Distinctly Welcoming

If you go down to the woods today......

A big part of my job involves helping churches to understand Islam and Muslims and to engage constructively as good neighbours. It's quite a challenge in the current climate of fear and not helped by some Christian voices that would villify and generalise. Every now and then, though, something comes up on the news that makes my job exceptionally difficult, and the controversy over the teddy bear in the Sudanese classroom is one of those instances. I groan, I wince, I shudder.Good dialogue, good neighbourliness requires that we have some uncomfortable discussions too. A colleague of mine has been suggesting that the current metaphors of host and guest for the Christian engagement with our multifaith arena are inadequate. Basically, guests are always on their best behaviour and will try not to say anything too challenging to their host. After all, they're dependent on the host aren't they? Conversely, a host will have a reputation to keep up and not want to turn the guest out. So what is it to be? He suggests that "co-citizens" might be a more robust metaphor. As co-citizens in this world, let's express our disgust for the reactions of the Education Ministry in Sudan. They're not representative of all Muslims, let's not forget that, but with grace, humility and with a determination to hear critiques that come the other way, let's not duck out of the hard-talk. Oh, and if all we do with and about Muslims is the "hard-talk", it might be time to rewind and start being a guest before we can mature into being co-citizens.

Beginnings and Endings

For this Advent, I've bought Maggi Dawn's new book of daily readings, "Beginnings and Endings", and whilst I don't want to spoil my Christmas preparation by peeking at the ending, it does look like it will be good value. Maggi is someone who does not  resort to the stock or fashionable statement. She is able to combine a huge wealth of theological knowledge, a proper appreciation of tradition and church history and a creative twist to make our faith root in today's world.

Maggi recently posted on "emerging christology" and shares some complex yet refreshing thoughts that are worth airing. Essentially, the emerging church has emphasised the incarnational roots of the Christian faith and thus advocated a missional theology. For Maggi, there is a danger that this tips the pendulum towards reducing our view of Christ  as he is always seen as within culture. This danger is especially apparent when the Trinity is expounded only as a model of sociality: of our interrelatedness and interdependence. This is all brain-ache stuff but I think I know what Maggi is getting at. Coming at this from a "theology of religions" perspective, it seems that we need a Trinitarian understanding that gives us a vision of what God looks like (the self-giving love of the cross) and how God moves (by His Spirit in the church and in the world). The very fact that God is God means that we cannot say all there is to say about God (the third part of this Trinity!), and as a consequence cannot say all there is to say about Christ. It's this tension between the universal and the particular that is enabled by a true Trinitarian understanding: ie how can you say you follow the God of the whole world if this God can only be known and accessed in this particular time and place?

This is the counter-balance that, perhaps, Maggi is touching towards. You reduce Jesus to being a relevant, contextual servant of God, and Jesus ceases to be God. You do that, and other gods rise up. You over-emphasise Trinity as a model of behaviour rather than as a life to participate in, and church becomes a dispensible extra as opposed to a sign and down-payment of what the God of covenant is doing in the world even in all (and because?) of its wearisome variety, tradition and brokenness.

There was a fab throw-away line of Bishop Graham Cray at this year's Greenbelt. He talked of holding the tension of God as present, absent and coming. God is here, active in the church and in the world; we don't need to conjure him up and signs of his goodness and his imprint are in every person, every situation and every place. God is also absent: absent because he is God and we are not, but absent because there is pain, sin, brokenness, suffering. God is also coming: there is a future, a hope, God does transform and heal. The church, broken, battered and bruised, are heralds of this new creation, this new future, where what is whole, we believe, will look something like the Christ we know. In many instances, for people that do not share our faith, the task will be what Rowan Williams describes as inviting the world to find "in the narrative and practice of Jesus and his community that which anchors and connects their human hopefulness". The challenge then remains to find the language to make sense of this hopefulness, without colonising and patronising. Here endeth the brain-ache session! Normal service will resume when we complete the Distinctly Welcoming iPod next week!!

Church Schools - critical friendship

Big Bulky Anglican is a thoughtful parish priest who is not afraid of commenting on the church and its mission and place in public life. He has posted recently on the role of church schools in a multifaith and post-Christendom society and provides some worthwhile reflections here. The post effectively encourages a stepping back from unqualified support of faith schools and, noting comments by Simon Barrow and Jonathan Bartley of the Christian think-tank Ekklesia suggests that we should be putting some clear blue water between ourselves and the self-serving agendas of government.

Now I speak as a parent and governor of a church school in a mixed faith, multicultural area. Nearly half of the school's in-take is Muslim yet it provides a distinctly Christian ethos to its education; education that  genuinely sees every child and member of staff as significant and valued. Other faith celebrations are acknowledged, taught and shared while there is a weekly Christian act of worship. The key thing is, though, no assumptions are made about the allegiance of pupils and in every explicit Christian story or prayer, a lesson or application that can be owned by everyone is provided. Indeed, every prayer is prefaced with a, "if you agree, you can say "Amen" at the end". The church is distinctive, but inclusive. Not one pupil is taken out of the collective worship and the local community, of decidedly other faiths, value the school partly because it "does God".

Now, after this eulogising, I have to go back to the posts mentioned above. The challenge to us is that faith schools are often NOT like this. The critique of society that they are elitist and self-aggrandising can so often stick. There are genuine issues too about the unfairness of the privilege enjoyed by CofE schools that I too am concerned about. The argument is not, "should faith schools exist?" but rather "how should their respective faiths inform their role in the schools in an age of diversity?"

I would commend to you the booklets published by my friend Smeeee, "Top Tips for Welcoming Children of Other Faiths" which you can link to on the sidebar of this site and also the latest edition of Colin Chapman's "Cross and Crescent" book. The latter has some case studies in the back of the book, one on faith schools where I was kindly invited to publish some thoughts. Let's not spin the success of some faith schools; dare I say it that in a post-Christendom, cynical society, we should have no truck for spin by the church anyway, but let's take a long hard look at what we can and ought to be in society. The public square is there for us to serve, not to conquer.

Distinctly Welcoming iPod No. 3 - "Step Right Up" and "Chocolate Jesus", Tom Waits

Another excursion into popular culture for lessons in engaging with our multicultural society, this time from that balladeer of the low life, the romantic of the all-night bar whose crackling voice is as diamond-edged as his lyrics are cutting, witty and wise. Tom Waits has written two songs that, for me, provide a neat challenge to the pervading god of consumerism: "Step Right Up" and "Chocolate Jesus". In our fear and bewilderment at the pushing of the Christian faith to the fringes of the West and the rise in other religions, it is easy to forget the single most powerful force around and its corrosive effect on all of us, and especially our youth: materialism.

"Step Right Up" is a hilarious and relentless litany of selling slogans, "That's right it fillets, it chops, it dices, it slices, Never stops, lasts a lifetime, mows your lawn....You can live in it, live in it, laugh in it, love in it, Swim in it, sleep in it....It's a friend, it's a companion, It's the only product you'll ever need". Check it out, smile, wince and be that more cynical about the lies we take on board every day, without realising that "The large print giveth, And the small print taketh away". This seeps into the very fabric of our church culture and that's where "Chocolate Jesus" comes in.

Tom Waits' "church" is his local candy store where they sell a chocolate Jesus, "the only thing that can pick me up": "It's best to wrap your saviour up in cellophane He flows like the big muddy river But that's ok Pour him over ice cream for a nice parfait". It's cynical, it's barbed and it ought to challenge the church in an age when we so often domesticate Jesus so that "He's good enough for me, Make me feel good inside". In a consumerist age, is the Christian faith just one of a number of options out there to keep us comfortable, prop us up, provide our therapeutic kick away from the pain of life? Or is Jesus our radical Lord, challenging all other deities, brands and allegiances? Sing on Tom Waits, prophet of the twilight zone. If we are to seriously engage as a church with our multifaith context, we need to name some of the idols first: "The large print giveth and the small print taketh away".

Pilgrims of Christ on the Muslim Road

Last night I was at a fascinating lecture by Paul-Gordon Chandler on his new book, "Pilgrims of Christ on the Muslim Road". Chandler is an American Episcopal priest in Cairo and has many years of living and working in the Muslim world. His challenge is that the church should be seeking to develop points of contact and commonality with Islam, helping Muslims see that Jesus can be followed entirely within the cultural and religious norms of the Islamic faith. He takes the celebrated examples of Sadhu Sundar Singh (Sikh follower of Christ) and the work of E Stanley Jones ("The Christ of the Indian Road") as indicative of incarnational models of witness that avoid the imperialism and westernisation of so much of the church.

Arabic novelist Mazhar Mallouhi is a vital example of this: perhaps the most famous living writer of fiction in the Arab world, feted by Muslim scholars and yet professing to be a Muslim follower of Christ. Mallouhi has written novels infused by his Sufi spirituality and even published a number of commentaries on the gospels. He reframes the gospel for Muslim audiences highlighting the distinctive, peace-loving and decidedly Middle Eastern Christ shorne of the offensiveness of the typical Scandinavian, western Jesus frequently on offer from the church.

There was so much to ponder in the lecture...much that I welcome and much too that I'm a little uncomfortable with (a week of discomfort perhaps?...see the previous post!). Mallouhi still holds to the 5 pillars of Islam but adds in Jesus to the traditional creedal statement of belief in Allah and Mohammed as his prophet. My questions is, what is the nature of the Muslim Jesus presented by Mallouhi? I can't wait to get hold of some of his works and check this out. Is this a reductionist Jesus; a good man with an appealing ethic? And what of the church then? Is the church entirely irrelevant in the process of a Muslim following Christ? The Old Testament and Paul are clearly no-go areas for Mallouhi and Chandler as they advocate this road. Big questions of mission, hermeneutics, eschatology and ecclesiology....

But in the meantime, there is a very real challenge for us; one that is arguably of greater urgency in the post colonial Middle East than in the West where many of our Muslim neighbours are as distanced from Arabic culture and mores as the next person: How can the life of Jesus be fully contextualised in a Muslim world which has been so immunised against the church by the self-aggrandisement and totalising power of the Christian West?

New Age Spirituality - Too close for comfort?

Yesterday I had the privilege of hosting Ben Edson of the emerging church fellowship sanctus1 as he did some training for us and then spoke at our BLAH Birmingham event. Ben has just come back from a week of research in the New Age eco community of Findhorn and his reflections were incredibly stimulating. I won't repeat his story here but Ben's blog plays out the scenario of joining in the ritual of the birth of the new moon here and it has created quite a stir. Ben is an incredibly thoughtful church leader with, at heart, a truly missionary vocation so we would do well to hear him out and listen to the challenge of a constructive engagement with New Age and neo-Pagan spiritualities.

Coming from the more acceptable inter-faith perspective it's fascinating for me to reflect on Ben's approach. I'm not sure that there are definitive judgments to be made here. On one level, it's far easier to know when to say "no" and when to say "yes" to a shared prayer when working with traditional religions with their corpus of language and theology that can provide for a sifting of the good, the bad and the blandly benign. When we encounter the New Age, we are engaging with a meld and mix that, to some extent, accomodates whatever the participant wishes to read into the experience. I wonder too that in Ben's sharing in the birth of the new moon festival that what you have here is a ritual, divorced from worship. It seems to be more like a rite of passage, a marking of the seasons that can become an act of worship for us as we recognise the faithful sovereign God who governs the seasons.

Reflecting on Paul's engagement with the religions of his day, I recognise three understandings of "what is happening" that require discernment: something of God, something false and dangerous, and something empty and redundant. The risky challenge for everyone of us (whether we are mixing it with the secular, Islamic, Hindu, New Age etc) is to to stay faithful and true in relationship when we are not entirely sure what we are discerning.

Anyway, Ben, thankyou for the stimulus of your thoughts and your considered practice.

Distinctly Welcoming iPod - No. 4 "Go to Sleep"

In teaching on a Christian engagement in our multifaith world, I love to point to that old curmudgeon Jeremiah. Somehow, this prophet, who is perhaps the great archetype of Christ in his suffering on behalf of the city, holds together an uncompromising sense of what it means to be a follower of God (wholehearted worship evidenced in acts of justice and mercy) with a vocation to the people to be a blessing to all. So, in Jeremiah 29, when the fate that he has prophesied to his cost is sealed and the Babylonians have finally taken over the holy city of Jerusalem, he writes to the Israelites that have been carried into exile in Babylon. The essence of the prophecy is that they are to be a blessing to the people of that city and that their own future is dependent on the way that they bless those that worship other gods in this strange city. It's a message for our time. In Radiohead's blistering "Go to Sleep" you get the usual opaque lyrics but I see this song as being the culmination of the album: a satire of those that would carry on regardless, as if nothing need change. In Radiohead's vision, rampant globalisation and ecological meltdown are continuing apace but the powers that be would prefer that "We don't really want a monster taking over", "We don't want the loonies takin' over". What are the monsters? For some, its Islam, for others its secular humanism. Maybe we should just recognise that we're now strangers in an alien land and take our worship more seriously and recognise our vocation to bless all peoples. If you don't know the song, see the video here on Youtube, and you get the additional Jeremiah style image of that prophet's own vocation to tear down and destroy, to plant and to build. What may need tearing down are so many of the church's cherished pretensions to hold the ring of privilege. And if the video doesn't grab you, just enjoy the freewheeling guitar solo at the end: lament and protest for the 21st Century.

Distinctly Welcoming iPod - No. 5 "Rock El Casbah"

I've planned to bring a lighter touch in this blog to Christian reflections on our multifaith world so as part of that, I'm going to present the "Top 5 songs on the Distinctly Welcoming iPod". These will be songs that give us some insights into the religious diversity we find ourselves in. First up is Rachid Taha's incredible reworking of The Clash's "Rock the Casbah". The original punk classic was written in response to the banning of punk records in Saudi Arabia: "Now the king told the boogie men you have to let that raga drop". The chorus hits and the music still holds sway even though "Sharif don't like it". So the jet pilots are sent in on the minarets: "He thinks its not kosher Fundamentally he can't take it You know he really hates it." Hearing these words spoken in Arabic by an Algerian who has spoken out against the marginalisation of North African communities by the secularist French state is startling. Rachid Taha is somehow subverting a diatribe against religious fundamentalism to make a more nuanced statement about the imperialistic West, whose jet planes now circle the minarets of the Middle East. At the same time, he is celebrating the music and culture of the West and advocating an artistic freedom that would be unimaginable in Saudi Arabia. And then you remember Algeria, where free democratic elections were annulled because the "wrong party" won (the Islamists) and wonder whether Taha is also wanting to say something about privileged elites crushing the voices of those in the casbahs of Algiers.

Confused? You should be. This song exemplifies something of the religious, political and cultural borrowing that makes conversation about faith so problematic. Simplistic polarities that seek to divide the world into monolithic compartments no longer work. What is the reality on the ground? Where are the people in all our generalisations?  Listen to the thrilling voice of Rachid Taha, hear his passion and  you might make a start  here.

BLAH Brum - New Age Spiritualities, Ben Edson

Next Tuesday, 13th November, we have the latest BLAH seminar with Ben Edson from the holy city of Manchester. Ben is involved in sanctus1, an emerging church fellowship linked in to the Manchester Diocese and seeking to engage spiritual searchers. Ben is one of the leading thinkers in the emerging church movement and was recently at the Manchester Mind, Body, Spirit Fair embodying something of Paul at the Areopagus in Acts 17! He's well worth listening to and will be sharing about some of the lessons he has learned on the way. Doors open at 6.30pm, light refreshments available, we finish at 8.30pm. As usual, we're using the "Breathe" space on the 5th floor of 3 Temple Row, opposite Birmingham's Anglican Cathedral, St Philips. Let me know if you plan to show.

A Common Word

Following the recent letter from Muslim leaders to Christian leaders, "A Common Word" stating the basis for a shared dialogue between the two faiths, a "Common Word" website has been launched here. The full text of the letter can be read including a huge range of worldwide responses from Christian and other leaders. It's fascinating to read and genuinely challenges us to think through, "what is my basis for dialogue with other faiths?" I heard a Christian academic of Islamics recently make the point that the "A Common Word" document is the Muslim equivalent of Nostra Aetate. NA is the Catholic church's groundbreaking document on the status of other faiths from Vatican II. Interestingly, that document stresses the basis of dialogue is not the shared belief in "worship of the one God and love of neighbour" but our shared humanity. This I prefer to see as the foundation of any incentive for engagement in relationship with the stranger: we are all human, all broken, all in need of each other, and ultimately God. Once you go beyond that, the nuances and niceties of what we understand by God, by "one", by "neighbour" are so intrinsic to our particular faiths that they become arenas for dialogue rather than shared platforms for dialogue.