The sun is shining through the windows of Rev Andrew White’s study, and outside birds are singing in the trees.  It’s a beautiful spring morning in this sleepy bit of Hampshire, and White – a tall, round-spectacled man sporting a multi-coloured bow tie – looks every inch the country vicar.

But the truth is very different. Because when the phone rings on his polished, wooden desk it’s not an enquiry about flowers for Sunday services, or a rural churchwarden.  Instead, the voice on the broken line is coming from Iraq.  It’s passing on update on security in the war-ravaged Middle Eastern country, and a report on a medical clinic currently in progress.  White listens carefully, interjecting occasionally to ask questions about his flock.  He might be thousands of miles away in an English village, but his parish – and his heart – are in Baghdad.

White’s home and his wife Caroline and two children are in the UK, and he is currently staying here.  But he’s the vicar not of Liphook, where the family is based – he’s the vicar of Baghdad. It’s an unlikely kind of a job – he shows me a photograph of himself, striking in a bulletproof vest, army hat, dog collar and outsize crucifix on his chest – for an unlikely kind of a man.  White is, and always has been, a maverick – an eccentric.  By chance I used, many years ago, to run a parent-toddler group at his then parish in south London: even in those days, he was an out of the ordinary churchman.  Before being ordained, he worked at St Thomas’s Hospital as an operating department practitioner (some of the mums in my playgroup remembered him from the hospital when they were there having their babies!) but the medical world, he used to say, never quite gave him enough and after studying in Cambridge he was ordained in 1990.

He worked in two churches in south London, and was famous in our area for having spotted his wife from the pulpit, only to end up asking her to marry him six weeks later.  During his time in Balham, he was a Conservative councillor in Wandsworth, and always a larger-than-life figure on the local scene.

In 1998, White succeeded Paul Oestreicher as director for the Centre of Reconciliation at Coventry Cathedral.  'Once I was appointed, I changed the focus from Europe to the Middle East,' he explains.  'I said, the main thing we have got to be working on today is the Islamic world and the relationship between Islam and the west.  This was 1998, remember: well before 9/11.  But I knew it was important to get to Iraq..'

White opened a new place of worship – a chapel in what had been Saddam’s throne room.Long before the war started there, White was a regular visitor to Baghdad. His first job was to reopen the Anglican church in the centre of the city. 'It had been closed down by Saddam Hussein in 1991 after the Gulf  War, because it was known as ‘the British church’,' he says.

On September 12 2001, White was booked to fly to Iraq – instead he spent the day in his office at Coventry Cathedral, watching events unfold in New York in the aftermath of the destruction of the Twin Towers.  'But a few days later I did fly to Iraq,' he recalls.  'And I remember going to see Tariq Aziz and he shouted down the corridor ‘Tell them we had nothing to do with it!’.  And I said, it doesn’t matter whether you did or not, they are still coming to get you…'

At the height of the fighting there, White was unable to get into Iraq so he returned to Cambridge to study.  In 2003 he returned to Baghdad and again reopened the Anglican church.  It had – and still has – an intriguing congregation.  'Most of the people who came to the church were foreigners – diplomats, soldiers.  But within about six weeks of the reopening, Iraqis were filling the church – because the foreigners weren’t allowed to leave the Green Zone, and the church is not in that zone.'

For the foreigners who were confined to the Green Zone, White opened a new place of worship – a chapel in what had been Saddam’s throne room.  Meanwhile Iraqis who were unable to worship in their own churches continued to come to the Anglican church. 'Most of them were from other denominations, but they were happy to worship with us,' explains White.  'These days we’re the biggest church in Iraq with around 3700 members…and at last count I think only three of them were Anglicans…'

In many ways, says White, his church feels like the church of the future – many Christian denominations represented there, and the important thing is the sense of community and of supporting one another amidst what have been difficult times.  

Today White divides his time between Iraq and the UK, doing his work as president of the Foundation for Relief and Reconciliation in the Middle East.  He set the charity up, he explains, after he left Coventry. He’d recently been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis – after this he’d been told by the powers that be in the Church of England in the UK that he wasn’t well enough to be a vicar here.  'So instead, I went to Baghdad,' he says, enjoying the irony of the story.  

As well as his work for the foundation, he is involved 'as an individual' in work around hostage release, and has played a behind-the-scenes role in several releases. 'What you have to recognise in doing this work is that when religion goes wrong, it goes very wrong.  And religion has gone very wrong in Iraq. But it’s difficult work, and it’s dangerous at times.  I’ve been in at least one room that had chopped-off toes and fingers in it.  Was I worried?  Yes, a little bit…'

'What you have to recognise in doing this work is that when religion goes wrong, it goes very wrong.  And religion has gone very wrong in Iraq.His biggest role, he says, is to spread hope and love in Iraq. 'At the end of every service in the church in Baghdad I say that I hope, I hope, I hope we love, love love.  It’s only love that can change Iraq.  We are trying to show the love of Our Lord to everyone – not by preaching to them, but by serving them.  

'People come to our clinic and our dentist and our pharmacy and it’s the only one that’s totally free.  And I tell the staff to tell the people that we offer this just because we love them – that’s our message.'

How do his wife and two sons – Josiah is 13, Jacob is 11 – cope with the knowledge that their father is in such a dangerous part of the world on such a regular basis?  'Caroline doesn’t worry – in the Bible it says perfect love casts out all fear.

'On a bad day once I said to her, I do wish I had a little parish somewhere in England. And she said: do you know what, Andrew?  They couldn’t cope with you – and you couldn’t cope with them.'

The Vicar of Baghdad
Canon Andrew White

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