Joel Edwards Interview
Joel Edwards has served as the General Director of the Evangelical Alliance since 1997. After over a decade of service he is stepping down from this role. We caught up with him earlier this year on the tour promoting his book An Agenda for Change.
Could you please tell us some of your story?
My journey began when I was a boy in Kingston, Jamaica and my earliest memories of church are all very positive; exuberance, joy, enthusiastic, sweaty, loud, confident preaching. I came to the UK when I was eight years old.
I had always been a church boy, but somewhere around the age of 11 I was at a convention in Birmingham and the preacher gave an invitation to come forward. I had a little bit of a dare from a friend. He said ‘last one to the altar is a monkey!’ So I went; I didn’t want to be a monkey! Just kneeling, no words were said to me, nobody touched me but I had the most powerful encounter with Christ and a real sense of forgiveness. That was the amazing thing for me; a young boy being so utterly and incredibly forgiven. And that opened a new world of spiritual cognisance, if you like, where I began to take things more seriously. My journey with Christ pretty much started from there. It hasn’t been a perfect one but it has been exciting.
How would you summarise the aim of your latest book An Agenda for Change?
To encourage the church to rehabilitate the legacy and the heart and soul of what it means to be a ‘good news person’, an evangelical person. The historian David Bebbington came up with four propositions about evangelicalism. Evangelicals are people who take the Bible seriously, who take Christ and his cross very seriously, who take the process of conversion seriously and who are into social action. Many people do one or two or three of those, but the key thing about authentic evangelicalism is that it embraces all four and tries to keep them in perfect harmony. That for me is great news, not just for the Christian church but for society as well.
You speak of the need to present Christ credibly. How do you feel we are in danger of misrepresenting him?
We often present a risk-averse Christ; a nice, safe, gentle Jesus who is understood within the church but not really understood outside. In his day he had extremely provocative things to say about the social order of things. He spoke about the relationships between men and women, he said things about ethical responsibilities, he had things to say about your attitudes to taxation. He was a real risk taker. He had a way of putting provocative and searching questions to individuals, communities and institutions. He was not a safe pair of hands. He was not risk-averse. In fact he was so not risk-averse they crucified him. And what we have done is to domesticate Jesus. We need to rediscover and re-present the true Jesus who was engaged with the pain of society rather than simply ticking a few safe boxes.
You write that ‘Christians who deny the place of miracles may wake up to find that we are out of step with a contemporary culture growing weary with “reason”, which changes nothing and no one.’ (p39) Do you feel our culture is particularly open to the supernatural?
Oh yes! Science fiction is a huge part of our consumption now. The idea of paranormal activities is very normal. Channel hop through Sky and the amount of weird things you see after the watershed tells us that people have tapped into spirituality in a big way. So we find ourselves in a kind of a post-modern, almost post-rational environment, where people are actually quite ok about extending their rationality into almost disbelief. We’re now at a point where a man is having a baby, for heaven’s sake! So there is a sense in which the supra-rational, which doesn’t necessarily set aside rationality; 2+2 is still 4, is part and parcel of our cultural diet. Therefore if we’re talking about the miraculous, or phenomena, or mystery or mystique, it is not unusual anymore. And I think that we still think it is.
So should we expect and have faith for more signs and wonders, particularly in our evangelism?
There is no denying the fact that a very central part of the credibility of the gospel is the idea that God breaks into the material world to do things which we cannot do by our own volition and we call that ‘miracle’. I think the church should recognise firstly that it is a part of a package deal of presenting a credible Christ and that secondly miracles still do happen and we should deliberately pursue miracles. And thirdly that we may come to recognise in the years ahead, that when rational arguments don’t stack up, when we have to somehow demonstrate that the God of the Bible is active and well, we may in those circumstances increasingly find that the Christ of the miraculous becomes one of the most significant calling cards for a credible Christian lifestyle in the UK.
How can students and twenties best represent Christ?
Lifestyle, lifestyle, lifestyle. In my pre 20s days I remember being one of two Christians in school. I had it quite easy at college because it was a Christian college. As a student in a really hostile, absolutely secularised polytechnic, the difference was lifestyle; living a credible lifestyle, which helps people to understand a credible Christ. It’s about your morality. It’s about truth telling. It’s about not getting involved in the backbiting and the viciousness. It’s about being a person who exercises kindness and actually treats people with respect. It’s about having a set of values that stand out from the crowd. It’s about modelling what it means to be a human in the 21st century. And I found, even without saying a great deal about being a Christian that those things always stood out. The message of your lifestyle goes a long way.
Can you tell us a little about the Micah Challenge?
The Micah Challenge is a global Christian response to the International Millennium Development Goals and it has two aims. The first is to deepen our commitment to the poor and the second is to be an advocate for, with and on behalf of the poor globally. The Micah Challenge was launched at the UN in October 2004 and there are now 40 national campaigns around the world. For the last four or five years we’ve been talking about the millennium development goals and now suddenly I wake up and all around me everybody from Gordon Brown to Tony Blair to the Secretary General of the UN are just hot on seeking to mobilise communities to take the MDG’s seriously. We have a long way to go, but we have come so far and I’m excited about the future.
