About Us

LAPIDO means ‘to speak up for’ or ‘advocate’ in the Acholi dialect of Northern Uganda. The charity was birthed out of a campaign to ‘Break the Silence’ and end the twenty-year war there.* The campaign, prompted by the Acholi Religious Leaders Peace Initiative, taught vital lessons about the spiritual dimension in international affairs. Public affairs and media techniques, harnessed to the international church’s unique networks, achieved what no other agency had.  By increasing publicity and generating a huge amount of spiritual and social capacity over three years, the campaign handed politicians a bigger electoral mandate to address a difficult issue.

The charity seeks to amplify the voice of the forgotten and persecuted church around the world by working with the media to improve the reportage of religion.   Secularization and distorted history have squeezed a sense of the transcendent from public life, and made religious discourse tabu.  This can and must be changed.  The world’s poor are also religious.  The rich can do little to change the world for the poor, or avert religiously sanctioned war, unless they learn the language of faith.

We are non-denominational, politically non-aligned and internationally experienced.  Our trustees have all worked in either Africa, India or the Pacific, on diplomatic or aid assignments.  Our Associates are senior journalists and professionals living and working on four continents.  We understand how the secular and the sacred interpret each other - and we seek to contribute that wisdom to the international discourse.

Who we are

Executive Director - Dr Jenny Taylor
An established media professional, academic and writer, she trained with Yorkshire Post Newspapers and became the first race reporter in the Westminster Press Group, disconcertingly finding herself interviewing her heartthrob Cat Stevens, just after he became Yusuf Islam. She has travelled widely seeing the work of civil society organizations all over Asia and Africa at first hand.  She is an expert on the connection between faith and culture, on which she has addressed parliamentary and Commonwealth gatherings.  Her doctorate is from SOAS in London on Islam and secularization.

Read her Wikipedia entry here »

Vishal Arora is our newest Associate - a journalist and writer, based in New Delhi, India.  He is currently the Features Editor of The Caravan, a journal of politics and culture published from the capital city. He also writes on religion and politics for the Indian and foreign media, including in the US, the UK and the UAE.  He is married to leading Indian human rights lawyer Termina Arora whose advocacy for persecuted minorities is contributing to a new politics in India.

Heather Payne was born in Orissa, and lived alone for years in a remote Himalayan village working on women’s development.  She now writes for us from Delhi.  ‘Social development is my main pre-occupation with extensive experience in Africa and Asia, particulary on gender and disability issues.  My Indian roots are an advantage in addressing injustices in this society. The Hindu caste system is the biggest barrier to development.  Foreign aid should be tied to addressing human rights abused by religious practices. I am learning to speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves and to encourage others to do so. But there’s nothing like supporting people to speak for themselves.’

Christoph Hasselbach is currently with Deutsche Welle, Germany's international broadcasting service. A life-long Anglophile, Christoph started his career at the BBC World Service - which he thinks of fondly as his 'alma mater'.

 

Nick Page was the well-modulated voice behind Radio 2's Nick Page Programme for many years, and has clocked up 35 years behind one mic or another. As a radio anchorman and producer he hosted Nightline for the London Broadcasting Company as well as programmes for schools on BBC Radio 4. As a communication consultant, he choreographs public events and conferences around the world, and is Secretary of the International Christian Media Commission. He is a member of the panel of judges for the Andrew Cross Awards.

Dr. Irfan Al Alawi is an expert in Middle East affairs and Tasawwuf (Islamic spirituality), and studied at Al-Azhar University, Cairo as well as under the famous Imam Sayyid Habib ahmad Mashhur al Haddad Al Alawi.  He is International Director at the Centre for Islamic Pluralism and a Visiting Fellow at The Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars (Washington).  He has written for the Independent, The Guardian, The Times, as well as for The Weekly Standard, The Spectator, and many Islamic journals. He has translated many works into Arabic, English, Swahili and Urdu.

Chine Mbubaegbu is Editor of Idea magazine. After gaining her BA in Theology & Religious Studies at Cambridge University, she became one of the country’s first ‘faith’ reporters - at that hotbed of religious radicalism, the Reading Evening Post.  There she interviewed the Revd Jesse Jackson, and reported on an historic trip to Auschwitz with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. She has written for regional and national newspapers including the Guardian, the Sunday Telegraph and the Independent, and was former Editor of the Crown Prosecution Service’s legal magazine Eye Witness.

Trustees

• Mrs Ann Warren, MA - Chair
• Eric Thompson (Treasurer)
• Dr Colin Edwards, MBChB, BHB, BA (Hons) Theol.
• Revd Dr Arne Fjeldstad
• Tom Holland
• Dr Philip Lewis, DPhil
• Simon Sheldon, MSc
• Dr Jenny Taylor, PhD

Advisory Board

• Dr Ziya Meral - Chair 
  Turkish analyst, writer and a PhD candidate in Politics at the University of Cambridge.  Author of No Place to Call Home: Experiences of Apostates from Islam and Failures of the International Community (London: CSW)
   
• Dr John Azumah 
  Principal, Guthrie Centre for Islamic Studies, London School of Theology;   Author,  My Neighbour’s Faith: Islam Explained for Christians (Nairobi: Hippo Books/Zondervan, 2008)The Legacy of Arab-Islam in Islam: A Quest for inter-Religious Dialogue (OneWorld Publications, 2001)
   
• Dr Ida Glaser
  Academic Director of the Centre for Muslim-Christian Studies in Oxford.
   
• The Revd Andrew Rumsey
  Vicar of Gypsy Hill, London; Author Homing In (Paternoster 1998) andStrangely Warmed: Meditations on God, Life and Bric-a-brac – the Mowbray Lent Book 2010
   
• Yemi Adedeji
  CEO, Mind The Gap Consult.  Ecumenical Adviser to the Chair and  Executive Council of Redeemed Church UK.  Curate, Nigerian Chaplaincy of St  Marylebone Church, London.
   
• The Revd Gareth Wardell
  Associate Vicar, St Mary Abbots’ Church, Kensington.  Formerly Head of  HR for the United Mission to Nepal and the International Assistance Mission, Afghanistan, and former Research Fellow at York University's Post-war Reconstruction & Development Unit.
   
• Neil Addison
  Barrister-at-law; author, Religious Discrimination and Hatred Law (Routledge Cavendish, 2007)
   
• Rev Dr Arne Fjeldstad
  Journalist; CEO, The Media Project, Washington;  Chair, International  Board of Gegrapha
   
• David Landrum
  Parliamentary Officer, Bible Society
   
• David Taylor MA (Cantab)
  Senior Editor, Middle East and North Africa, Oxford Analytica.  Former British diplomat
   
• Douglas Knight
  Theologian; blogger and founder of the St Augustine Institute.  Author, The Eschatological Economy: Time and the Hospitality of God and The Theology of John Zizioulas (Ashgate, 2007)

* The Acholi lands on the Uganda/Sudan border are poor in natural resources, but rich in spirituality and courage.   When President Museveni routed them from power in a coup in 1986, they took to the hills of southern Sudan to enact God’s revenge.   As the Lord’s Resistance Army, led by Joseph Kony, they brought mayhem and terror to the north for more than 20 years.   They did so according to a misreading of Ezekiel in the Old Testament.   This, mixed up with traditional snake religion and muti sacrifice held an entire nation in terrified thrall. The secular world understood little of this, least of all the destructive power of a sin/revenge/fear culture in a lawless state.   They ignored the situation, or dropped bombs on it (the US’ disastrous Operation Iron Fist).   It was a handful of Acholi church leaders who alone among 1,000 intellectuals, stayed to offer leadership, fight for justice and advocate relentlessly for a peaceful way through a terrible impasse that had become a by-word for child soldiering.   In partnership with British and European churches, they woke up the world.   Bob Geldof went and filmed there; the UN tripled its aid budget, and the International Criminal Court made it their test case.   Today, unique, traditional forms of reconciliation are being mediated by the church; the displacement camps are being broken up, and people are slowly returning to their villages.