His comments were made during yesterday’s 2004 Faithworks Awards ceremony, which saw MPs, church leaders and community development experts gather at Portcullis House in Westminster to celebrate the wide-ranging community work being undertaken by churches across the country.

“The 2004 Faithworks Awards are bold statements by local churches that, far from being dead and irrelevant, they are actually at the heart of providing practical care and real hope to communities across the country.”

“Where faith groups have demonstrated they can be trusted to deliver services to the wider community, local councils need to afford them the same level of trust. I believe that the time has come for local authorities up and down the country to work hard at building powerful partnerships with voluntary and community organisations, and particularly with churches and faith-based projects.” Sir Sandy Bruce Lockhart, Chairman of the Local Government Association (LGA)

As part of the event, three Faithworks Awards were presented to community projects that had been inspired by Christian faith and were demonstrating trustworthiness in meeting a local need.

The CRE Faithworks Community Resource Award 2004 was presented to Trust, a community project providing support to women involved in prostitution on the streets of Brixton, south London.

The Spring Harvest Faithworks Community Innovation Award 2004 was presented to the Turning Point Craft Initiative, a unique recovery programme for alcohol and drug addicts on the Shetland Isles that combines woodworking and woodturning skills with addiction counselling.

The TBN Faithworks Social Entrepreneurship Award 2004 was presented to The Open Doors International Language School, an independent church-run school that is providing English language tuition and life-skills training to refugees and asylum seekers in Plymouth.

The Awards ceremony follows on from the recent launch of the Faithworks Building Trust campaign, which aims to encourage churches, Christians and Christian organisations to model trustworthy behaviour as they engage with their local community. The campaign features a nationwide tour of local churches along with a book by Faithworks Founder, Steve Chalke, entitled Trust: A Radical Manifesto.

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