St Luke’s, Liverpool has offered its facilities to a local Nepalese fellowship in a bid to promote cross-cultural ministry.

About eight months ago the Nepalese group, which was meeting in a garage, approached the church asking whether it could meet in the church building.

 The senior minister of St Luke’s, the Rev Stuart Pearson, sat down with the Nepalese leadership team to determine whether their fellowship’s theology matched that of the church’s.

It did, and the church then offered its building to the Nepalese group, which now meets every Sunday at 8am.

Mr Pearson holds regular talks with the leaders to make them feel a part of St Luke’s.

One of the ways the church hopes to help the Nepalese congregation integrate is by inviting members to stay and join in with the 10.30am family service.

At this stage there are 30 people attending the Nepalese service, with a small number staying for the St Luke’s family service. And while the Nepalese fellowship is not an official service of St Luke’s, Mr Pearson is keen to ensure they feel  part of the church.

“We recently celebrated our anniversary and the Nepalese fellowship joined us in those celebrations,” he says. “We hope that they will also be involved with our next AGM.”

The Nepalese service also reaches the local community in a way that St Luke’s on its own would struggle to do.

“Liverpool is very multicultural,” Mr Pearson says. “There isn’t one major people group so the way we aim to reach the community is by conducting our services in simple English… [The Nepalese fellowship] is doing something that we couldn’t do, which is really great.”

By encouraging members to stay for the morning family service, Mr Pearson hopes to grow ministry to second- generation Nepalese.

“One of the struggles of ministering just to [the] first generation is that you lose the second generation who are trying to straddle both cultures,” he says. “If we can get them involved in both services that would be great.”

Under God Mr Pearson hopes that the Nepalese fellowship will continue to grow.

“This is a new ministry that is developing in Liverpool,” he says. “It requires some care and looking after.

In time, who knows? We may see people raised up from there who want to go to Moore College and receive training.”