Tributes have been paid to the former head of the Evangelical Alliance, Joel Edwards, who passed away from cancer on Wednesday morning.
Edwards was a British immigrant from Jamaica and started out as a probation officer, a role he held for 14 years.
In a rich and varied career, he served as senior pastor of Mile End New Testament Church of God and was an honorary Canon of St Paul’s Cathedral.
But he spent the best part of his career as a figurehead for evangelicals, joining the African and Caribbean Evangelical Alliance in 1988, and then going on to lead the UK Evangelical Alliance as General Director from 1997 until 2009.
Following his time with the EA, he became director of Micah Challenge, a coalition of Christian development agencies, and he was involved in academia as a Visiting Fellow of St John’s College, Durham.
In 2019, he was awarded a CBE for services to tackling poverty and injustice, and in April this year, he was appointed by the Church of England to establish a racial justice commission that would hold the Archbishops of Canterbury and York to account tackling racism.
In a letter to friends shared by his family after his death, Edwards bade a “final goodbye” and thanked people for their prayers for him.
“Words cannot express the depth, breadth and height of my gratitude, but I have gone home,” he said.
“My earnest prayer is that your faith and tenacity on my behalf will not be considered a pointless religious exercise, but that it will have strengthened your faith in a God who is marvellous, mysterious and majestic in all he does: The Faithful One.”
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Joel is another inspiring pioneer who fulfilled his purpose on this earth and left a legacy for those who will follow in his footsteps and stand on his shoulders in influential roles developed to reduce inequalities
Respected his ‘church without walls’ approach when I first saw him in The Voice newspaper. I had just picked up a national leading ethnicity role for a cancer charity.
Love that his dignified voice of wisdom was captured when he knew that his race was run and he was about to finish. As usual still encouraging others.
It is done Joel. Now RIP
Dr Rose Thompson
Chief Executive
B’Me Against Cancer
(Formerly BME Cancer Communities)
http://www.bmecancer.com
Former Evangelical Alliance General Director, Joel Edwards, was the perfect embodiment of all that is wrong when African-heritage or skin men and women are given high public office and recognition in our English society that still views African-heritage men and women as inferior people with low social status.
Pastor Joel Edwards was so enamelled by the recognition he received from Caucasian Christians; by Caucasian academic institutions and by the BBC that he tempered and censored his thoughts as to not upset the Christian Caucasian power elite that gave him great public respectability.
He well knew that outspoken African-heritage men or women are not offered a public profile.
Most African-heritage people who are given great public recognition in England today display a similar Uncle-Tomish attitude because they are not empowered or supported to speak or reveal the continuing effect of skin-colour prejudice; discrimination and racism endured by African-skin people today.
I communicated with Pastor Edwards. I was shocked to discovered the Equality & Human Rights Commission (EHRC) kept him as an adviser whilst the EHRC had sacked all senior staff of African-heritage by 2018.
The EHRC had sacked all the African-heritage senior staff at the precise moment when African-Caribbean-heritage Subjects were being illegally exiled to the Caribbean by the Home Office.
Whilst the African-Caribbean-heritage Subjects were being exiled, the EHRC was busy falsely investigating the Labour Party and championing Stonewall’s LGBTQIAP2S+ sexual creed.
It was at the end of his days that Pastor Edwards wrote in the Voice Newspaper about the silence from the U.S. Christian Clergy’s failure to offer any meaningful support to Dr Martin Luther King and his campaign against Christian Caucasian skin-colour violent racism from the U.S. Protestant Christian Caucasian laity.
Christian Clergy is associated with being respectable and middle-class in the minds of too many African-heritage christians.
However, Christianity in England and the United States was at the forefront of creating the creed that caused Caucasian people’s violent historical racism against African and Native tribal people.
The Caucasian Christian power structure would not promote an African-heritage Pastor who was not afraid to remind the Caucasian Christian Protestant churches of their abuse of the Messiah’s Gospel Message to increase their wealth; their prestige and their cultural superiority.
Until England’s high profile African-heritage men and women place skin-colour justice first. The African-heritage people in public profile today will continue to be servants of the caucasian power structure; rather than men and women who actively speak and advocate on behalf of the low status African-skin people of England.