The Evangelical Alliance has held its fifth annual Temple Address at Church House, Westminster on Nov. 10, with the Archbishop of Canterbury delivering the keynote speech on the issue of respect.
The Champions of Respect Awards were presented to three young people that have made significant positive contributions to their communities, with the top award of the night, the Anthony Walker Award, dedicated to the murdered Liverpool teenager, presented to a young female DJ.Explaining the motive behind the new campaign the General Director of the Evangelical Alliance, Rev Joel Edwards told Christian Today, “We are launching our campaign on Respect. There is a tremendous amount of disrespect and a spiralling amount of anti-social behaviour disorders among other things, and we want to give something that is slightly different and say here are a number of young people in society doing positive things in that mark them out as respecting young people. We want to say this is a great showcase of respectful behaviour.”
The guest of honour at the high-profile event was the Church of England head, Dr Rowan Williams whose speech was entitled, ‘Becoming Trustworthy: Respect and Self-Respect’.
Dr Williams used the opportunity to point out the way in which today’s society so often neglects to offer respect to the youth generation, in turn leading to them seeking respect in more demanding and often aggressive ways.
He said, “If we want to claim that we are a society in which real respect matters, we have a long way to go. It doesn’t look that way to a large part of especially the younger population in our cities; and this certainly helps to explain why what emerges is so often a culture that aggressively and even violently demands respect on its own terms.”
