26 August 2008

Joel Edwards brings Agenda for Change message to Greenbelt

What are evangelicals for in 2008? Around 2,500 festival-goers were keen to find out as they flocked to Joel Edwards’ talk on the issue at Greenbelt.

Joel’s answer – and his challenge for the crowd – was that today’s evangelicals need to go back to their roots and act strategically to present Christ credibly as good news to society.

Hoards of the campers responded by visiting the Alliance’s Greenbelt stall and writing the answer to the question “what are you doing to be good news in your community” on a plastic building block, contributing a final layer to the Agenda for Change tour cathedral.

Joel was also a member of two Greenbelt panels, “For the Bible tells me so,” an exploration of how Christians handle the Bible, and “How do you shop for development?”, and talked about his childhood and the Alliance’s vision for the future at the late-night “Last Orders” event.

He said: “I arrived on site and felt that I’d stepped into an open space, where I was free to speak unapologetically from an evangelical perspective into a truly eclectic environment, where thinking Christians feel at liberty to interrogate their faith.”