Bishop Hovakim Manukyan, Primate of the Diocese of the Armenian Church of the United Kingdom and Ireland, will run London’s Battersea Park Half Marathon on Saturday, November 14, to support the world’s persecuted Christians, reports Zartonk Media.
He announced the run at St Sarkis Church in London on Sunday, November 1, closing an All Saints sermon that moved from the martyrs of the early Church to the Armenians who kept the faith alive under Soviet rule. The 13.1-mile race backs the Red Wednesday campaign of Aid to the Church in Need, a charity that supports vulnerable Christian communities and lights churches in red to mark the witness of the persecuted. The bishop is aiming to raise 5,000 pounds.
For Bishop Hovakim, the cause is not abstract. He told the congregation about a classmate in Soviet Armenia who was pulled out of class and taken to the headmaster’s office for saying, in front of a visiting official, that he went to church to pray. “A child’s simple words, ‘I go to pray’, were enough for him to be singled out and discouraged from practising his faith,” he said.
His own family, Genocide survivors, repatriated from Lebanon to Armenia in 1946 and found a homeland where faith had to be lived quietly. He recalled his grandmothers gathering in the evenings to read Scripture, and his mother arranging for a priest to come to the house so that friends could be baptized or married out of sight, because an open church wedding could cost them their state jobs. At one such wedding, Bishop Hovakim stood as the kavor, so small he had to stand on a chair to hold the cross. “I can still picture it today,” he said.
He turned that memory into a challenge for the living. Around 10,000 Armenians live in London, he noted, yet only about 150 gather across the community’s two churches on an ordinary Sunday. “If each of us made a conscious commitment to attend the Divine Liturgy at least once a month, our churches would be full,” he said. “We might even need a third church.”
The run, he said, is a way to turn solidarity into action. “For me, this run is a small opportunity to draw attention to the suffering of our brothers and sisters and turn concern into practical support,” he told the congregation, inviting them to join him through prayer, through donations to the charity, and by telling the stories of persecuted Christians. “There are Christians today for whom going to church is dangerous, and for whom faithfulness to Christ may cost their employment, their freedom or even their lives.”
The bishop took up running for his health. “I was overweight and realised that I needed to make a change,” he said, describing how he built up from walking to short distances. He has since run the Windsor 5K and the Kingston Half Marathon, and his training for Battersea is already underway, including a 15-kilometer run from Kew Bridge to Hammersmith Bridge and back. On September 20 he completed a 10-kilometer run, part of the AGBU Global Run, for Camp Nairi, a camp serving children forcibly displaced from Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) after Azerbaijan’s September 2023 offensive and the ethnic cleansing of the region’s Armenian population.
He closed with the words of the day’s Gospel, which framed the whole appeal. “My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it,” he said. “The path of holiness is open to each of us. It begins when we hear God’s word and put it into practice.”
