Celebrating Forty Years of Faith in the City

Terry Drummond was commissioned a Church Army Evangelist by Archbishop Michael Ramsey in 1972. Since then, his ministry has focused on linking the local church to the wider community. It has included work on a housing estate, a ministry with the street homeless, and nine years with lead responsibility for...

Joseph Forde is Honorary Research Fellow in Historical Theology at the Urban Theology Union, Sheffield. After working for 26 years in NHS management, he was awarded a PhD in Theology from the University of Manchester, having previously gained degrees in History from the universities of Lancaster (BA Hons) and Sheffield...

Angus Ritchie is the founding director of the Centre for Theology and Community (CTC). Ordained in the Church of England in 1998, he has served throughout his ministry in parishes in East London involved in community organizing, currently assisting at St George-in-the-East in Tower Hamlets. These parishes have played a...

Jenny Sinclair is Founder and Director of Together for the Common Good (T4CG), a charity dedicated to spiritual and civic renewal. Drawing on Catholic Social Thought, T4CG resources Christian leaders and churches across all denominations, as well as schools and charities, to read the signs of the times and play...

David Walker has been a Church of England bishop since 2000, serving first as suffragan Bishop of Dudley, then, since 2013, as Bishop of Manchester. Until the end of 2023, he was for several years deputy chair of the Board of Governors of the Church Commissioners, and a member of...

Averil Pooten Watan is a mother, wife and community leader in Waltham Forest, East London. She is one of the churchwardens in St Barnabas and St James, Walthamstow. This enables her to live out her faith in service of others. She is a trustee of the Centre for Theology and...

Alan Billings was the Police and Crime Commissioner for South Yorkshire 2010‒24. He has degrees from Cambridge and Leicester universities and a doctorate from the New York Theological Seminary and was also at various times a parish priest in Sheffield; Vice Principal of Ripon College, Cuddesdon, Oxford; Principal of the...

Andrew Bradstock has been researching, teaching and writing about the relationship between faith, politics and social engagement for more than 40 years. After gaining degrees in Theology, Politics and Church History from the universities of Bristol, Kent and Otago, he lectured at colleges of higher education in Southampton and Winchester,...

Sophie Valentine Cowan is from Corby in Northamptonshire. Having trained for ordination at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford, she served her curacy in Desborough (Anglican–Methodist LEP), Dingley, Brampton Ash and Braybrooke in the Peterborough Diocese, and is now a parish priest in Ipswich. Having grown up and lived most of her life...

Ian K. Duffield is an Anglican priest who spent most of his 40 years in parish ministry in urban Sheffield, including 17 years on council estates on the Manor and in Southey. In the diocese, he chaired the response to Faith in the City and the diocesan Church Urban Fund...

Susan Lucas has served in urban parishes in the dioceses of Chelmsford and Liverpool and became the Archdeacon of Southend in February 2025. She was ordained in 2008. Prior to ordination she worked in education and examining, and came to theology from graduate work in philosophy, with her PhD studies...

Before retiring in January 2025, The Revd Dr John Perumbalath had served as Bishop of Liverpool since 2023. He has a PhD in Hermeneutics from King’s College London. He moved to the UK in 2001 and served at Beckenham St George’s as Associate Rector, at Rosherville St Mark’s as Priest-in-Charge/Team...