Rev Joel Edwards - Laureation Address St. Andrews

LAUREATION ADDRESS

Rev. Joel Edwards D.D. Honoris Causa
Given by Professor Mario I. Aguilar on Friday 22 June 2007 at 2:30 p.m.

Chancellor, I have the honour to present for the degree of Doctor of Divinity, honoris causa, the Reverend Joel Edwards.

Joel Nigel Patrick Edwards was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1951. Married with two grown-up children he studied theology at the London Bible College and was ordained minister in one of the UK’s major Caribbean denominations, the New Testament Church of God. In 2001 he was appointed one of the first honorary Canon of St Paul’s Cathedral.
Throughout his life he has combined service to the church and to society at large, thus before being elected General Director of the Evangelical Alliance in 1997 he worked as probation officer with the Inner London probation service from 1975 to 1988. His service to society has continued and he has been a member of the Prison Service Race Steering Group, and currently serves as a member of the Faith & Government Liaison Steering Group of the Home Office, as a member of the National Policing Forum and as Home Office Independent Advisor to the Metropolitan Police.
Crossing cultural divides and coping with ‘daily culture shock’ since he arrived in the UK at the age of 8, Joel Edwards has become one of the foremost protagonists within the Christian church scene. A respecter of diversity, he is also passionate about unity within the church but unity with a purpose; the purpose to see real change for real lives and real communities.
Chancellor, Joel Edwards has led the Evangelical Alliance as their General Director since 1997, 151 years after its inception. The Alliance now represents a million evangelical Christians and aims to unite evangelicals to present Christ credibly and demonstrate evangelicalism as good news in order to be a transformational movement within, and for the good of society. Throughout his working life Joel Edwards became convinced that society functions best when it fully understands its need for shared values. Consequently, he now spends much of his time wrestling with what it means to be fully human in today’s complex world. He attempts to publicly talk up the biblical values of faith, hope and love in contemporary conversations about trust, hope and respect.
As a result, he is also committed to seeing long-term change for the world’s poor and is happy to devote a big portion of his life to champion their cause. As an expression of this, he is Co-Chair of the Micah Challenge International Council – a group of senior figures across the globe who make every effort to hold governments to account for the Millennium Development Goals, and to engage Christians with their God-given mandate to care for the poor and the marginalized. Refreshingly, despite his unswerving commitment to his Pentecostal and evangelical roots, his passion for justice and grace outweighs his concern for Christianity with a purely moral agenda.
A regular contributor to BBC Radio 4’s Thought for the Day, Sky News and other current affairs-related programmes, he is keen for the Christian church to be recognised as relevant in all areas of life and not sidelined solely to religious issues. Aptly, he was appointed Chair of the Churches Media Council in 2006, giving him further opportunity to illustrate that the church in the UK is a vibrant community, with good news stories to tell and an important voice to be heard on contemporary issues. Thus, in one of his latest statements under the title ‘Keep the faith Mr Brown’ he has challenged the incoming prime minister to meet the Millennium Development Goals of the year 2000 and to continue his undertakings on behalf of the poor.
In 2006 he received an honorary doctorate from the Caribbean Graduate School of Theology in his hometown of Kingston, Jamaica. Fittingly, this first honorary doctorate of divinity was bestowed by the country to which he refers to as ‘God’s Official Residence’, and in which he has spent much time and energy working with church leaders, politicians and the media to help position the island for long-term spiritual and social change, mirroring his work within the UK. Previously, he was also presented with the Prime Minister’s Medal of Appreciation for Services to Jamaica in 2003.
Chancellor, it is all fitting that his second honorary doctorate be awarded by this university in which the study and research on the public face and the service of theology to society at large remains one of its important research activities and from where yearly theology students graduate in order to bring their knowledge, their skills and their dreams to society at large.
Chancellor, in recognition of his major contribution to the public understanding of religion and politics I invite you to confer on Joel Edwards the Degree of Doctor of Divinity honoris causa.

A Common Humanity: The Dalai Lama

In the words of the 14th Dalai Lama's Nobel Prize Lecture in 1989:

I am always reminded that we are all basically alike: we are all human beings. Maybe we have different clothes, our skin is of a different colour, or we speak different languages. This is on the surface. But basically, we are the same human beings. That is what binds us to each other [1].

[1] The 14th Dalai Lama, ‘The Nobel Peace Prize Lecture, Oslo, Norway’, in Sidney Piburn, ed., The Dalai Lama: A Policy of Kindness – An Anthology of Writings by and about the Dalai Lama (Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion Publications, 1990), pp. 15-25 at p. 15.