Niall Cooper stepped down in June after 28 years as Director of Church Action on Poverty. He looks back and forward with Reform

Were you brought up in the faith?
My dad was a Methodist minister, so I was brought up in the manse. Happy family childhood. Moved around a fair bit, but I was always part of the church community. A lifelong nonconformist.

Were social issues part of that faith?
Yes, through my parents, my dad in particular. We didn’t talk a lot about it, but it informed who he was. Then a junior church teacher in my teens, and another Methodist minister who was our A-level RE teacher. These people were formative in making me connect social justice with being a Christian. From my earliest conscious thoughts about what it was to be Christian, that was always part of the mix.

Can you say what it was about those social justice questions that connected with you?
I think it was simply the stories of Jesus, how he spent time with people on the margins, spoke up, put his neck on the line. And people I knew that were putting that into practice, in how they understood the world around them, so faith wasn’t abstract or a personalised ‘my journey with Jesus’. It was faith that has to mean something in the world.

As I grew up and started to do things myself, that was the question for me: How does Christian faith have an impact on the world?…

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This is an extract from an article published in the Issue 5 – 2025 edition of Reform

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