LONDON: As a school boy, Isaac Poobalan grew up in the southern Indian town of Vellore watching people of different faiths pray side by side in the chapel of the Christian Medical College hospital . Now, four decades later, this male nurse turned Reverend has become the symbol of inter-faith brotherhood in UK.

Poobalan, the rector of St John’s Church in Aberdeen (Scotland) has opened up his facility for Muslims to pray alongside Christians.

With the nearby Syed Shah Mustafa Jame Masjid mosque too small to accommodate everyone, up to 100 Muslims now pray in the main chapel of St John’s five times every Friday. “Secular India taught me to look at every religion with equal respect. My inheritance and the celebration of religions in India where Hindu, Sikhs, Christians and Muslims celebrate and live side by side, irrespective of colour or creed was a significant factor for my growth,” Rev Poobalan told TOI in an exclusive interview from Aberdeen.

Rev Poobalan told TOI “The church and the mosque are next to each other. One bitterly cold day, I saw Muslims praying in the open with their bare hands and frozen feet. I could almost see their breaths. I thought to myself that this is wrong. I took permission from my church council to ask Muslims to come and pray inside a part of the church which does not get used on Fridays. Initially, the Islamic community was hesitant. But the number of Muslim worshippers started to gradually increase and now it’s common.”

Poobalan’s father was part of the chaplency in CMC Vellore hospital. “I grew up seeing people from all religions walk into the chapel to light a candle and pray. It taught me that prayer transcends religion and everyone actually prays to a single God.”

Poobalan later trained in CMC Vellore as a psychiatric nurse and moved to Abu Dhabi with a job in a hospital. During his visits to a local Anglican church, the priest in Abu Dhabi kept telling him that he was meant “to take up the service of God.”

“I resisted for nearly two years. I saw my father’s life of having to see suffering everyday. I would tell the priest in Abu Dhabi that caring for mentally ill patients too was a service to God. But then after two years I gave up. I moved to Edinburgh in 1994 and joined the Church,” said the 50-year-old Rev Poobalan who has been in Scotland for over two decades now.

Rev Poobalan is now working towards turning the garden that divides the church and the mosque into “a paradise for people of different religions to pray in quiet and peace.”

In October later this year, he is also organising an inter-faith football game and is trying to get a team from Berlin, Birmingham and Israel or Palestine to come for it.

Church leaders believe this may be the only place in the UK where Christians and Muslims worship side by side. The building which now acts as the mosque was built on the grounds of St John’s Church in the 1980s. In 2006 it was turned into a prayer room but developers did not anticipate that up to 200 Muslims would want to worship there.

The two faiths now work closely together in Aberdeen with the church and the mosque holding simultaneous prayers before opening their doors to provide food for local people.