On May 7th 2006, Rabbi Neil was invited to be the guest speaker at the AGM of the Southampton Council of Faiths (SCOF), a very active body which organises interfaith activities.

Rabbi Neil chose to speak on "The Challenge of Faith Today," an address which he split into two sections - the challenge for faith communities, and the challenge of faith itself to the individual."

In the first section, he explained how "conservatism is the psychological need to preserve the old in the face of the new, but religious fundamentalism is a need to destroy the new for fear of it simply affecting the old." He therefore held that "one challenge is to not bend towards extremism for fear of losing tradition in the face of modernity," while another was "to embrace tradition and change together, to hold them not as mutually exclusive but as an integral pair - a challenge that necessitated new ways of reading traditional sources and new methods of interpretation that promote flexibility and personal expression without compromising the lens of each faith tradition."

He attacked the "overarching failure of religion in this country to be in sync with modern British needs," and therefore challenged the audience to "stimulate the members of our communities intellectually at the same time as spiritually." He spoke on the spiritual schism that has been created by the perception of a society of people who have, and peope who don't yet have, but could. In response to this, he said that "our challenge as members of faith communities is to fully embrace the return to spirituality and to ensure that spirituality is the key to successful living."

But it was the challenge of relevance to which he returned, because it is perhaps the most difficult of all. This is the "challenge of responding to the needs of every human beings without waterig down the religious content of the message, the challenge of working together, instead of aiming to convert those of other faith traditions. In essence, this involves aiming for a new target, which is to bring the world to any faith, not just our particular one, a challenge of working together to bring the world to faith according to their needs, not ours so taht we can simply bolster our number of members." He implied that relevance through spirituality also involved public selfless acts of love since the challenge of relevance was also one of "united moments of calm with moments of profound political and social action."

He also questioned some models of interfaith dialogue which seek to only show the similarities between differing faith traditions. Rabbi Neil said that "to suggest that we're all similar implies nothing unique about our tradition, but we can no longer be afraid of being different, since it is through difference that we reach a great audience and bring more people to faith."

In the second section, the challenge of faith itself to the individual, Rabbi Neil remarked that Ecclesiastes tells us that there is nothing new under the sun, and that there have always been challenges to faith, the most fundamental of which is the problem of evil. Since these problems are perennial, he stated that "we have to be content to help individuals find their own answers through the lens of our tradition...to be content with understanding that sometimes there aren't answers to questions and that the search itself is sometimes more valuable than an answer." There exists a corollary challenge which is for people of faith "not to go for easy answers, or dogmatic ones because we've been told by faith leaders that they're right. This last point is the challenge to use one's own intellect and resources to find the most satisfactory answers to life's questions, first by looking within our own tradition, but then by looking outside as well if there is nothing appropriate that our tradition suggests to us.

Rabbi Neil then asked what is a faith tradition? He noted that most often the name sugegsts something unchanging, almost inflexible, whereas "most of us come from faith traditions that have clearly adapted to differing cultures and societal needs. The challenge of faith, then, is to find which model of faith within our tradition is most preferable, even if that means contravening models of faith that existed hundreds or even thousands of years ago. The challenge for faith leaders is to allow that flexibility - to hold congregations that consist of people who believe God is a supernatural Deity as well as those who do not see GOd in that way."

His final challenge was of how we talk about Divinity, and stated that he believed that rleigious language was all metaphorical. As such, "the challenge of religious dialogue is not to convince others to change their metaphorical model, but merely to come to udnerstand how their metaphor is most appropriate for them, and to show how our particular metaphor is most appropriate for us."

As he rounded off, he stated that we have two choices ahead of us. The first was to follow the model that had been used for thousands of years - to try to bring everyone under the banner of our own particular faith, "to try to make everyone think as we do" - a model he described as being bound for failure. Rabbi Neil said that the only other choice that he could see was "to work together "for the spiritual fulfillment of humanity - for Jews to stay as Jews, for Sikhs to stay as Sikhs, Christians to remain Christians, Muslims to always be Muslims, and so on, so long as the metaphors of those traditions remain relevant for thier members." He concluded by saying that "the challenge of faith today is to bring Divinity to humanity through the lens of all of our traditions combined in an exciting, engaging, personal, and relevant manner. It is a challenge for all of us, and rising to that challenge is the most joyous task we can ever fulfil."