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Chris has a BSc and PhD in geology and has worked as a consultant geologist for oil companies and as a university and college lecturer. He has however always been very much involved in environmental issues. He spent a total of eight years in Lebanon (1980–84, 1994–96) and during the second period was in part responsible for founding A Rocha Lebanon. He and his wife Alison now live in southern France midway between the two A Rocha France centres. Chris is on the Board of Trustees of A Rocha France and takes part in teaching weeks at Courmettes and in leading a popular natural history tour of the estate. In such spare time as he has, he likes to write both fiction and popular theology and has written a number of books with J. John, most recently Jesus Christ: The Truth.

5th November 2019 | Chris Walley | 1 comments

A bad week and good memories

It was going to be a good week. But it wasn’t. We were beginning to enjoy our new house and also had our younger son and his family visiting. Then midday Tuesday, the warm Provençal sun spilling over us, we received the appalling news that a terrible car accident in South Africa had taken the lives of our old A Rocha friends Chris and Susanna Naylor and with them Miranda Harris, leaving her husband Peter recovering in hospital.

Categories: Stories
Tags: grief Lebanon loss wetlands
31st May 2018 | Chris Naylor | 0 comments

Creation Care in Lebanon

History is written in the landscapes of the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon. Baalbek with its magnificent Roman ruins, more ancient rounded hills known as tells, and long rusted barbed wire and tank emplacements. For good or ill we leave our mark on the land long after we have gone. Can people tell what we believe about God from what we write in the landscape?

Categories: Reflections
Tags: creation environmental education Lebanon Middle East
30th June 2015 | Chris Naylor | 0 comments

Postcards from the Middle East by Chris Naylor: 5. Conservation conversations

We were often asked to study the wildlife of areas in need of conservation, but even more often groups came to Aammiq to see how a community dialogues and decides to restrain itself from more and more consumption of land, resources, and wildlife to the benefit of all and for a heritage to be passed on to future generations.

Categories: Postcards
Tags: Aammiq community conservation Lebanon Middle East surveying
31st May 2015 | Chris Naylor | 0 comments

Postcards from the Middle East by Chris Naylor: 4. Visitors drop a bombshell

“You are breaking the mould. Abu Charbel, like many others, thinks the church should keep to traditional areas of work.” “But what about priorities?” I pressed. “What is the most important thing? Preaching, poverty relief, or conservation of rare species?”

Categories: Postcards
Tags: birdwatching conservation Lebanon Middle East Peter and Miranda Harris priorities theology
30th April 2015 | Chris Naylor | 2 comments

Postcards from the Middle East by Chris Naylor: 3. Mission impossible

It was a transformed class that reconvened under the shade of the ash tree a couple of hours later. It was like conducting an orchestra to establish the learning objectives of the lesson; the wetland provided invaluable services to the human communities of the Bekaa, it contained rare and beautiful species and it needed protection. We didn’t stop there; questions tumbled from the class all the way back to the bus.

Categories: Postcards
Tags: Aammiq birdwatching eagles insects Lebanon Middle East mission teaching wetlands
31st March 2015 | Chris Naylor | 2 comments

Postcards from the Middle East by Chris Naylor: 2. Bedouin hospitality

The tent was dark but warm inside, a simple wood stove providing a flickering light. The bitter, piping-hot coffee was in an elaborate brass pot. Most of the year they lived in Homs in Syria but each spring, and sometimes in the autumn, they would get the tent out of storage and make the trek to the Bekaa for extra work.

Categories: Postcards
Tags: Aammiq birdwatching hunting Lebanon machine guns Middle East migrations Syria
12th July 2013 | Miranda Harris | 1 comments

A Rocha’s five core commitments as lived by John Stott – 5: Cooperation

I have a small, determined grandson. He can insert an astonishing number of vowels into the word NO. Whether in two-year olds or adults, strong differences of opinion may need to pass through several stages before a degree of cooperation is reached − mutual listening, clear communication, appropriate compromise, and peace-making − which in his case means a cuddle.

Categories: Stories
Tags: cooperation John Stott Lebanon Middle East peace-building