Article

Change

Community

Development

22 June 2023

7 min read

To a house on the hill

Why did a New York lawyer move to a Brazilian slum? Jane Cacouris talks to Luke Simone about his extraordinary story.

Jane Cacouris

Jane Cacouris is a writer and consultant working in international development on environment, poverty and livelihood issues.

an aerial view of a shantytown on a steep hill side in Rio, Sugerloaf Mountain is visible in the distance

Morro da Providencia, Rio de Janeiro.

It was a hot and humid evening in 2015 and Luke had just moved into a tiny house in Morro da Providencia, Rio de Janeiro’s oldest favela, a shantytown located in the heart of the city. His new home was near the top of the hill, sandwiched between two loud and rampant drug dens. He could hear the parties and orgies happening above and below him twenty-four hours a day; his neighbours regularly firing bullets out of the windows. The noise was draining and constant. It was dark outside, and Luke sat frozen in fear, staring at a blank laptop screen by his window facing the street… waiting and praying. He had just been informed that the bandidos (drug traffickers from the main drug gang in the favela) were on their way to pay him a visit. Gossip on the street had spread that he was an undercover police officer. Why else would a white British gringo in his thirties choose to buy a house in one of Rio’s poorest and most dangerous communities?

“After about five minutes I saw a glint out of the corner of my eye… I looked around and a number of drug dealers were arriving on the porch.”

Faced with ten heavily armed gang members, they asked who he was and what he was doing in their community. Luke took a breath and explained that God had called him to Brazil from New York, and that he was choosing to live in Providencia because he loved the neighbourhood, and wanted to serve the community and build something for them; for their children and their young people. The gang listened. Then remarkably they lowered their guns, said “ok then”, and walked away. Luke was stunned.

“I know what happens to people… It was a very violent time. I thought I was going to die and it was terrifying. But God turned it around...”

The relief that he was alive quickly turned into disappointment; a realisation that despite all the sacrifices he had made to be there, he wasn’t wanted by the people he had given up everything to serve.

Armed police patrol the favela.

Armed police stand on steep steps between shantytown dwellings

Five years previously Luke was living in New York working as a finance lawyer with a corporate law firm. He was single, his firm paid for his Manhattan apartment, and he had so much disposable income that he saved half his pay each month. Originally from the UK, he grew up going to a local church in Surrey with his family, but he’d fallen far away from God.

“I was in a favourable position to go off the rails. And I did go off the rails.” he says.

In 2009, the financial crash hit and having spent five years living and working in New York, Luke began to question the premise and direction of his life. Through a family member, he was put in touch with a Christian association working with street children in São Paulo in Brazil, providing living accommodation to homeless children, who were disenfranchised from their families and/or victims of abuse and neglect. The aim was to reintegrate the children where possible with their families. During a weekend visit to São Paulo, within fifteen minutes of being shown around one of the shelters, Luke had a deep conviction that this was where he was meant to be.

“It was not this Damascus Road moment,” he says. “It was a familiar voice. Not someone who was needing to twist my arm or convince me. I felt I was in good hands. Even though change was going to mean going from a six-figure bonus to zero salary…. I was suddenly ready to risk everything knowing I was in these safe hands.”

A few months later Luke moved from New York to Brazil and went on to live and work in one of the shelters for street children for several years. He talks about a particularly bleak time when one of the boys in the shelter took a dislike to him, the relationship becoming so acrimonious that Luke even began fearing for his life. Emotionally and mentally drained, feeling rejected by the children he was trying to care for, he went away for a couple of days to regroup and called his sister. He recalls,

“She said to me, ‘Just come home Luke. Just come home.’”

Her words made him realise that he had life choices the street kids simply didn’t have. He could choose to leave them and “go home” at any moment; home to people who loved and cared for him. The children he was working with were born without options or choices. So, Luke decided to stay, and by making that decision, hoped to model a love and commitment to those who perhaps had never experienced it. A love that doesn’t diminish or disappear, even when we turn our backs.

Luke Simone.

A man sits on a concrete path with one leg splayed out in front.

What is intriguing about Luke’s story is not the desire to “re-purpose” his life. So many of us feel at times in our lives that we are drifting without purpose or meaning but when we look for more purpose, it tends to be either seeking fulfilment in our work - towards more wealth or influence or social legacy - or through our relationships. What is intriguing is that Luke chose to follow God’s purpose, rather than his own.

Luke’s story is one of sacrificing comfort, wealth and status to simply do life alongside the people that society in general has given up on, and, at times, in return getting hostility and death threats from the very people he is walking with. The story is a little reminiscent of the gospel story of Jesus Christ. Although, of course, Luke will be the first to say that he’s certainly not Jesus - “unqualified”, “unprepared” and “broken” are words he uses to describe himself – but perhaps this self-awareness of his own flaws has given him the ability to rely entirely on God rather than himself, in a place where he simply has to.

Missionaries, like Luke, are perceived by many to be the outworking of a colonial interpretation of the “Great Commission.” This refers to a number of passages in the gospel of Matthew where Jesus tells his apostles to “make disciples of all nations.” People assume this means going to far flung places and preaching about Jesus. But when I asked Luke about his work in Providencia, for him, mission is far more integral and encompassing than “straight evangelism.”

As theologian Christopher Wright points out, Jesus was concerned with responding to the needs of people - both materially and spiritually - in the power of the Holy Spirit. The two go together and are integrated. The Book of Acts and letters of the apostle Paul in the Bible show a commitment of the followers of Jesus to preach the good news and bring others to faith, but also to live with compassion as a loving community seeking to address the social and material needs of those around them. In fact, Paul’s first of many missionary journeys was to provide famine relief to prevent starvation of the people in Judea.

So where is Luke now thirteen years after he first left New York? He still lives in Providencia and together with his team of volunteers and a local church in Rio, he has built and runs a community house, Casa Cruzeiro (House of the Cross) and adjoining educational annex at the highest point of the favela.

Casa Cruzeiro.

A group of buildings jostle together at the summit of a hill in a city.

On entering Casa Cruzeiro during my visit to Rio a few months ago, I was struck by the sense of peace. The community around the house is far from calm. It’s poverty at its crudest and, as Luke will say, at times depicting humanity at its darkest. Murder, rape, incest, drugs, extortion, prostitution, abuse, neglect… the list goes on. Life at the margins doesn’t get more marginalised than this. Casa Cruzeiro is a light in the darkness, a stillness in the chaos. It operates an open-door policy where anyone is welcome, drug traffickers included (as long as they behave), for a meal, to hang out, to talk, even to stay if someone needs a roof over their head. About 200 children, adolescents and adults pass through their doors each week, and some of the activities include an afterschool programme, adult literacy support, a communal vegetable garden, career counselling, guitar lessons, bible studies and prayer groups. Material and spiritual needs met seamlessly and uncomplicatedly together as part of a whole.

A Providencia family.

A mother sits with a toddler standing in front of her. The father appears from the side lying on his back reaching an arm out.

A family play in a Rio favela.

If you could rewind the clock by thirteen years, and make a different choice, would you? I ask Luke. He pauses, and says no, but is clear that it hasn’t always felt like an easy choice. He’s often pondered over the comfort and wealth that he left behind. But at the moment he has no plans to leave.

And what has he learnt about God over these years in Brazil?

When he relies on God he feels a deep sense of peace, and a conviction of God’s love in a way he hadn’t known before.

“When God called me to Brazil, he was saying, ‘You need to know me again. I want to reintroduce myself to you. This is who I am. And this is how much I love you.”

Jesus said to His father, “Let thy Kingdom come, on Earth as it is in Heaven.” And as I walk around the safe, clean space of Casa Cruzeiro… chat with Iam over lunch, who became a Christian five years ago when reading a passage of scripture with Luke… hear about Monique, who with the team’s help, has been accepted onto a youth apprenticeship programme… look out from the roof top past the carefully nurtured community vegetable garden to the dark winding alleys and mish mash of favela shacks sprawling down the hill and into the city beyond….and watch Luke’s eyes lighten as he tells me about the young people that he and his team look after and walk through life with…

I realise this is what Jesus meant.

Interview

Change

Politics

S&U interviews

30 April 2024

7 min read

Stephen Timms: still on mission

The MP on five decades trying to prove a Christian Tory wrong.

Robert Wright

Robert is a journalist at the Financial Times.

A man in a suit turns to look at the camera and behind him is a gallery of large painting

Stephen TImms MP.

The day before the February 1974 election, the first in which he was old enough to vote, Stephen Timms says an elder at the Brethren assembly that he then attended – near his home in Fleet, in Hampshire – took him aside. The Brethren are a non-denominational, non-conformist evangelical Christian movement.

“You will be voting Conservative, won’t you?” Timms recalls the man asking.

The assumption surprised Timms, who had thought there was an “obvious connection” between the social justice elements of Christ’s teaching and parties that sought greater equality. He told the elder – Mr Gilmour – that he would be voting Labour.

The incident was an early sign of how Timms, now 68, would spend a life that has brought together an evangelical Christian faith with attachment to the Labour party.

His career has taken him as high as the Cabinet – where he was Chief Secretary to the Treasury for a year in 2006 and 2007. He became Sir Stephen in 2022. He also has a reputation as one of the MPs most dogged in pursuing case work for constituents. That commitment nearly cost him his life in 2010 when a constituent, angry at his support for the Iraq War, stabbed him twice at a constituency surgery. Timms is standing again at the coming general election for East Ham, the constituency which, with some boundary changes, he has represented in various forms since 1994.

“I suppose I’ve spent 50 years trying to prove Mr Gilmour wrong,” Timms says. “[He was] a delightful man but I never agreed with him about that.”

There is a “very clear trend” of economic justice in the biblical message, which the Labour party represents and seeks to realise, Timms goes on, over coffee at an arts centre in his constituency.

“The Christian roots of Labour are absolutely clear,” he says, pointing out that Keir Hardie, the party’s first leader, was an evangelical Christian and many of its other founders were Methodists. “I’ve always seen Labour values and Labour aims as wanting to realise that commitment to economic justice which is such a clear thrust of the Bible.”

He sees no attempt in the Conservative party to realise that vision, he says.

“It’s just not a subject of interest, I don’t think,” Timms says of Conservative supporters. “For people in the Conservative party, there are concerns about maintaining order and respectability and all those things and I can understand how you might find those in the Bible. But I don’t think that’s what the Bible is about.”

“His argument to me was, ‘You believe in God; we believe in God; we think you should go for this’.”

Timms’ attachment to his small area of East London is almost as strong a thread in his story as his Christian and Labour party commitments. He first came to the area while a maths student at Cambridge, in the summer of 1976, as part of a two-week mission by the Christian Union of Emmanuel College to Forest Gate. It was a formative experience.

“It was the first time I could see how what I believed could shape my life,” Timms recalls.

He returned to the area in 1978 when, after leaving university, he was recruited by Logica, then an information technology and management consultancy, working in the west end of London. He joined the church that the 1976 mission had planted – now called Plaistow Christian Fellowship. He continues to attend the church with his wife, Hui-Leng, originally from Singapore, who was also part of the 1976 mission.

His joined the local Labour party.

“Very quickly, I was asked to be the secretary of my local branch Labour party, which was Little Ilford branch, and then very quickly after that I was asked to be the secretary of the constituency Labour party,” Timms recalls.

Timms was chosen as an office bearer, he believes, because of his neutrality in a bitter feud. Left-wing activists had tried to oust Reg Prentice, Labour MP for the constituency, then called Newham North-East. They claimed he was fundamentally a Conservative. Long-standing local activists had successfully defended him. Both sides had been left dismayed when Prentice subsequently defected to the Conservative party.

“It was a terrible mess,” Timms recalls.

His first elected office was as a councillor on Newham Council, fighting in an unusually high-profile council byelection in 1984. The party had, surprisingly, lost the three Little Ilford wards to representatives of the then Liberal-SDP Alliance. But it emerged that two of the Alliance councillors had given false addresses and there was a byelection.

“Ken Livingstone came down; Neil Kinnock came down,” Timms recalls, referring, respectively, to the then Labour leader of the Greater London council and the Labour party nationally. “We threw everything at it.”

Timms was leader of Newham council when, in 1994, the previous MP, Ron Leighton, died of a heart attack. After being chosen as the Labour candidate, Timms won the subsequent byelection, in June 1994.

His connection with his church has remained critical, he says. A group in the church offered to pray with him every month when he became a councillor. They increased the frequency to weekly once he became leader of the council.

“We still do that and that has been a very important source of support for me through all the ups and downs of the intervening 34 years,” Timms says.

Yet it was not a foregone conclusion that an evangelical Christian would form such a strong bond with, first, Newham North-East and then East Ham, as the constituency has been known since 1997. The seat has, according to the 2021 census, the eighth-highest proportion of people – 41.2 per cent – identifying as Muslim.

Timms insists the tension is less than it might appear. The first person to urge him to stand as an MP following Ron Leighton’s death was the chair of the Alliance of Newham Muslim Associations, he says.

“His argument to me was, ‘You believe in God; we believe in God; we think you should go for this’,” Timms recalls.

There are points of connection between different faith groups in the area, he adds. He has a particularly strong connection with Bonny Downs Baptists Church, in Beckton, which has an active food bank and many other social ministries.

“If you look at the people who around this community are really doing things to help here, it’s the faith groups,” Timms says. “It’s Bonny Downs Baptist Church; it’s some of the Muslim groups.”

“I certainly see what I’ve been doing in politics as a calling, as part of what I came here first of all to do, which is to take part in a mission,”

Timms’s sense of affinity with his Muslim constituents, however, did not prevent the most distressing incident of his career – when Roshonara Choudhry tried to kill him at a constituency surgery in Beckton in May 2010.

Medical staff described the two stab wounds, to his stomach, as “life-threatening” and Choudhry is serving a life term for attempted murder. She had been radicalised by online Islamist extremist sermons and acted because of Timms’ vote in favour of the 2003 Iraq war.

“It was a very, very unpleasant episode,” Timms says, with characteristic understatement.

In March this year, he says, he received a reply from Choudhry, part of a correspondence that began after she wrote to him expressing remorse for her actions.

Even the stabbing, however, underlined the community’s goodwill, Timms insists.

“I was absolutely inundated after that episode with people sending cards and good wishes – including Christians saying, ‘We’re praying for you’, and quite a lot of similar things from Muslims saying, ‘We’re praying for you for a speedy recovery’,” he says. “I hadn’t had that experience before of Muslims telling me, ‘We’re praying for you’. So it left me with a stronger sense, I think, of being supported by my Christian and Muslim constituents, which I appreciated very much.”

Timms nevertheless remains an unapologetically partisan politician. He wants a Labour government under Keir Starmer, he says, to resolve problems he says have built up over 14 years of coalition and then Conservative government since 2010.

“I think the country is in a sorry mess,” he says. “I think we very urgently need a change of direction. I think that the prescription that Keir Starmer has set out offers a hopeful way forward.”

Timms, who is currently chair of the Commons work and pensions committee, says he would be “delighted” to return to a ministerial role in a Starmer government. He is standing as an MP again in the hope of being able to support a new Labour government.

“It would seem a shame to leave just when we might be on the brink of a Labour government again,” he says.

Nevertheless, the way he links his work as an MP with his Christian faith sets him apart.

“I experienced a calling to be in this area,” Timms says.

As far back as when he came to East London, his thinking about faith, what to do with his life and politics were all “intertwined”, he adds.

“I certainly see what I’ve been doing in politics as a calling, as part of what I came here first of all to do, which is to take part in a mission,” Timms says.