Philippa Stroud is Executive Director and co-founder of the Centre for Social Justice, a think-tank chaired by the Rt. Hon. Iain Duncan Smith MP. She is also the Conservative Parliamentary Candidate for Sutton and Cheam.
Philippa became a Christian at the age of 17 through the witness of a Christian school friend whom she had known for the previous six years.
After a long and active summer break Philippa returned to school to find that her friend hadn’t done much by way of typical teenage excess over the holidays. Philippa says, ‘Although my friend had done absolutely nothing, she was really peaceful and I wasn’t. I remember asking myself why that was and my friend saying to me that I knew the gospel. She took me back to visit her family and her church and it was just overwhelming to be in a Christian family who totally loved God. Being in that community was very powerful and it allowed me to see Christianity in action, rather than just in words. If that’s what it meant to be a Christian then I wanted it. I knew that it would mean everything and it was a very definite decision’.
