TODAY marks the end of Christian Aid week. Thousands of Christians have been collecting door to door in what has become a significant annual event in the life of many churches. For some years international development has been rising up the churches’ agenda. Through campaigns such as Jubilee 2000 and Make Poverty History, in which churches and religious aid agencies played key roles, Christians have arguably had more impact on public opinion than through any other campaign for several decades. This year, with a much-publicised report linking poverty reduction to climate change, Christian Aid has confirmed its place in the thriving development industry. Yet interestingly, though it has changed its logo, Christian Aid has kept its now-famous strapline: “We believe in life before death.”

It is easy to understand why the phrase endures. Christianity is readily caricatured as being a matter of “pie in the sky when you die”. Asserting that the Christian gospel is concerned with the here and now as well as the hereafter is important not only to correct public misapprehensions but also to remind churchgoers what their faith actually teaches. Yet establishing a sharp contrast between this-worldly salvation and eternal salvation may do violence to what are better conceived as penultimate and ultimate acts in the same drama. Properly understood, belief in life before death is not an alternative to belief in life after death, it is its consequence.

Two examples may help to explain. The Church of St Mary Magdalene stands on the Newmarket road into Cambridge. Its decorative friezes make it one of the finest examples of 12th-century ecclesiastical architecture in England. This lavish chapel was built in 1169 as the heart of a hospital caring for those with leprosy. It continued in this capacity for more than a century, providing a slim lifeline for those who would otherwise have been dependent on begging.

At the far end of Kindwitwi village in the Rufiji District of Tanzania stands a more modest church, also built to serve a community of leprosy patients. Its mud walls support a corrugated iron roof that in the rainy season bangs like a drum. By the late 1960s the village was so neglected that patients routinely went untreated and unfed. Responsibility for the village was assumed by the Anglican Diocese of Masasi, and a retired missionary, Robin Lamburn, took over the management of healthcare. His work won international recognition. In the 1980s an enterprising British volunteer set up the Rufiji Leprosy Trust to support the village and eradicate leprosy in the district. The dispensary was rebuilt, outreach programmes initiated and pipes laid to bring clean water. With increasingly effective participation by Tanzanian health services, Kindwitwi has become the district centre for exemplary leprosy and tuberculosis care and prevention.

Much more than eight centuries separate these examples. Though it is hard to get inside the mind of the wealthy donors who endowed the leprosy settlement near Cambridge, it is likely that their primary interest was in saving souls — the patients’ and their own — through charitable giving. Their driving concern was life after death. Those involved in Kindwitwi, on the other hand, are focused on improving the lives of villagers before death. Yet the outcomes are surprisingly similar. What took place outside Cambridge was charity. What is taking place in the Rufiji District is development; but in the end, both amount to an affirmation of the value of life through care of the poor and sick.

There is no need for Christian Aid to change its motto. But a mental note might be filed: belief in life after death need not be a distraction from belief in life before death — it can be its motivation.

Stephen Plant teaches theology in Cambridge