Lyndon June Letter

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God was so palpable that I felt overwhelmed. Helen understood, saying I was not the first to experience such deep emotions. Running late for my next meeting I hailed a taxi and told the driver all about it. He was so moved by the dedication of the Mildmay medics and nurses that when I got out to pay, he said, ‘God bless you! Have this ride on me’. If I hadn’t believed in signs and wonders before, the miracle of a London cabbie refusing a fare because of such an affecting testimony was a confirmation of God’s blessing on this mission of mercy!

LYNDON BOWRING Chairman

Writing her obituary Lord McColl described Helen as ‘an inspirational visionary and an entrepreneur … motivated by a deep Christian faith … a great warrior who lived a full and productive life.’ She spent her life helping others even before her work with Mildmay and is someone I’ll never forget.

One of the hallmarks of Christ’s ministry was that He honoured and loved women – massively countercultural in His day. I thank God for all my sisters in Christ, from every background, who display so much of the love, truth and power of God. And among them, I’m so grateful for the wonderful Mary, Elspeth, Jill, Cicely and Helen. And of course, Her Majesty the Queen as she celebrates her Platinum Jubilee!

I want to pay tribute to the CARE supporters so many of whom are women, who for decades have stood with us, some from the very beginning, with prayers, action and giving. We salute you and thank God for your longstanding faithful support. We could not continue our work without you! Long may you live to know the continued blessing of God! Yours in His amazing mercy and grace,

June 2022

FAITHFUL SERVICE Our Queen has consistently, winsomely and publicly honoured the God she serves, an extraordinary example of joyful, persevering, life-affirming, generous-hearted, unstinting, wise service on behalf of others. Six months before her coronation, she asked people to pray that God ‘may give me wisdom and strength to carry out the solemn promises I shall be making, and that I may faithfully serve Him and you, all the days of my life’. Hopetogether.org.uk has produced a beautiful gift book for the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee. It traces her spiritual journey through her coronation prayers and vows in 1953, and throughout her life. We can see that God has clearly answered her prayers. We owe Him – and her – our enormous gratitude.

Rev Lyndon Bowring CHAIRMAN

EXCEPTIONAL WOMEN

CAREORGUK

CARE.ORG.UK

CARE (Christian Action Research & Education) | Chief Executive Ross Hendry | Chairman Rev Lyndon Bowring 53 Romney St, London, SW1P 3RF | 020 7233 0455 | mail@care.org.uk | Charity No: 1066963 | Scottish Charity No: SC038911

British society has changed radically and looking back over CARE’s work, five exceptional but very different Christian women come to mind. They were born around the same time as the Queen and lived into their nineties. We were privileged to work closely with each of them in their various campaigns to protect the most vulnerable and to challenge harmful influences in our land.

Mary Whitehouse (1910-2001) founded the National Viewers and Listeners Association in 1964. Through this she harnessed a ‘silent majority’ of concerned parents and Christian groups around the country to protest about the increasing portrayal of sex and violence on television. She held hugely successful rallies, petitioned parliament and criticised the BBC’s liberal stance. Mary took part in the 1971 Nationwide Festival of Light from which CARE’s ministry grew, and later we worked alongside her supporting MPs on various pieces of legislation.

Throughout her life Mary, a strong Christian with a forceful personality, was lampooned and hated. CARE’s former Executive Director Charlie Colchester and I knew her well – in later years we visited her and Ernest in their Essex home, and she’d stay with Celia and me when she had early morning meetings with the media and government ministers in London. It was my privilege to be invited by the family to give the eulogy at her Thanksgiving Service at All Souls Langham Place in 2002.

In the congregation were some of the BBC executives who had been her bitterest enemies and twenty years later some of her fiercest critics admit that much of what she said was right.

BBC2’s recent documentary ‘Banned!’ featured Dame Joan Bakewell, who had previously opposed Mary Whitehouse, but admitted that she was “surprised by how contemporary her views were about the corrupting influence of pornography – and how feminist she now seems.”

Mary warned that porn was “a male commodity, made by men, for men – we must consider its effects on women and children.”’

Baroness Elspeth Howe of Idlicote (1932-2022), whose husband was Geoffrey Howe, Chancellor of the Exchequer and Foreign Secretary in the 1980s, died in March having devoted her life to many causes. In some ways taking up Mary’s baton, she was particularly concerned about the impact on children of dangerous online material and from 2012 onwards CARE gave her significant support in her efforts to introduce seven Bills related to online safety. The last of these was when she was 89, only months before her death.

There’s no doubt that Lady Howe’s persistence over so many years contributed immensely to keeping the debate on internet safety alive in parliament which, eventually, led to internet companies and the Government taking positive action.

Dame Jill Knight (1924-2022), the oldest woman to sit in the House of Commons, died this April. She was a key figure in politics and involved with legislation that CARE worked on, including the Protection of Children Act (1978) to curb the exploitation of minors; the Indecent Displays Act (1981) to control inappropriate and offensive material in shop windows and on magazine covers; and the Video Recordings Act (1984) which attached classifications to videos for hire, many of which were extremely explicit yet unregulated. A Christian, Jill was a lifelong campaigner on behalf of the unborn, speaking against David Steele’s original Abortion Act

and over the next three decades supporting every effort to reduce the age limit and tighten the grounds for legal abortion.

COMPASSIONATE CARE It’s incredibly important to us at CARE to balance our public policy work with a compassionate response to those who are touched by the issues we deal with. We work alongside organisations and ministries that care for victims of human trafficking and sexual exploitation, porn and gambling addictions, women affected by abortion and miscarriage and people at the end of their lives.

The inspiring Dame Cicely Saunders (1918-2005) truly lived out her destiny and ‘finished well’. Her work in caring for the dying lives on. Founder of the worldwide hospice movement, ‘the mother of palliative care’ Dame Cicely set up St Christopher’s Hospice in Sydenham in 1967 to be ‘a home for dying people, where scientific knowledge should be combined with care and love’. This godly woman was an eloquent witness to the truth that ‘you matter because you are you, and you matter to the end of your life’.

Her aim was to help people not only to die peacefully, but also to ‘live until they died’ realising that true palliative care goes beyond relieving physical pain to helping terminally ill people and their families to cope with every aspect of dying. I’ll never forget being at St Christopher’s – the sense of peace and the presence of God’s angels. As a Christian, Dame Cicely strongly opposed euthanasia; she believed in giving dignity and comfort, neither hastening nor postponing death while allowing the individual to be in as much control as possible. God raised her up to bring hope and a regard for the unique value of all human life.

Charlie Colchester and I attended her Thanksgiving Service in a packed Westminster Abbey and sensed Christ’s word to her; ‘well done, good and faithful servant!’

GOD’S PRESENCE In the mid-1980’s Charlie had the vision to see the historic Mildmay Mission Hospital in London’s East End – closed because of NHS cutbacks – reopened as a hospice for HIV/AIDS patients.

We met Helen Taylor-Thompson (1924-2020) in its gloomy shuttered building with disused beds and equipment pushed aside.

CARE promised to help with fundraising and wonderfully, in 1988 after many setbacks Mildmay became the first hospice in the world to be dedicated exclusively to AIDS/HIV patients. Diana Princess of Wales came privately to meet patients and encourage the staff, but Helen was the driving force behind it all and CARE was pleased to support her in what was at that time a controversial initiative because of the stigma attached to the disease and fears of infection.

Shortly after it opened, I revisited the transformed Mildmay. Young men told me they had never known anything like the unconditional love shown by the staff there and the presence of