Distinctly Welcoming

Dialogue or Evangelism with Muslims: a simple trade?

There is a mini fuss kicking off about the place of evangelism amongst Muslims. Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali has spoken out about the need to have a strategy for evangelism to Muslims and suggested that the church has been far too diffident in that direction. His comments have provoked a fellow bishop to warn that evangelism "contributes nothing to our communities". What do you think?

Stay with me with this thread while I make my point; whatever you do, don't duck out too early for fear of misunderstanding me! Now I'm someone who normally gets a little jittery when Michael Nazir-Ali starts talking about Muslims...but he has got a point. Is the church a little like liberal newspapers that will gladly have a pop at other religions, but never satirise Muslims for fear of a backlash? There's not much integrity and courage there. And what kind of one-dimensional dialogue and community relations are established when a major dimension of our identity (and this is a mutual identity!) is the injunction to proclaim our faith to the other?

For me it is a no-brainer that we need to embrace evangelism and continue to think through our proclamation to all faiths and none. It's also a no-brainer that we should be thinking through strategies for dialogue and good community relations, though. The more pressing questions relate to the issue of what kind of dialogue and what kind of evangelism?

So, I'll applaud Michael Nazir-Ali, but add a vital qualification. If the Bishop of Rochester wants to resource an influx of folk bearing tracts and standing on podiums doing anti-qur'anic polemics into areas like mine (Muslim-majority) then I will agree to disagree. If he's talking about resourcing church communities that can confidently love and serve their Muslim neighbours unconditionally while unashamedly explaining the hope they have in Jesus, then I'm with him 100%. If the Bishop of Hulme's concern to see good community relations is about smoothing church-mosque relations so issues like apostasy in Islam are never broached and doctrinal differences overlooked in favour of focussing on shared beliefs alone, then I'm not interested. But if his vision of dialogue helps churches and Muslims to disagree and still be friends then I'm up for that.

The thing is, we don't need traditional evangelism or traditional dialogue: we need dialogue that includes the sharing of faith and evangelism that is prepared to listen.

Islam in the West on Film

We live in an age when people get a lot of their cultural clues through film rather than literature. With the aims of encouraging curiosity in other faiths and equipping knowledge, I will offer some pointers to resources beyond the traditional textbook theology or guide to religion books that can be ever so daunting and intimidating. Here are 3 films, then, that are, first and foremost, great entertainment, quality productions. But they also provide authentic and perceptive windows onto Islam in the West. So, in no particular order:

East is East is a comedy based in 1970's Manchester and explores the gulf in cultures between the Pakistani-born Muslim dad, his white English wife and their children. The two worlds that so many Muslim young people live in are reflected in both the comic and tragic episodes of this family. I remember talking to a leading interfaith churchman and Muslim imam about this film and they both thought it offensive and a caricature. I mention this as a qualification to the film but feel I need to recommend it because, without exception, I've found that second-generation British Asians find this witty, warm and true to their own experiences (the imam and vicar were of  "a certain age"). It helps lift the lid on the complexity of faith and culture in the  multicultural debate and  each character is treated with genuine sympathy.

Hidden was my favourite film of last year and is very much at the opposite end of the spectrum from East is East. If you enjoy arthouse foreign language films then you'll love this French domestic drama with brilliant performances from Juliette Binoche and Daniel Auteul. It's the sort of film with lots of languor; minutes when nothing seems to happen. Beneath the tense threat to the middle class existence of the main characters is a foreign menace that seems to draw from a past sin; an act that has never been acknowledged, confessed, forgiven. It's an incredibly powerful film in which you are never quite sure who is guilty, who bears responsibility. In essence, it's a challenge, with the most tantalisingly open-ended conclusion, to love of neighbour, to honest dealings with the past, and risky embrace of the stranger. In our Orwellian Big Brother age, and with the legacies of colonialism and the fear of terrorism, Hidden is a very eloquent stir to emotion and intellect.

Ae Fond Kiss is the third recommendation. A British arthouse film by the director Ken Loach; it's a love story between a white Catholic girl and a Muslim boy, set in sectarian Glasgow. There's a touch of Romeo and Juliet about this, but once again, it helps to highlight the culture/religion interface and the grappling of communitarian Asian cultures in the individualised West. There's a wonderful scene early on when the sister of the Muslim boy is making a school speech and proudly strips off her  school shirt to reveal a blue Rangers top announcing  that, "I'm a Scottish, Muslim, Rangers-supporting girl in a Catholic school". A lovely encapsulation of the mulitiple identities that are the lot of our lives today.

Go rent and watch! ....next up will be novels.

Christian Dialogue with the Secular - Cardinal Cormac and the Professor

I was intrigued to hear Cardinal Cormac Murphy O"Connor's call for a Christian dialogue with the Secular (or Secularism or Atheism). There is a lot of confusion with these terms but I believe he is talking about a dialogue with those that would seek to take God-talk away from the public sphere (strictly speaking "secularism"). Hence, he's had a little dig at Richard Dawkins and his like (who was given the most woefully gentle treatment when interviewed this morning by that rottweiler John Humphreys on the radio!). What this sort of discussion demonstrates is that our context is not one of "faith versus the rest", still less about a purported vision of Christian Britain against the threat of political Islam. Across all quarters, amongst all communities, there are fundamental convictions about the nature of the good life that need to find expression. The challenge is to find language appropriate to what motivates and inspires our deepest concerns about life, community and the other such that the differences do not detract from the building of a shared whole.

Frequently, when lecturing about Islam, people will respond by saying something like, "We have an amazing amount in common, it seems to me that the real enemy is secular atheism". I have to reply, "no". The fact that we have so much in common in terms of the oneness of God and a recognition of many shared prophets (as we do with Judaism) demands that we ought to be better about the conversations, but we have our fundamental points of departure. Secularism, too, though teaches us truths consonant with the gospel. There are threats within the agenda of secularists seeking to remove God-talk from the public square....There are also threats within the agenda of a robust political Islam that totalises the non-Muslim. But there is much of God's grace within the freedoms and liberties of secularism or in the corporate responsibility to God within political Islam. We are not dealing with either/ors here, enemies or partners.

Can we learn from all quarters in being fully Christian and totally engaged, bringing our own challenges in turn? My Masters supervisor David Marshall makes the point that the Church arguably rediscovered its original mandate of social justice through its encounter with Marxism. I would add that, more latterly, the Church has rediscovered its original mandate to stewardship of creation through its encounter with the conservation movement. What might we learn and rediscover about our particular biblical calling as we engage in honest, vulnerable but confident ways with Muslims, Hindus, New Agers, Prof Richard Dawkins etc etc...It makes our bewildering multifaith milieu an exciting prospect rather than a frightening one when looked at this way, does it not?