‘We need hope in chaos’ says tycoon funding £30m prayer monument – The Times

One of Britain’s richest men, who once helped to bankroll the Tories and Brexit, is now putting his faith — and more than £30 million of funding — in a higher power to bring hope to the country during “difficult times”.
Lord Edmiston is the biggest and most high-profile backer of a project, which broke ground this week, to build a vast Christian monument in the West Midlands countryside between the M6 and M42 motorways to celebrate the power of prayer.
“I think there’s a lot of problems and a lot of pain in the country at the moment. We need hope,” he said in his first interview about the monument. “We know that prayer works. We need to be reminded of that because I think we live in difficult times. Everything I see at the moment is chaos.”
This renewed hope will come, he believes, in the form of a twisted concrete sculpture, shaped like a mobius strip with one continuous side, that will stand 51 metres high on its completion in 2028, taller than the Angel of the North and Rio de Janeiro’s Christ the Redeemer combined. The million-brick monument will be called the Eternal Wall of Answered Prayer, visible from six miles away.
“I’m unaware of anything else in the world that’s quite like this,” said Edmiston, 79.
IM Properties, a firm owned by Edmiston, has not only donated the land in Coleshill, near Birmingham, but has also given at least £31 million.
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Edmiston is 187th on the Sunday Times Rich List, with wealth estimated at £855 million from a car and property empire he started with a £6,000 redundancy payout in 1974. He was ranked higher, at seventh, on the Giving List, donating £46.1 million last year, including through his charity Christian Vision.
Edmiston became a Tory life peer in 2011. He opposed the legalisation of same-sex marriage, commenting in the Lords that it could pave the way for “close relatives” to marry. He says of gay marriage now: “That passed and I accept that’s what’s happened.”
He donated several million pounds to the Conservative Party in the 2000s and 2010s and gave £1 million to pro-Brexit campaigns before the 2016 EU referendum.
Does the peer, who retired from the Lords in 2015, still donate to the Tories? “Let’s put it this way,” he said. “I haven’t given any money to them for a while. To the Conservative Party or any other political party, for that matter.”
Asked if he had considered switching his allegiance to Reform, he said: “I’m a Conservative peer and loyalty’s a big thing. However, I do feel we’re not in a very good place politically in this country … We need some belief. It’d be nice to have something to make us feel a little bit happier about the way the world’s going.”
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Speaking about his faith in prayer, he said he once attended a massive Christian gathering in Nigeria and said: “There were people getting out of wheelchairs and throwing away walking sticks because they were healed.
“I think of Dunkirk, when we were trying to evacuate from the beaches in France. The nation was called to prayer. What happened? The water was really calm and all these boats went out and got people back.”
Edmiston now lives mostly in Australia, but was born in India, the son of a fighter pilot, in 1946. He returned to the UK between the ages of three and ten, before spending five years in Kenya and then coming back to Essex.
He was raised as a Catholic due to his mother’s faith, which left him seeing God as “fearsome”, but an invitation to attend a Pentecostal church aged 17 saw him embrace an evangelical faith that has remained with him for life.
His firm, run by his son, Andrew, has also offered advice for the monument, which was the brainchild of a priest, the Rev Richard Gamble.
“A lot of Christian projects are great on faith but not on too much practicality,” Edmiston said.
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Asked what reaction he expects in a country where less than half of people now identify as Christian and record numbers have no faith at all, he said: “There’ll be those that will be thrilled and delighted, those that think: ‘What on earth is that all about?’ and [who are] curious, and those who will be thinking, ‘What a waste of money.’ But this is something that’s going to be around for a few hundred years. It’s supposed to be a constant reminder to our nation of the goodness of God to us in the past.”
He said on the day work began on the monument: “We once sent missionaries around the world, but in recent times you might ask what’s happened to Christianity in Britain. Yet today I am encouraged: faith is rising again, and this wall is part of what God is doing in the UK.”
As for his own wealth, does the Bible not teach that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God?
“I’ve got more than enough money,” Edmiston said. “And what do you do when you’ve got more than enough? What’s the point of making more than ‘more than enough’? It’s a completely pointless exercise. But the more I make, the more I can do with it. And that’s great.
“I’m not here to tell everyone what a good guy I am,” he said, adding that he wanted to hear from God the words: “Well done, you good and faithful servant.”
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