Faith in action

Philippa Stroud is Executive Director and co-founder of the Centre for Social Justice, a think-tank chaired by the Rt. Hon. Iain Duncan Smith MP. She is also the Conservative Parliamentary Candidate for Sutton and Cheam.

Philippa became a Christian at the age of 17 through the witness of a Christian school friend whom she had known for the previous six years.

After a long and active summer break Philippa returned to school to find that her friend hadn’t done much by way of typical teenage excess over the holidays. Philippa says, ‘Although my friend had done absolutely nothing, she was really peaceful and I wasn’t. I remember asking myself why that was and my friend saying to me that I knew the gospel. She took me back to visit her family and her church and it was just overwhelming to be in a Christian family who totally loved God. Being in that community was very powerful and it allowed me to see Christianity in action, rather than just in words. If that’s what it meant to be a Christian then I wanted it. I knew that it would mean everything and it was a very definite decision’.

Change of trajectory

Philippa proceeded through education to study French at Birmingham University and was on course for a career in merchant banking. It was during her year abroad in France that the trajectory of her life began to change quite dramatically: ‘I was living in Provence and I encountered street sleepers who I found intensely provoking. It was around that time that I was studying the passages in the Bible about selling all we have and giving to the poor and I was constantly being brought back to these passages in my time of prayer.’ Over the next months she describes that ‘on about nine occasions people would come up to me and mention the name Jackie Pullinger, or encourage me to go and work with her in Hong Kong’.

Hong Kong

Jackie Pullinger is known worldwide as the author of Chasing the Dragon, the story of how she arrived in Hong Kong in 1966 as a missionary and was immediately drawn to the most notorious and dangerous city imaginable: the den of hopelessness and despair that is Kowloon's Walled City.

Philippa continued: ‘I remember saying to my housemate, once I had returned to England for my final year of study, just before going to church that if I heard any more about Jackie I would scream’. As it turned out, the first person to stand up in the meeting had just returned from Hong Kong having worked with Jackie. Fast forward several months and Philippa found herself in the notorious Walled City in Hong Kong working with drug addicts alongside Jackie and she describes her time there as ‘being everything that I wanted’.

Homeless in Bedford

Since her return in 1989 after 18 months in Hong Kong and Macau until 1996, Philippa pioneered a four-stage residential support project in Bedford enabling homeless people to move off the streets and become contributing members of the community. From 2001 to 2003 she developed a project to care for the homeless, addicts and those in debt in Birmingham. In 2003 she became a founder of the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), an independent think tank that provides workable solutions to social challenges facing Britain.

EN: Please describe your journey from the streets of Hong Kong to working with the CSJ to running for Parliament and the reasons for your decision to get involved in politics?

PS: I knew what I was for: to be speaking up on behalf of those who couldn’t speak for themselves. I always thought that would be done through the establishment of projects that cared for those who couldn’t care for themselves. Having my own children gave me time to re-evaluate where I was headed in life. I thought to myself, I could spend the rest of my life picking up the broken pieces of about 50 lives at a time but that it was really difficult to extend beyond that. I also knew that the problems of social breakdown that I had been dealing with would only escalate and that we could only reverse this situation if we turned off the tap and stopped the breakdown at a national level. I looked at starting a charity or an organisation to lobby politicians to change the system. After weighing up all my options and the potential for impact, I felt that joining a political party and becoming a direct influencer and lawmaker was the best way of getting things done. I knew that if we could increase at a political level the understanding of what drives social breakdown then we could really do something.

EN: Could you explain some of the challenges that you dealt with by moving from being very much on the ground to working at the policy level?

PS: I absolutely love being hands on and being involved in people’s lives. There’s nothing like walking with someone from the streets all the way through to being able to contribute to society and that will always be the thing that I love the most. But I’ve had to recognise that if I want that multiplied many, many times over, then actually I have to be involved with policy work. Whenever we are discussing policy I have all the faces of people that we have and do care for. If the policy proposals do not benefit those people and fail to bring about genuine reversal impact, then they go in the bin.

EN: What is the importance of Christians engaging in politics, what difference can we bring?

PS: It is massively important because we have a unique understanding of the value of human beings and we know just how important every single person, regardless of background or of what they can contribute to society. We, possibly more than anybody else, have a responsibility to speak up for the vulnerable. It is an idea that is often referred to in politics but not often understood. Christians, I believe, uniquely carry that vision and that is why we must be involved.

John Stott makes a similar point in his influential book Issues Facing Christians Today: ‘Evangelism and social concern have been intimately related to one another throughout the history of the church…Christian people have often engaged in both activities quite unselfconsciously, without feeling any need to define what they were doing or why. Our God… asks us, as his people, not only to live justly but to champion the cause of the poor and the powerless’ (Zondervan, fourth edition, p.24).

EN: What do you say in response to the sometimes unfair portrayal of Christians in the media and by secular society more generally?

PS: The world longs to see Christians doing what they think Christians should be doing in terms of looking after and caring for the vulnerable. In the face of this it is very hard to argue with a life well lived even if they do not agree with what we have to say. I think one of the most powerful things is faith in action. We can sometimes be quick to use words but it would be great if we acted too. In terms of the situation of the church today I have massive hope. I see a church mobilising and on its knees to pray one minute and then on its feet to act the next. I am immensely hopeful for the church and, in London, church attendance is actually rising.

EN: Do you have a Bible character who has been an example to you?

PS: Joseph is a constant source of inspiration, he has a vision and he lived with it for years. When God gave him the opportunity he was in the position, in terms of his character, to embrace it.

Joseph was a man who used his power for a purpose and he was effectively the Prime Minister of Egypt for some 80 years. He maintained good relationships with those around him and guarded his integrity and he is an example to those who would seek to be used by God. It is most encouraging to see men and women such as Philippa in the public arena, standing as Christians, and pursuing those issues close to God’s heart with passion wholehearted commitment. Will we take up the challenge posed by such lives well lived and champion the cause of the poor and vulnerable. Will we seek to effectively engage in the society around us and seek its transformation for God’s glory?

This interview for Evangelicals Now was carried out by Paul Brennan.

Interview with Philippa Stroud