The song Oranges and Lemons began in 1744 as London Bells, and is known by many for its references to London churches (St Clement Danes, St Martin-in-the-Fields, and so on). The first six lines are now unknown to, or forgotten by, most people.

Two sticks and an apple
Ring y bells at Whitechapel.
Old Father Bald Pate
Ring y bells of Aldgate.
Maids in white aprons
Ring y bells at St Cathrin.

In the late 1990s I found myself standing in the pulpit of St Botolph’s, Aldgate, singing the “Old Father Bald Pate” lines for a children’s video. Anyone who has seen me will realise why I was deemed appropriate for this role.

Of course, there are now no literal gates, but the City of London remains an elite zone, cut off from people who are outside, who do not belong. The “gate” at the east is only too real. The division between the life and culture of the City and that of Whitechapel constitutes a symbolic gate of enormous proportions. The correct name of St Botolph’s Church is St Botolph without Aldgate, that is, the church outside the old gate, the gate which faces eastward.

That Jesus was crucified outside the city gate — and the Letter to the Hebrews calls us to “go to Him outside the gate” — has always seemed to me a key symbol of, and challenge to, our work as Christian ministers, here and elsewhere. Of course we have not lived up to the challenge. Ministry here and elsewhere has always been very ambiguous, compromised and imperfect. Yet I felt that my own ministry was located “outside the gate”, primarily with people for whom the Church itself was a barrier, and for whom the other side of “the gate” represented an alien world.

The theme of doing theology “outside the gate” had been important to me for many years, though I saw the danger of romanticising it, and of self-deception.

As a white male Christian priest, based in Altab Ali Park, on Whitechapel Road, I was, for the most part, a minority figure. Not in terms of being male, for there were — given the many male homeless persons, gay men, male medical students at the nearby London Hospital Medical College campus, and the general number of males in the population — probably more men than women living and working in the area. But I was certainly in a minority as a white man, a Christian and a priest, living in an area which was mainly Bengali, mainly Muslim, and mainly disconnected from the Christian community in its institutional form. So what could it mean to be a Christian theologian in this context? What form might it take?

It seemed, first, to involve being what Christian theologians have called a “sacramental presence” within the area, in this case within, and in a lived tension with, a historic system of colonisation. For the East End of London was one of the major areas to have been colonised by both the Church and the monarchy, in the reign of Queen Anne, and later by Oxbridge, and by the Oxford Movement, in the 19th century.

There is no question that this colonising movement did much good, as well as much harm, but those days are now over — though the consciousness and the mindset remain in much church thinking. Today the Whitechapel area is mainly Muslim, while the white working class remains fairly disconnected from the Church. So what I was envisaging was a very lowly and small-scale attempt to work in a different way and on different models. I was influenced in my approach by Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement, Charles de Foucauld and the Little Sisters and Brothers of Jesus, and, later, by the new generation of Anabaptists, with their emphasis on prayer, presence and commitment to the local area and its people.

I was also aware that much theology is actually done in the streets though it may not use theological language, or call itself that. During the struggles of the civil rights movement in the US in the 1960s, a key location was the UCLA — not the University of California at Los Angeles, but the “University at the Corner of Lennox Avenue” in New York. This corner played a crucial role in rooting radical Christian thinking at street level.

There are similar street corners in London and elsewhere which have become focal points for what can be called “street theology”, places where people engage in debate and struggle about major questions of life and death. Tower Hill in East London is one of many sites where such questions were debated.

The two people who drew the largest crowds were the Methodist Donald Soper and the East End Jewish communist Solly Kaye. Altab Ali Park is one of these sites too, and many debates on burning issues have taken place on this spot, usually in the course of marches and demonstrations, for which the park has been a favoured spot.

Secondly, being a Christian theologian in such a context seemed to involve trying to engage with the relatively new Muslim population, drawing on the areas of common ground between Muslim and Christian understandings of the role of theological reflection and action. Christians — or at least many of them — and Muslims share a common view that religion can never be “private” but must affect the public realm. This engagement has become more important over the years, although my own role in it was fairly minor.