INTERVIEW
15
JS When you went forward for
PETER HARRIS
is the Founder and President of A Rocha
International, an organisation which, inspired
by God’s love, engages in scientific research,
environmental education and community-based
conservation projects in 20 countries to date.
After studying theology and English at Cambridge
University, he taught English at Christ Hospital, Horsham
and then trained for ordination, completing his curacy on
the Merseyside. He is widely regarded as one of the pioneers
of the Christian Evangelical movement.
He is also my father. I had the great privilege of growing up
in the first A Rocha project, founded in 1983 near the Alvor
estuary on the Algarve, and the challenge of trying to
explain to baffled school friends what my parents did
– something to do with birds and God and fighting
off developers, as far as my childish mind could
grasp. It all led for a colourful childhood, and
as time has gone on and I’ve come to
a personal understanding of the
triune creator God, what
they were doing
with A Rocha has
made more and
more sense.
To hear Peter preach ‘All things reconciled –
Christ and creation’ at Antioch Church in Bend,
Oregon, go to vimeo.com/109542957.
LWPT8462 - Preach Magazine - Issue 2 v2.indd 15
ordination in the late 1970s, what
connections did you see between
faith and your vocation and your
love of bird watching and the great
outdoors?
I didn’t see any connections. I
felt I was in front of a clear choice
between an ornithological job –
running a bird observatory – and
what I thought then was spiritual
work, which was inevitably going to
be with people primarily and also to
do with what I understood to be the
spiritual part of people. At that point,
I suspect I thought the spiritual was
a non-material reality.
JS How did A Rocha come about? If
that was your attitude, how did you
come to change your mind?
During my theological training
at Trinity College Bristol, I had the
chance to read people like Jürgen
Moltmann and for many people in
the late 70s, Moltmann was someone
who was speaking very directly out
of his faith to these issues. I also
discovered the Old Testament: the
Hebrew Scriptures are full of the
creation relevance of God’s love for
the world. And then in practical
terms, many of my friends who were
birders never went near a church; in
the early 80s the ‘eco crisis’ as it was
then called was becoming recognised
as critically important for all of us,
but I never heard about that in the
church. At a personal level I was
trying to integrate my passion for
landscape and for nature and for
the migration of birds within my
Christian life, and all of those three
things, the theological, the practical
and the personal, came together.
[My wife] Miranda and I had been
looking at jobs in Africa with
what was then called The Bible
Churchman’s Missionary Society
(now Crosslinks), but nothing was
coming together so we proposed
a project – a Christian Field Study
Centre in a mission context.
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