St. John's Westminster: The Master in an English Pulpit

In *The Chosen Highway* Lady Blomfield records what she considered one of the most striking moments of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s 1911 visit to England: the Sunday evening, 17 September, on which He spoke from the pulpit of St. John’s Westminster — a parish church of the Church of England in the heart of the capital — at the invitation of its Rector, the Reverend Archdeacon Basil Wilberforce.

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Wilberforce was a celebrated preacher, a man of considerable breadth of religious sympathy, and a friend of Lady Blomfield’s. He had heard of the Master’s arrival in London and had sought the opportunity to introduce his congregation to the Persian visitor whose teaching of universal love had, at that moment, just begun to be talked about in the religious press of England.

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The church was full. The pews were crowded; people stood at the back; many waited in the porches who could not be admitted. The Reverend Wilberforce conducted the evening service in the ordinary form. After the prayers, the recollection preserves, he turned to the Master, who was seated in the chancel, and invited Him to ascend the pulpit.

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‘Abdu’l-Bahá rose. He climbed the pulpit steps. He stood, in His Persian robes and white turban, in the pulpit of an English parish church. The congregation, the recollection records, was perfectly still. He spoke, through an interpreter, on the oneness of God, the unity of the Manifestations, the brotherhood of humanity, and the duty of the present age to bring the peoples of the world into a single fellowship.

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The talk was not long. The interpreter rendered each sentence into English as it was spoken. The Master closed with a blessing. Then, the recollection preserves, He raised His hand and chanted, in His own Arabic, the closing words of prayer.

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> The whole congregation knelt as the Master gave the blessing > in His own tongue.

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Lady Blomfield, who had sat near the front, records that she looked back across the kneeling rows of the English congregation — bishops, members of Parliament, women in their Sunday hats, working people from the streets of Westminster, all on their knees before a Persian voice they could not understand — and felt that something was being inaugurated in that moment. The Christian century had, until that evening, kept its churches and its pulpits to its own clergy. The pulpit of St. John’s Westminster had now been, briefly, opened. The opening would not, after that evening, be undone.

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The Reverend Wilberforce closed the service in the ordinary way. The congregation rose; the organ played; the people dispersed. The Master, with Lady Blomfield and a small company, returned across Whitehall to Cadogan Gardens. Behind Him, the recollection ends, the small parish church of Westminster had become, that one evening, a place where the Cause of God had spoken in an English pulpit for the first time.

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