate Christ’s love to everyone we meet (Heb. 13:2;
1 John 3:18, 23).

One of the exciting developments this year has been the visible change in our contractors. Most of the time we have on site a team of caterers and a team of contractors. The caterers have been remarkably stable as a team – for industry standards – and explain it as, ‘I like this house!’

We have implemented a new policy that anyone working on site joins us for lunch, which gives us wonderful opportunities for fellowship. The building contractors – a Muslim family firm from Iraq – tell us they have never worked anywhere so nice. One of them accepted our offer of prayer for his injured leg – and he was healed, praise God!

The youngest son has accepted a copy of John’s gospel from Sue, and last week he even led the table in grace at lunch! We pray that he becomes overwhelmed by Jesus’ love.

It was a joy to bring all this together in our 60th birthday celebrations in August.

I found it particularly encouraging to see an impromptu mixture of Lee Abbey Friends, previous Community members – some dating from the 1960s, students, current Community members and tourists, all sharing the same tables and conversations. The dance floor was similarly multigenerational!

Our birthday has been a great opportunity to pause and reflect on what the next 60 years might look like (unless, of course, Jesus returns first – Phil. 1:23). The mission remains the same, but the execution is perhaps different. We thank God that he has provisioned us abundantly since the depths (financial and emotional) of Covid-19 and we are well placed to grow our ministry.

We are delighted to be offering more scholarships to students, so that we can broaden our base of opportunity, and we are excited to have started a new initiative: the London Lighthouse is a project where we send some of our students who are Christian – most of whom come from reasonably well-off backgrounds – to serve with the last, least and lost (Matt. 20:16; 25:40; Luke 19:10). Again, it is the medium of hospitality that enables this, as they work in women’s shelters, homeless shelters and foodbanks. Their motivation is servant-hearted ministry, but we do allow them a reduction on their rent. We already have our first Lighthouse keepers and they are working in ministry in Hounslow, a multicultural and economically challenged suburb near Heathrow.

In these straitened times, when the enemy is using anxiety to try to establish barriers between us and to amplify our differences as a threat rather than an opportunity, it is wonderful to use the gift of hospitality assertively, to break down these walls, to celebrate our different backgrounds and cultures and to fellowship together – just as Jesus did!

James Fulford
Director, Lee Abbey London