(RNS) — In early December the Syro-Malankara Church, a church that traces its origins to the first-century journey of the Apostle Thomas to India, had its first bishop installed in Britain, a sign of its rapid increase in local membership. Its joins another denomination, the Syro-Malabar Church, which has also boomed in Britain in recent years, with dozens of new missions across the country.
The uncommon rise of both churches, according to their leaders, is not due to evangelization but avid recruiting by the UK’s National Health Service in the southern Indian state of Kerala.
Kerala, which has the largest Christian minority population of any other Indian state, has benefited from its relationships with Christian organizations that over the decades have founded and supported professional schools there. Since Brexit has reduced the supply of immigrant help from Europe, Britain, with its longstanding ties to India, has increasingly turned to these training colleges, which have a track record of producing highly qualified nurses and other healthcare workers.
Last year the Welsh government signed a memorandum with Kerala’s government to hire 300 healthcare staff. Barnsley Hospital, in South Yorkshire, has hired 100 nurses from Kerala since 2020; Humber and North Yorkshire Integrated Care Board has recruited a similar number. Kerala officials have also developed relationships with nursing schools in Britain, including Father Muller Nursing and Medical College, a Catholic foundation.
The church mission schools’ students blend easily with staff trained in Europe, according to John Adam Fox, chairman of the nonprofit Fellowship and Aid to Christians of the East and an expert in Eastern Christianity. “Their medical education is second to none,” said Fox.
When the worldwide leader of the Syro-Malankara Catholic Church, His Beatitude Baselios Cardinal Cleemis, attended celebrations of the new bishop’s appointment, joined by 10 of the church’s bishops, it was the first time they had gathered in Britain.
The Syro-Malankara church now has 23 missions across the U.K., serving about 300 families. The Malankaran Catholics, whose church has been in full communion with the Vatican since 1930 but is self-governing, hold their Masses in Catholic churches. Though most recite the West Syriac Rite of Liturgy in Syriac or Hindi, there is increasing interest among the immigrants to hear Mass in English.
Liju Varughese, the Syro-Malankara Church’s program coordinator, said, “We are very serious about our faith, and in particular about children born into the tradition, and their formation and learning the catechism.”
But Varughese said the community is also looking outward and wants to be more visible as a Christian presence to its British neighbors. “We want to reach out, to be more engaged with other faiths, to do more charitable work.”
The Syro-Malabars, who use the East Syriac rite and theologically differ from Mankaran Catholics over the nature of Jesus, have also seen their numbers climb. In the 1960s and 1970s, “small numbers of professionals migrated to the UK from Kerala and found work in the NHS,” the church reported on the website of its nearly decade-old British eparchy — the equivalent of a diocese in Eastern Christianity — which covers England, Scotland and Wales. But the eparchy adds that it has “around 8,000 families in Great Britain, mostly belonging to the age group of 30-40,” served by five parishes and 73 missions, with another 24 missions planned.
The church is known for its movement called Anointing Fire Catholic Ministries, monthly conventions that regularly draw between 2,000 and 3,000 people at a conference center in the West Midlands.
The two churches have already begun to change the character of Catholicism in Britain, according to a new study, “After Secularisation,” published by the Catholic Truth Society. The church in Britain is now distinguished by its diversity, particularly among young adults, and the study’s authors, Stephen Bullivant, Hannah Vaughan-Spruce and Bernadette Durcan, call the impact of diaspora communities, including the Syro-Malabar Church, “significantly under-appreciated.”
A major highlight for its 80,000 members is an annual pilgrimage to Walsingham, the site of Marian visions where a replica of Jesus’ home in Nazareth was built in the medieval era. It was England’s most popular place of piety until the Reformation and since its restoration in the 20th century has been embraced by migrant groups.
