‘Every Christian is a living witness’

Thomas Baldwin meets the former Archbishop of York and chair of Christian Aid, John Sentamu.

ON a bakingly hot day in Edinburgh, John Sentamu has just officially opened the famous Christian Aid Week sale at St Andrew’s and St George’s West Church.

The evening before, as chair of Christian Aid, he had appeared at an event for business leaders, discussing sustainable leadership. This morning, he was interviewed for Radio Scotland. He will go on to preach in two churches, one Church of Scotland and one Episcopal.

All in all, not bad for someone less than a month from his 73rdbirthday. Wasn’t the former Archbishop of York at all tempted to retreat into quiet retirement with his wife Margaret, pottering in the garden of their new home in the beautiful surroundings of north Northumberland?

“When we left York on June 8 2020 in our little Clio,” he says, “we had a lot of Coke cans on the back and a sign in the window that said ‘just re-tired’. Not ‘retired’ – ‘retired’. So I’ve got fresh treads on my feet!

“I don’t believe that a Christian minister ever gives up the calling of Christ to worship, to witness in word and deed about the love of God. It seems to me that every Christian is a living witness to Jesus Christ and has a ministry which the Holy Spirit gives them. And either ill health puts an end to that – or death.”

For John, being re-tired has meant the House of Lords, where he sits as a crossbench peer and attends when he has a particular interest in the debate (“It’s a long way from Berwick to London”); and, since November, the chairmanship of Christian Aid.

“Taking on Christian Aid wasn’t something I had planned,” he says, “But I knew that Rowan (Williams, his predecessor) was going to be stepping down in November, and many people were saying to me that Christian Aid was at a point at which my skills, gifts and calling may be of some use.

“And I remembered suddenly, when I became a curate the first really public work that I did was when my vicar said to me ‘go with my daughter and find some other young people and take these envelopes’, which were the envelopes for Christian Aid Week. I’d never heard of it before, but we went round the parish and distributed the envelopes. And there was not one house that did not return the envelope. And there were no coins in any of them – every one had in it paper money.

“Then I remembered in 2004 when I was Bishop of Birmingham, I went with John Battle MP and two other people to Afghanistan. And we took a long journey to Herat Province, and in those villages Christian Aid had provided boreholes, so they had fresh clean water and cholera was no longer a constant threat. So the people were healthier, no longer had terrible diseases, and they said ‘that’s why we love Christian Aid’.”

The first six months in the role of chair were something of a baptism of fire, as the organisation lost both its chief executive and head of fundraising and community engagement to new jobs.

There was also a significant drop in funding from the UK Government, after the decision to abandon the commitment to spending 0.7% of gross national income on overseas development, and emergencies for various reasons in Afghanistan, South Sudan and Ukraine.

John is full of praise for the public and church response to the challenges, which he says led to giving being ‘the best there had been for 20 years’ but says he will ‘never understand’ why the aid budget was cut.

Speaking truth to power has been a constant thread running through his life and ministry, which over the years has seen him fall foul of Idi Amin’s regime in his native Uganda (spending 90 days in prison, during which he has said he was ‘kicked around like a football’) and speak out against Robert Mugabe while he was Archbishop of York.

Today it is mostly the UK government that has him exercised, although he is careful to praise certain actions, such as the lockdown furlough scheme (a ‘bold decision’), the Real Living Wage and merging health and social care into one department. However, he describes the plan to send refugees to Rwanda as ‘appalling’.

“This country has a lot of resources, has the rule of law and has an expertise in dealing with asylum seekers. But to suggest that we send them to Rwanda – it doesn’t matter which country it is – Ijust think we’re passing the problem to someone else. That’s (the action of) a country that is losing its moorings really, and I for one will never understand it. They are treating asylum seekers not as people but as goods that you can export to somewhere else.”

He also remains very outspoken on issues of poverty. “My idea about poverty, is that every time you see a person in the midst of poverty, that’s Jesus looking back at you.

Every human being is a stand-in for God because they bear his image and likeness.”

And to anyone who thinks Christians should not get involved in politics, he paraphrases Desmond Tutu: ‘I’m surprised people tell me this, what kind of Bible are they reading?’.

The subject of poverty is one he returns to when he is invited to address the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland the following week. Dr Sentamu’s links with the Kirk go back a long way, having addressed the Church Without Walls National Gathering in 2008 and been part of the conversations either side of the St Columba Declaration between the Churches of England and Scotland.

Both churches are currently struggling with similar issues of falling membership, shortage of clergy, and uncertainty about the place of the established churches in a multi-cultural, secular society. Dr Sentamu says that both need to ‘rediscover their core calling’.

“My vision and my understanding is that the church is called first and foremost to worship God, and then to witness to the love of God in word and deed. In England as well as in Scotland, the churches that are growing are those that are concentrating on worship and witness.”

With a new Christian Aid chief executive in place, he expects things to quieten down for him on that front. However, he preached in Westminster Abbey on May 11, and prior to that every day in Holy Week in the famous St Thomas Church Fifth Avenue in New York. He also says he has plans for some writing at some point, and his House of Lords work will continue – he notes that he is following the current Health Bill very closely.

So no plans to slow down then?

“When I encounter Christ in His Kingdom, He’s not about to ask me ‘what did you do?’ I think what he would want to know, given the many opportunities I’ve had to worship and witness, is why was I so lazy about it.”