Photos: African churches boom in London backstreets

Worshippers dance during ‘Super Sunday’ service at the House of Praise church. For some, the noise from amplified services is a problem, leading to complaints to local authorities from residents. But many churches face bigger challenges than unhappy neighbours: Some provide food for people struggling to make ends meet, or work with young people at risk of recruitment by gangs. (Simon Dawson / REUTERS)

Andrew Rogers, who led the Roehampton researchers, said pastors had to juggle retaining the churches’ African identity as many have never lived outside Britain and have to reconcile liberal worldviews with conservative Pentecostal teachings. Rogers recalled speaking to one pastor who lamented he was unable to talk about religious miracles to his children. “If the church doesn’t adapt, then they are going to leave and look elsewhere,” Rogers said. (Simon Dawson / REUTERS)

Senior members of the Apostles of Muchinjikwa Christian church leave the sea after leading a mass Baptism (Jorodhani) on the beachfront on Southend-on-Sea, Britain. Around 250 black majority churches are believed to operate in the borough of Southwark, where 16% of the population identifies as having African ethnicity. (Simon Dawson / REUTERS)

Worshippers greet each other following a nighttime Christmas Eve service at the Celestial Church of Christ in Elephant and Castle in London. Reflecting the different waves of migration to Britain in the 20th Century, Caribbean churches began to appear in the late 1940s and 1950s as workers and their families arrived from Jamaica and other former British colonies. (Simon Dawson / REUTERS)

Worshippers bless a vehicle to keep it safe after a member of the congregation had a revelation during Sunday service at the Celestial Church of Christ Grace of God Parish in London. “We pray for this country,” said Abosede Ajibade, a 54-year-old Nigerian who moved to Britain in 2002 and works for an office maintenance company. “People here brought Christianity to Africa but it doesn’t feel like they serve Jesus Christ any more.” (Simon Dawson / REUTERS)
Members of the Eternal Sacred Order of Cherubim & Seraphim Church parade to celebrate their annual Thanksgiving. The congregation, almost entirely dressed in white robes, steadily grew to around 70 people as musicians playing drums, a keyboard and a guitar picked up the pace of the hymns. Some women prostrated themselves in prayer. (Simon Dawson / REUTERS)

Sterling notes seen on a collection tray during a Good Friday Lent church service. Southwark represents the biggest concentration of African Christians in the world outside the continent with an estimated 20,000 congregants attending churches each Sunday, according to researchers at the University of Roehampton. (Simon Dawson / REUTERS)

A cameraman films Pastor Andrew Adeleke as he speaks during 'Super Sunday' service at the House of Praise church in London. Hymns are sung only in African languages in some temples, or only in English at others. Some pastors take worshippers for full immersion baptisms in the cold of the English Channel. Others believe that when congregants suddenly start speaking in unknown languages it marks the presence of the Holy Spirit. (Simon Dawson / REUTERS)

According to researchers from the University of Roehampton, there are things the churches have in common, including a drive for professional advancement, a commitment to spend three hours or more at Sunday service and typically loud worship. “That is how we express our joy and gratitude to God,” Andrew Adeleke, a senior pastor at the House of Praise, one of the biggest African churches in Southwark, in a former theatre. (Simon Dawson / REUTERS)

Migrants, many of them from Nigeria and Ghana, sought to build communities and maintain cultural connections with their home countries by founding churches, often founded in private homes, schools and offices. But, as the communities grew, the churches moved into bigger spaces, gathering congregations of up to 500 people where services are streamed online by volunteers. (Simon Dawson / REUTERS)

On a cold, grey Sunday morning, in a street lined with shuttered builders' yards and storage units, songs of prayer in the West African language of Yoruba ring out from a former warehouse that is now a church. The busy scene at the Celestial Church of Christ is repeated at a half a dozen other African Christian temples on the same drab street and in the adjacent roads - one corner of the thriving African church community in south London.