Interview

Coptic Church

Creed

Egypt

Freedom of Belief

Middle East

Monastic life

S&U interviews

16 February 2024

9 min read

An Archbishop’s life: monasteries, martyrs and media

Archbishop Angaelos, the leader of the Coptic Church in the UK, is one of the most respected and recognisable Christian leaders in the UK and around the world. He shares his journey and that of the Middle East's largest church in conversation with Belle Tindall and Graham Tomlin.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

An archbishop wearing a black hat and robes stands next to a new building's plaque, while King Charles, wearing a suit stands the other side holding a mic.

The archbishop with King Charles at the opening of a Coptic Church centre.

Archbishop Angaelos, the first Coptic Orthodox Archbishop of London, tells Graham Tomlin and Belle Tindall what life is like as a Coptic Orthodox monk, what makes this church so distinctive, and why, despite the harrowing danger that so many Christians are in, we should not consider them to be victims.

We wanted to discover your background and what has led you to where you are today, yet also about the situation faced by the Coptic Orthodox Church, both here in Europe, but also in Egypt as well.

But I'm just going to start off the conversation by asking you about your own story. You were born in Cairo, in Egypt - did you also grow up there? And how did you become an Archbishop in the Coptic Orthodox Church?

By complete surprise to me.

I was born in Egypt and we migrated as a family to Australia when I was five. I finished my education there, completed my qualifications, worked. And then I decided to go back to Egypt to join the monastery, expecting that I would live the rest of my life in, quite literally, the desert.

How old were you when you decided that?

I was the ripe old age of twenty-two.

And what prompted it? That’s quite an unusual decision.

It is, I think, like any sort of ministry, a calling.

And no, there were no bright lights or big voices. But I do remember the exact moment in my room, I was doing some postgraduate studies, so I had my books surrounding me, and all of a sudden I felt this incredible calling, this feeling. I remember I closed my book, put it on the side, and never looked back.

And that was it – I was going to the life of the monastery. But then in retrospect, you realise that the calling has been happening over a long period. That's the wonderful benefit of the hindsight. So many things had been preparing me for that moment, but that's the moment when it became real.

And so, you moved back to Egypt, and you joined one of the monasteries, which of course goes back to the days of Antony, back in the second century, and that long tradition of Egyptian desert monasticism?

I did.

The monastery is halfway between Cairo and Alexandria. And it's said that that part of wilderness was a monastic area where there were, at one stage, 10,000 monks and nuns. There were 50 major monasteries and 500 settlements. It has been there for 1,500 years, which is quite the history.

I remember one particular instance when I was there, towards the end of my time (I was there for six years before I was sent to the UK to serve), I was walking down a tunnel, a tunnel that links the back of the church with the refectory. Because, of course, monks would come from the desert, gather for Liturgy in the church, and then after they finished, would move into the refectory to break the fast. And I just had shivers down my spine. I don't know why, but for the first time, it struck me that monks had been walking up and down this tunnel for 1,500 years, and I was the latest generation of monks to do that very thing. It was just such a beautiful feeling.

There's been quite a revival of Coptic monasticism in Egypt in recent decades.

What has stimulated that revival?

It was stimulated by the late Pope Shenouda III, who was our Pope before the current Pope Tawadros II. He was a monk from the same region, the same area. He had a great love of monasticism, and really did reinvigorate monastic life through small things, such as that he ensured that his residence was in the monastery.

He wanted the monasteries to have more of a presence in people's lives. Because, if you imagine a community that is living under persecution, they need their monasteries as a haven. I remember one particular day, it was 6th October, which is the Egyptian Day of Independence, and a public holiday. I went to the main monastery and spoke to one of the monks who looked after the guests, and he had said that on that day, 10,000 pilgrims had come through the monastery. They come in busloads from all over the country. It becomes their haven, their escape.

Monasticism is one of the three major pillars of the Coptic Orthodox Church, along with theological teaching, and martyrology. So there is still a great space for monasticism, and we have a very specific experience of it, because we have an oversubscription of people wanting to be monks and nuns. For that reason we're constantly building monastic cells in our monasteries and our convents, to keep up with the demand.

It's quite a rigorous life. We wake up at 4am for what we call midnight praises, which are preceded by the Midnight Prayers, one of the seven offices that are prayed throughout the day: a series of psalms, Scripture readings and litanies. That will go through to about 6am, at which point there will be a Eucharistic service, and then monks go back to their cells. Those who don't have to work very early will get a little bit of sleep, others will go straight into their work. All of the monks work.

They do everything from overseeing agricultural work, to construction and maintenance. There is a workforce of about, let's say, two to three hundred, just to oversee these incredible acres of agricultural farmland. We also have livestock.

There are monks who will be responsible for guests, engineering, and so on. So, everyone has a job. It's like a city. It's a complete community.

In the evening, at sunset, we meet in church again for the evening prayers, where again, we chant the Psalms, read Scripture, and then we literally go out and walk in the desert, and just greet sunset in the desert, then come back and then do our own studies.

Do you miss being there?

Well, I still have my cell there, because monks die to the world. You see, there are two parts of a monastic consecration service. The first half is a full funeral service, where you lie on the ground, are covered with an altar curtain, and there’s a full funeral service for you. Your old life has concluded. The second part is a joyous service where you get up, are given a new name, and are welcomed into monastic life. The monastery becomes your family. So, my cell will remain mine in my monastery until I die, because I have nowhere else to go to. It’s home.

Tell us a little bit about the Coptic Orthodox Church, what makes it distinct?

Well, Coptic simply means Egyptian.

Christianity has been in Egypt since the first century. In 55 AD, St Mark the Evangelist, the writer of the Gospel, went to Egypt and started preaching Christianity there.

It spread quite quickly because of the foundation of ancient Egyptian theology and mythology. In the Egyptian spirituality, you already have concepts of deities, an afterlife and of judgment. It was easy for Egyptians to absorb and accept the idea of Christ and Christianity.

Within a few centuries, Egypt became 85 per cent Christian. The church has remained there. St Mark is considered our first Pope, and we’ve had an unbroken succession of priesthood until now; so I can trace my priestly ancestry all the way back to St. Mark, and through him, to Jesus.

We are also a very scriptural church, with the Bible is core to all things. It's also a deeply sacramental church.

While Islam and Arabization in Egypt started in the seventh century in Egypt, Christianity went back to the first century. So, our roots are in ancient Egypt.

I think that's important for us because it shows not only the longevity, but the resilience of the Christians in Egypt, who have been persecuted massively. If it wasn't Rome, it was Byzantium, the Turks, and many others. And yet the church remains strong. It still remains the largest Christian gathering in the Middle East, with about 15 million Christians in the Egypt.

You began talking about the reality of persecution. This always strikes me when I meet Coptic Christians. I have a Coptic friend in Jerusalem who has the cross tattooed on his wrist, as all Coptic Christians do.

Yes. It’s a proclamation of Faith and a daily witness.

And I suppose, most people’s minds go to that horrific event in 2015 when 21 Coptic Christians were lined up on the beach and beheaded by ISIS.

I just want to offer a slight correction, there were 20 Coptic Christians and one of them was a Ghanaian whose name was Matthew.

You must remember that time. Do you remember where you were when you heard that and what your reactions were and what were your feelings around that time?

Absolutely. The Libya martyrs were pivotal in my life.

You were talking about tattooed Coptic crosses, I have one on my right wrist on the inside of the wrist, if you imagine palm facing up.

I didn't have one originally because I grew up in Australia. I had it done in 2015 after the Libya martyrs because I was so moved by their story and I was so moved by their witness. And so this was done in memory of that.

I remember it very well. I was visiting a family and over the course of the day, we were receiving lots of communications backwards and forwards that these men, who had been kidnapped and we didn't know where they were, had died. The Egyptian foreign ministry said they had died. Then they said they hadn't. There was confusion all day.

And then I finally got a call around 8pm from a news organisation to say that there was a video.

I remember jumping in my car and driving. I stopped along the way because I thought people wanted to know. I posted on my Twitter account that it had been confirmed that these men had died, and that we were praying for their families and communities.

I don't know why, but I felt compelled to write ‘father forgive’ at the end of my message. It's just what I felt. I went and did this interview, and the interviewer asked - how can you talk about forgiveness? How does a Coptic bishop, who sees this happen to his spiritual children, talk about forgiveness? Quite simply, that's really what we've been taught by our church: forgiveness, resilience, and reconciliation.

I remember, during the next 24 hours, I must have done something like 36 back-to-back interviews between television, radio and press, and the whole conversation became about forgiveness.

Even right up to today, it's remarkable how much the witness of these men has touched so many lives.

We can spend a lot of our Christian lives only pondering the hypothetical. And yet, some of the real tenets of Christianity are laser sharp for those who face persecution. They're focused and their witness is vibrant. Those of us who don't have pressure put on us for our faith have so much to learn from them about the preciousness and resilience of our faith.

This has been the story of Christianity since the beginning, since our Lord Jesus Christ himself walked on this earth. He was rejected and persecuted. He was captured, tortured, killed, and so that is our story. It's one of carrying that cross, but carrying the cross comes with grace.

One thing concerns me sometimes - when we speak of Christians who are persecuted, we speak of them as victims. The language we use is ‘survivors’, not ‘victims’. Christian communities have survived, and survived incredibly well, with great courage and grace.

Article

Belief

Creed

Mental Health

Spiritual formation

11 June 2025

7 min read

We have become myopic when it comes to prayer

We have scienced the s**t out of how to talk to God

Roger Bretherton

Roger is a Clinical and Coaching Psychologist.

A woman stands against a sparse white background looking up.

Guilherme Stecanella on Unsplash.

When I was a kid in the eighties, Japan belonged in the realm of science fiction. The Land of the Rising Sun was the land of bullet trains, robotics, the Sony Walkman, the home of Sonic and Mario. British engineers and technicians learned Japanese to avoid being left out when the inevitable Nipponese future arrived.

In recent years the news has been more concerning. One and a half million young Japanese people have become hikikomori, locked in their rooms in extreme isolation. The birthrate has bottomed out. Loneliness is pandemic, with restaurants designed to serve food to diners without needing to meet another person, not even a waiter. Yet Japan remains a place of profound spiritual heritage. Even its cultural exports reflect this. Take Studio Ghibli. There is a word for the moments of quiet contemplation that punctuate their films- ma. It’s the Japanese concept of the interval or space between things. A moment to breathe. If Pixar warms our hearts, then Ghibli heals our souls.

One of the most impressive people I know is Japanese. When asked about his upbringing he is characteristically understated. His parents, he says, were very religious. What he means by this is that they were practicing Buddhists and by the age of three he was meditating with them for hours every day. He now speaks multiple languages, has worked in universities all over the world, and has single-handedly taught more people psychological wellbeing skills than anyone else know. He carries himself with an elegant and compassionate poise that gently permeates any room he enters. He’s very, well… zen.

No doubt my characterisation of Japan is deeply culturally ignorant, unencumbered by any actual awareness of the economics and sociology that have determined the nation’s profile in recent decades. Chief among my many ignorances was the idea that the practice of meditation was widespread in Japan. You couldn’t throw a stick in Kyoto, I assumed, without hitting half a dozen robed monks perched on a rock. But it turns out I’m wrong. When I ask my friend, freshly returned from leading a retreat on Mount Fuji, if his meditative upbringing was typical, he says it wasn’t. It was very unusual. The notion of religious affiliation is not well matched to the complexity of Japanese culture, but more than one commentator has wondered whether the dominant ideology is not Buddhism, nor even Shinto, but Materialism.

Perhaps then it is not a complete surprise that in a recent study of more than 200,000 respondents from 22 countries, Japan is ranked last of those who report praying or meditating daily. According to this analysis, only 10 per cent of the Japanese population pray or meditate each day, just behind Sweden on 11per cent and Germany on17 per cent. Nigeria comes top of the list, with 92 per cent of the population reporting daily prayer or meditation (a result which tempted me to wonder whether the study had measured prayer in decibels rather than percentages. If like me, you’ve been fortunate enough to join Nigerian Christians in prayer, you will know what a joyously raucous occasion that can be). The national data equally represents Nigerian Muslims engaged in daily salat. Even more so the data from Indonesia, ranked second with 84 per cent of the population reporting daily prayer.

Roughly halfway down the table of results there is a sort of break, a statistical chasm if you like. Brazil is listed as 10th on the list with 65per cent of the population praying/meditating each day and then, after a bit of drop, Mexico and the United States come in as the best-of-the-rest at 48per cent and 42per cent respectively. The UK hovers just above the relegation zone, fifth from the bottom at 24per cent. If this was the Premier League, we would be Everton. Not good enough to win, but not great at losing either. I support Everton. They are my team. I pray a lot.

Of course, the major thing the authors had to clarify in their first few sentences was whether they were right to treat prayer and meditation as the same thing. Many people would argue they are different things. Prayer is usually directed towards one or more divine recipients. Meditation may include the quietude and introspection of prayer but does not necessarily require a theistic focus. The authors argue – I think rightly – that while prayer and meditation can be differentiated, they are similar and overlapping practices, which psychologically perform similar functions. They have both been linked with similar outcomes for those who practice them: increased psychological wellbeing, higher gratitude, greater purpose in life, reduced aggression, greater social connectedness, longer life expectancy, and so on. And this research certainly confirms demographic findings across cultures. Those who pray or meditate daily are likely to be elderly, retired, women, homemakers, and regularly attend religious services.

We’ve become myopic. Our technical prowess occupies the foreground, but the infinite mysterious background is chronically out of focus.

The reason this research interests me so much is because prayer and meditation – which are pretty much the same thing for me – are the most important things I do, but probably the ones I talk about least. So when I read that one-in-four people here in Britain are praying or meditating every day, I’m surprised twice. First surprise: so few people pray. Second surprise: more people are praying than I thought.

The first surprise is the realisation that it simply does not occur to many people to pray, even in situations when a bit of prayer would come in quite handy. This hit me most strongly when I watched Matt Damon playing The Martian. Stuck alone 140 million miles from home, he survives by growing potatoes in his own faeces, but at no point in his isolation does it ever occur to him to pray. Faced with a seemingly insurmountable problem he opts (in his words) to “science the sh**t out of it”. Personally, if I were stuck on Mars I would science the sh**t out of it and pray the sh**t out of it - though I suspect overcoming the disgust of wolfing down potatoes smeared in excrement would feature prominently in my daily devotions. But I can’t imagine not praying. I mean, Tom Hanks couldn’t survive two minutes on a desert island without worshipping a volleyball. Hopefully I’d do a bit better than that.

Much of the daily prayer recorded internationally was corporate not solitary: people gathering to pray or meditate, not sneaking off to do so in secret. But there is something about praying alone that captures my imagination, that is both enthralling and intimidating. William James famously defined religion as what we do with our solitude. We are who we are when we are alone with God and no more, claimed C.S. Lewis. And mystics down the millennia have loved to cite the definition of prayer offered by Plotinus, the flight of the alone to the alone. Praying alone ups the stakes. Because if there is no God and we make time to be alone, we are truly alone. If there is no God and we whisper our deepest desires into the darkness with no one to hear them, we are exposed as ridiculous creatures wasting our breath. Not meeting with God, just talking to ourselves.

Praying together is good, but it can be distracting, too susceptible to the mixed motives of impressing, appeasing or opposing others. Jesus was aware of this tension. His advice not to pray publicly for spiritual status, but rather to find a secret space where God could be found in secret, is pretty exacting. He knew that the danger of praying in a group is being satisfied with social rather than spiritual reward. To settle for the impression our prayers make on those around us, rather than surrendering to the impression God would make on us.

So maybe all that worrying about Japan is really just a projection of my own hopes and fears for people closer to home. On the one hand I worry that we have scienced the sh**t out of our ability to pray or meditate. Everything is a problem to be solved. We’ve become myopic. Our technical prowess occupies the foreground, but the infinite mysterious background is chronically out of focus. On the other hand, I find solace in knowing that every fourth person I pass in the street may have some inkling of what it means to connect with a deeper reality in prayer or contemplation. It gives me hope. Hope that wherever we are, whatever we are doing, whenever we wish to, there is always time to take one long deep breath in. And without fanfare or posting to Instagram, exhale our love, our worry, our sadness, our gratitude to the one Jesus called Our Father in secret.

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