Gaétan Roy goes to the United Nations building in Geneva with an unusual question: “How can I serve you?”
Roy is neither a waiter nor a salesman but the new representative of the World Evangelical Alliance (WEA) to the UN. Since he first got involved in politics, this is the question he has been wrestling with. In 2015, when he visited the German parliament to lobby for evangelical organizations, he could not forget the words of Mark 10:45: I came to serve, not to be served.
So Roy asked the first politician he met on his first day, “How can I serve you?” » Since then, he hasn’t stopped asking for it.
“I thought it was really simple, but I felt like God was relentless in that regard,” Roy told CT. “If Jesus came to serve and not to be served, then I will do the same by asking the diplomats and politicians we work with how we can serve them. »
With this issue, Roy became one of the leading evangelical voices within the world’s largest intergovernmental organization, speaking on behalf of 600 million believers in more than 120 countries. He succeeds Michael Mutzner, who helped establish the WEA office at the UN in 2012, and joins Wissam al-Saliby, director of the WEA Geneva office. Al-Saliby focuses on public statements about human rights violations while Roy works behind the scenes, negotiating deals and developing official proposals to submit to UN representatives.
Whether promoting peace in Nigeria or working with the Coalition for Minority Rights in India, Roy said he hopes the service will lead the way as it represents evangelical concerns and advances the cause religious freedom for all.
If Roy’s approach to high-level negotiations and political diplomacy seems unorthodox, so was his path to such a prestigious position.
He was born in Quebec and speaks fluent French and English, as well as excellent German and knowledge of Spanish and Mandarin Chinese. He grew up in a Roman Catholic family, then was born again at age 22 while working as a ski instructor in Eastern Canada.
He earned a computer science degree, a pilot’s license, and then went into business doing exploratory research in the aerospace industry. He worked on navigation systems to help pilots fly in zero visibility conditions. The venture was a success and Roy found himself consulting with NASA and the Canadian Civil Aviation Directorate.
But as his business took off, Roy felt a higher calling. He moved to Germany in 1991 to train for a year with Youth With a Mission (YAM), hoping to serve in international missions.
“And I did, but not in the way I expected,” Roy said.
He ended up at an independent evangelical church and mission center in Altensteig, in Germany’s Black Forest, where he worked as director of administration.
Roy grew in his work and became a church mission director, handling philanthropy and project management on five continents. Then, after more than a decade, his work as a strategist and networker launched him into politics. He visited the Bundestag, the German parliament, as a spokesperson for Christian groups working on issues of youth, family, education, human rights, humanitarian aid and religious freedom . He remembers realizing that groups like the Association of Evangelical Missions and network-man alliance of 79 faith-based nonprofit organizations, was doing remarkable work, but no one was telling its story to political leaders in Berlin, Strasbourg or Geneva.
Evangelicals, for their part, would complain about these leaders. But they didn’t contact them.
“We used to complain about politics, but I said to them, ‘Why are we complaining? We are the problem if we are not involved,” Roy said. “Pietism told us that politics is dirty, and we stayed away. But I thought it was changeable. If you have a good policy, it gets implemented.
That’s how Roy found himself volunteering for a new job: representing these organizations to the German government. And he found that his humble approach and unexpected questions were quite effective.
“My job was not to go and preach in Parliament. I wasn’t smart enough or rhetorically strong enough to get politicians to do what I wanted,” he said. “I simply asked how I could serve, and they ended up telling me about the problems they were having and how we can look for solutions together.” »
In 2019, for example, he contributed to the development of the “Digital Pact for Schools”. In its original form, the five billion euro ($5.3 billion) federal digitalization plan only gave money to public schools. Roy worked with lawmakers to include private religious schools throughout Germany. When it was adopted, around 600 million euros ($637 million) was granted to private religious schools so that they could acquire digital equipment, create or develop online learning platforms and train teachers.
Wolfgang Stock, general secretary of the German Association of Evangelical Schools and Kindergartens, said it was a major victory. And it wasn’t easy to achieve either. Lawmakers couldn’t just add a clause or two to the legislation to mention private schools.
“It took a constitutional amendment and the involvement of two federal departments to ensure that all schools – whether public, private or free – were treated fairly,” he said.
Evangelicals, a distinct minority in Germany, do not often receive this kind of consideration in legislation. Without someone like Roy as their voice, they wouldn’t be heard.
“We’re too small,” Stock said, “and have too few resources to do something like what he’s doing.”
He is convinced that Roy is effective because of his particularly evangelical approach to lobbying.
“Lobbyists…usually go to parliamentarians or civil servants with their demands,” Stock said. “Mr. Roy, for his part, brings suggestions and asks each interlocutor: “How can we serve you? With this attitude, he is unique.
Thomas Schirrmacher, head of the WEA, said sending Roy to the UN was a natural transition and that Roy would do important work. He looks forward to seeing him advocate on behalf of evangelicals around the world.
“Evangelical alliances across the world will benefit,” he said. “I am happy to have such a master of diplomacy to represent WEA.”
Of course, most evangelicals have never heard of the man who will represent them at the UN. But he will champion the cause of people like Dorcas Adeyemo, a Baptist from Ibadan, the capital of Nigeria’s Oyo State. It has been affected by the persistent violence in the northeast of the country, which has left thousands dead and millions displaced. Adeyemo told CT that she was happy to hear that a man like Roy was representing her at such a high level.
“There is so much violence,” she said. “Millions of Nigerians are dying or displaced because of the conflict. I pray that people like the honorable Mr. Roy can do something on our behalf.
He tries. In November, al-Saliby participated in a consultation with regional religious leaders, including the head of the Nigerian Evangelical Alliance, to discuss possible initiatives to promote peace and religious tolerance in Nigeria.
Roy, meanwhile, continued to meet with representatives at the UN, asking each his usual question: “How can I serve you?”
Ken Chitwood is a scholar of world religions who lives and works in Germany.
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