Each Sunday I write a short column for the Sunday order of service. I write different kinds of columns, including seasonal topics, introductions to sermon series, tangential titbits that did not make it into the sermon, mission partners’ news etc. But recently I have found what seems to be rich pickings in stories of the faith of prominent or remarkable people which have made it into the public eye. Here are five of the profiles I have included over the last 13 months. Two are Australians, two testify to the sustaining power of faith in terrible conditions, three are of conversions in mid or late life. All I found inspiring and an encouragement that God is at work in his world and our lives. I hope you might too.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali – Muslim, Atheist, Christian
26 November 2023
“The more time I spent with … people such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins … the more confident I felt that I had made the right choice. For the atheists were clever. They were also a great deal of fun. So, what changed? Why do I call myself a Christian now?”
These are the recent words of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whose life has been full of twists and turns. As a girl in Somalia she absorbed the vigorous Islam of the Muslim Brotherhood. In 1992 she found political asylum in the Netherlands, escaping a forced marriage. Following the September 11 attacks she renounced Islam and joined the circles of the leading New Atheists. She became a strong critic of Islam, especially in its treatment of women, and a member of the Dutch parliament. She has been controversial, acclaimed by some, accused by others, threatened by a few.
She moved to the US in 2006. Her latest change of direction has been to embrace Christianity, explaining herself in an online essay (unherd. com/2023/11/why-i-am-now-a-christian). She gives two reasons for doing this. First, she feels that Western civilisation is under threat, both externally and internally, and that secularism cannot provide the source of unity that is required to meet those threats. Nor is secularism the source of the values, ideas and institutions that have safeguarded human life, dignity and freedom in the West. Rather, these have their source and unity in Christianity and are its legacy. Only by owning Christianity can the West find itself and the resources to meet the hour. But there’s a second reason: She says, “I would not be truthful if I attributed my embrace of Christianity solely to the realisation that atheism is too weak and divisive a doctrine to fortify us against our menacing foes. I have also turned to Christianity because I ultimately found life without any spiritual solace unendurable — indeed very nearly self-destructive.” At first atheism was a release from fear of Allah’s hellfire. But Ali found atheism incapable of providing either meaning or consolation. She’s been going to church. Pray that she might indeed find the spiritual home she seeks in Christ and as one of his people. And pray that others who feel the same need might find the same home themselves.
Bill Hayden – Home Late
3 December 2023
“I do believe Jesus was such a magnificent man, he suffered for our shortcomings.”
These are the words of the late Bill Hayden, one time Labour leader who died on October 2, 2023. But for much of his life he was outwardly stridently opposed to Christian faith. His father was, he told the ABC, "a very bitter anti-religionist. I think that got to me." As a young man the riches of the Vatican offended his sense of the just sharing of wealth. In 1966 his 5-year-old daughter Michaela was hit and killed by a car. “Don't think I was an atheist just by chance. I thought a lot about it.” he said after his baptism in 2018 at age 85. He was the first governor-general to make an affirmation, and not to swear an oath on the Bible.
However, his mother was Catholic, part of his schooling was Catholic and he had a long friendship with Sister Angela Mary Doyle, longtime administrator of Mater hospitals in Brisbane. She was a great campaigner for universal health insurance, which Hayden was championing as a government minister. Troy Bramston wrote that it was “seeing so many selfless acts of compassion by Christians over his lifetime, and deep contemplation while recovering from a stroke, that prompted his decision [to be baptised].” He owned that, “There’s been a gnawing pain in my heart and soul about what is the meaning of life. What’s my role in it?”
During this time of recovery and contemplation Hayden and his wife Dallas visited Sister Angela in hospital and, he said, “The next morning I woke with the strong sense that I had been in the presence of a holy woman.” Reading a book on Shia Islam, it dawned on him that Christianity was love, forgiveness and compassion, not law. All this tipped him over into Christianity. “I can no longer accept that human existence is self-sufficient and isolated”, he came to say. “I do believe Jesus was such a magnificent man, he suffered for our shortcomings.” “I’m going to vouch for God”. He experienced his baptism as a homecoming, a recognition of where he belonged. He said, “I thought, 'I've always been here, I shouldn't have wandered off ’.”
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-10-01/bill-haydenexplains-why-he-decided-to-be-baptised/10316846
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-09-19/bill-haydenturns-to-god-at-85-baptism-brisbane/10280724
Alexei Navalny – Hungering For Righteousness
25 February 2024
Alexei Navalny has been one of Vladimir Putin’s most well-known opponents. He founded the Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) to investigate and expose Russian government corruption. He organised political rallies and ran for office in opposition to the ruling party. He survived a couple of attempts to poison him. He was imprisoned on various charges carrying long sentences. On 16 February, he died in a notorious Arctic Russian prison.
Part of what sustained and guided Navalny was a Christian faith. In a 2012 interview he said, “Up to the age of 25 or so, when I became a father, I was such a rabid atheist that I was ready to grab any priest by the beard.” But by 2012 he said, “I’m ashamed to say that I’m a typical post-Soviet believer—I observe the fasts, I cross myself when I pass a church, but I don’t actually go to church very often.” When atheist friends mocked his piety and shallow knowledge of his faith, he admitted, “It’s true, I don’t know as much about my religion as I would like to, but I’m working on it.” At his 2021 trial, he said, “The fact is that I am a Christian, which usually sets me up for constant ridicule in the Anti-Corruption Foundation, because mostly our people are atheists. […] But now I am a believer, and that helps me a lot in my activities, because everything becomes much, much easier.” Easier because he sought to live by the Bible, and so had a path to follow. But he also acknowledged, “It’s not always easy to follow this book”, he said, “but I am actually trying”. Navalny took Jesus’ words, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied” as a commandment to fulfil. Reflecting on his decision to return to Russia and face arrest and imprisonment, he said, “while not enjoying the place where I am, I have no regrets about coming back, or about what I’m doing. […] On the contrary, I feel a real kind of satisfaction. Because at some difficult moment I […] did not betray the commandment.” Truth and righteousness were worth more to him than his life, and Jesus was the Lord who named them as the goal to pursue.
Ken Elliot – He Was Always There
8 September 2024
Dr Ken Elliot and his wife Jocelyn are Christians from Perth. Seeking to serve God’s purpose for them, they founded a hospital in Djibo, Burkina Faso. From 1972 to 2016, Ken operated on people from all over West Africa, charging little or nothing, and praying for what they needed rather than fundraising. “It was just amazing how we got what we needed when we needed it”, said Ken. Militant Islam is pushing south through Africa, and nations such as Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger are suffering its violence. The kidnapping of westerners, held for ransom, is part of the Islamist business model. In 2016, Ken and Jocelyn became victims of this tactic. The town of Djibo was their home for over 40 years, and the people there were outraged at their kidnapping, for the Elliot’s had done nothing but good for the people there, whatever their creed. Jocelyn was released after three weeks, but octogenarian Ken endured over 7 years of captivity in the Saharan desert, with gruelling weather, scorpions, poor diet, scurvy, boredom and uncertainty. He was released in 2023 and returned to Perth. He and Jocelyn have given their only interviews to Jonathan Holmes on the ABC’s Foreign Correspondent. The episode aired on August 29, 2024 and I found it compelling viewing.
For someone who has endured such injustice and hardship as Ken has, he came across as wonderfully sane, at peace, undamaged by his ordeal, and his Christian faith seemed lodged right in his bones. The reporter, Jonathan Holmes, asked him about attempts by his captors to convert him. Ken said, “The Lord has been good to me. There's no way I was going to dishonour him by converting to Islam. Or even pretending to convert.” Holmes challenged Elliot: “Some might say that the Lord hadn't been doing you any favours for this period of your life. Didn't you ever feel that God had abandoned you?” Ken’s reply: “Never. No. He was always there.” If you can, read Holmes report ‘Scorpions, sandstorms and scurvy’ on the ABC news website, or watch the episode on iView.
Niall Ferguson – We Can’t Be Spiritually Naked
19 Jan 2025
Respected historian Niall Ferguson has joined his wife Ayaan Hirsi Ali in coming out publicly about his recent adoption of Christian faith. Born in Glasgow in 1964, Ferguson was brought up by atheist parents whose outlook was shaped by the Scottish Enlightenment. And atheism did him nicely for much of his life. But in recent years he has changed his mind. Greg Sheridan wrote about Ferguson’s journey to Christian faith in The Weekend Australian recently (21-22 Dec, 2024).
Ferguson describes his loss of faith in atheism in two stages. First, he said, “as a historian, I realised that no society had been successfully organised on the basis of atheism. All attempts to do this had been catastrophic.” But further, he came to believe “that no individual can in fact be fully formed or ethically secure without religious belief.” This conviction was, he says, “born of our experience as a family”.
Ferguson was not hostile to religion. In fact his conservative convictions made him respect it. But he has crossed over from respecting the church to wrestling personally with Jesus whom the church proclaims, praying and going to church in a spirit of faith and learning. He is struck by Jesus, “whose power to transform the world has never been equalled”, he now thinks it is cruel to deny the human impulse to pray, and he prays and finds prayer real. “We can’t be spiritually naked, we can’t be spiritually void, it’s too miserable”, he says. Were your child to go missing, “if you don’t pray in those moments, you are not flesh and blood”, he says.
He laments that we have largely given up on religious observance in the West. “This is a mistake—the empty churches on Sundays, people not saying grace at dinner … we’ve lost something very powerful and very healing”. And in a passage to warm the heart of pastors everywhere he says, “What strikes me … is how much one learns every Sunday morning. Every hymn contains some new clue as to the relationship between us and God. … All of this matters hugely, and as a society we’ve turned away from it.” Ferguson suspects that our mental health crisis exists because, “we’ve thrown away those wonderful support mechanisms”. Sanity is sustained by relating not only to other people, but, finally, by relating to God through Christ.
I have found writing a weekly column a good discipline. I enjoy writing and the chance to give the people in the congregations a side dish, to complement and add to what they get from me in the sermon feels like a worthwhile use of my time. Enough people say regularly enough that they value it for me to keep going. It makes me look out for things to share and perspectives on situations both current and perennial. This little set of testimonies is an example of how the columns can develop their own threads and themes. The testimonies of prominent people can cut both ways, but I hope I’ve been measured enough to avoid claiming too much for the journeys of faith these people have been on.
Ben is Rector of St Edmund’s Wembley in Perth Diocese.