From the Editor
Dear Friends and Supporters,
Thank you for your continuing interest and help, with feedback, enquiries,
purchases from our website, letters, thoughts, prayers and donations. Please
keep looking at our website for updates and new items:
www.waldensian.org.uk
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This year we do not have a Waldensian Day on the agenda, due to various
reasons, mainly ill health. Everything is better now, thank God and therefore
we hope to make it up in the near future.
Congratulations to Daniele Pevarello who is now Assistant Professor in
Early Christian History at Trinity College, Dublin and Research Director and
member of the Council of the New School of Religion.
Congratulations to Jean-David Eynard (ex-student of Collegio Valdese!)
for obtaining a distinction for his Master’s dissertation at Oxford and a fully
funded doctoral place (with an extra scholarship from the Italian Government)
at Pembroke College, Cambridge. All this in English Literature!
2018 is a year of important anniversaries for
me and this issue is going to be a bit of a Memory
Lane trip, but always with an optimistic eye
towards the future. It’s now 30 years since I
became Executive Secretary of the Waldensian
Church Mission, with my first Committee meet-
ing held in September 1988 in Twickenham. It
is also 40 years since, again in September, I met
by chance, in Venice, a young Englishman who
knew who the Waldensians were. His mother
Prescot Stephens, Paolo
had been one of Peggy Stephens’ best friends
Ricca and Erica Scroppo.
and his sister was and still is friends with Joy
Stephens … and, of course, he knew our Treasurer Mark as a boy … (but all
this came to light later …)
We got married in 1979 and after three years (and two babies) in Cambridge,
we went to Torre Pellice for six years. In 1987, after Cressida’s birth, I spent
some time in Cambridge; my friends from Radio Beckwith – of which I was
a founder and the first Director – asked me to thank the Waldensian Church
Mission for a donation they had received, which I did. Rosemary Farrer, then
Editor of this review, came and interviewed me. Having said that we were com-
ing back to Cambridge by Autumn 1988, when the Committee was looking for
a new Executive Secretary I was asked to stand for the post. I now know that
Cover: The open-air service at Chanforan, 21 August 2017.