Ruth Sanderson chats to Lindsay Conway, ahead of his retirement as Secretary of PCI’s Council for Social Witness.
I
f you’ve ever met Lindsay Conway, the chances are, you won’t have forgotten him in a hurry. His imposing stature is matched with the largesse of his character and you will have either come away from a conversation with him chuckling to yourself, or mulling over some radical notion he has just proposed. Either way, an interaction with him is never dull and always thought-provoking. Next month Lindsay retires from his role leading the Council for Social Witness. After a career spanning five decades, it’s been the last 18 months and how PCI has responded to the Covid crisis which has proven the most challenging. Yet far from being exhausted,
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he has been a clear and decisive leader in the most difficult of times. Now that the world is settling down, he feels it’s the right time to hand over the baton. “I’m still getting used to the idea of retirement,” he tells me. “Thankfully there’s been a long run-in time, you only do it once so you want to enjoy it and
Social witness should be the oxygen of our Christian witness…faith and actions have to go hand in glove.
Photography: Jamie Trimble
Big shoes to fill
people are being lovely. It’s certainly going to be different!” He tells me his energies are going to be poured into a 1975 Beetle and a lathe. I ask how his wife Norma feels about it. “The jury’s out!” he chuckles. “No, really she’s looking forward to it – we both are really.” A son of east Belfast, Lindsay grew up in Megain Memorial Presbyterian Church on the Newtownards Road. It was a hard time, the Troubles were beginning and the area was, and still is, a flashpoint. Yet Lindsay had a passion for the area and for its people. Growing up in a Christian family, there was never a time he didn’t know the embrace of Christ in his life.
