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Peter Wooding & Clayton Metcalfe at the House of Lords

Thursday 15 Jan 2009

Lord Taylor's Christmas Message of Hope

By Peter Wooding

MNS European Bureau Chief

LONDON, ENGLAND – MNS/ANS – During the current financial crisis, Lord John Taylor, the first ever black peer in the House of Lords, is urging Christians to share a message of hope this Christmas.

Speaking during his recent charity reception in the peers’ dining room in the House of Lords, Lord Taylor said: “We’ve got the credit crunch, we’ve got a worldwide recession and people are losing their homes.  We’re looking for hope again and we know where the hope is ultimately and this is a great opportunity to tell people that the marketplace can’t operate in a moral vacuum.

“We have to conduct our business, our banks with ethical guidelines.  So this is a great opportunity for Christians to say what we believe, because the world is looking for hope.

“The Christian faith is very relevant not just to me personally but to the world of banks and businesses.  I think this is a great opportunity for us to share our faith to show that it’s a very practical thing.

Hope in the next generation

Lord Taylor’s Christmas reception was to benefit the Warwick Leadership Foundation which he is chairman of and he remains confident that this work will bring hope through the next generation.

“Tonight was mainly about inspiring people and I think we’ve achieved that. The Warwick Leadership Foundation is about empowering young people into leadership.  To become a leader you have to be able to believe to achieve, so we hope to instill real belief in these young people.  We have young people in our programme from all over the world, and they spend six months to a year with us and we like to think that by the time they’ve finished with us, they really are potential world leaders.

Lord Taylor believes his achievement of becoming the first ever black peer isn’t enough unless he makes the most of his opportunity to inspire future leaders.

“Leadership is about action, it’s not about titles or position, so I regard this as an opportunity to build on this and to empower other people and that’s what it’s about.

“Yes it’s about inspiring people.  In this world we have so much information, but so little inspiration and so it’s about inspiring.  They’ve got the talent anyway but you need that inspirational spark to unleash that talent.”

The first ever Blackberry president

Finally when asked how important it was to utilize the latest technologies to spread our message Lord Taylor commented: “People say that Barack Obama is the first black president.  Well that’s true but he’s also the first Blackberry president.  He understands how to use YouTube, Facebook and MySpace.   It is important to use the internet, which is what Safe Worlds IPTV and the Missionaries News Service is doing, so I commend you on that.”

For more details on the work of the Warwick Leadership Foundation go to: www.warwickleadership.org/
 

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