Charles Fuge Lowder

Today we remember the life and work of Charles Fuge Lowder who was a missionary priest in the East End of London from the 1860s. Whilst is probably seems quite normal to us to have a breadth of spiritual expression and churchmanship within the Church of England - the Victorian Church was emerging from a period of decline and a fairly monotone religious expression. Charles Lowder was amongst those priests who embraced the new Anglo-Catholic movement - who believed ritual and liturgy to be of great importance but coupled this with a living and vibrant mission to the poor in the urban slums.

Lowder followed a path like many of his contemporaries, of discovering the Oxford Movement at university and finding themselves changed by it. He served various curacies but ended up building a Church at St. Peters in the Docks in the East End. Church building was not as simple as erecting stones - it meant a huge infrastructure of social programmes and personnel - including many women in new religious orders.

Lowder was somewhat stern but during the 1866 Cholera outbreak he went out among the people - carrying people to the hospital, barely sleeping as he comforted and offered God's pardon and buried people. Like most of the slum priests he was a work-aholic - this is not said to commend them - just to say that they were driven people. Once the Cholera abated Lowder found himself a hero of the people and twenty years later his funeral was attended by thousands.

The slum priests are often forgotten as a major missionary movement within the Church of England. Perhaps they are not so swashbuckling as the overseas missionaries but through their confidence and constant ministry they alleviated much urban suffering in places which could, quite literally, be hell on earth. They held together a strict and sometimes stifling spirituality with social outreach - the discipline seems to have held them in faith in these difficult and sometimes terrifying places.

Urban re-growth has sometimes left their Churches stranded in the middle of commerce as tenements were cleared and London slowly rebuilt - but in their time they were certainly saints of Christ to people who had nothing and who had no one to speak for them.