The current rash of policies across universities (aided by disastrous successive government policies on Higher Education) closing departments of Theology and Religious Studies, let alone other subjects in the Humanities, will one day be an interesting subject for some sociological analysis. Apart from the fact that their view of ‘religion’ is so misinformed so as to evacuate a number of social and political systems of any meaning, they seem to be totally oblivious to the implications of our deeply uncertain and fluid international situation at the moment, where it would be very unreflective (to put it mildly) not to engage with the study of religion and theology. Part of the problem of course is that for a great deal of people around, although religion seems to be very much back in the public domain, ‘religious belief’ is still considered by many to be a private matter, and as such, an anomaly in a vast ocean of human rationality; therefore, it is often considered as faulty, or irrelevant and weak. In some circles, a greater emphasis is put on what is called ‘worldviews’ or ‘spirituality’ without engaging with how these terms actually work.
Very few people can deny that we have moved on from the 1960s analysis of Harvey Cox’s The Secular City and Bryan Wilson’s Religion in Secular Society, when there was an overly optimistic view that religion has become irrelevant. The sustained influence and increasing visibility of religion in the United States led some observers to believe that secularisation was unique to Europe. Meanwhile, historical research into religious developments in individual countries over the last two or three centuries has revealed that patterns of religious expansion and decline frequently do no match the expectations of secularisation theories. Although most Western societies have experienced secularisation, its scale and underlying causes are still unclear. Recent research by Professor Stephen Bullivant at St Mary’s University suggested that secularisation may have peaked in Britain too.
Shifts of opinion on matters that were taken for granted has been evident in different ways. The Brexit referendum ten years ago here suggested a broad frustration with supranational institutions such as the EU; the credibility of the UN has also been under strain with the dominance of a single power, such as the USA. Fast forward ten years on, as America attacks Iran, the dominance of this single power is now itself under question as Britain seeks closer ties with its European neighbours; this is partly because sovereign states are increasingly aware that global crises such as the environment, terrorism and migration cannot be solved by detached states alone, even if these states dislike global jurisdictions. So, the first lesson we have from these initial remarks is that we cannot see the world around us in arbitrary single-eyed ways. There is no one way of understanding the world, which any fool is going to easily discover. We need to develop a range of skills that enable us to make connections and understand one event by viewing it through the perspective of other phenomena.
The American/Israeli confrontation with Iran cannot clearly be understood only through the lens of pure politics. America’s project of deposing Middle Eastern tyrants with the hope of turning their states into ‘Switzerland’ has failed miserably. This is a project that united both the politically Liberal Right and the European liberal Left. Both assume that Enlightenment liberalism is the evident creed of rational human beings, whilst many such Liberals are unconscious of the fact, as Tom Holland’s book Dominion argued, that the historical development of Liberalism is not possible without Christianity. Liberalism is, otherwise, inexplicable. The cultural and religious varieties in play between Europe and the Middle East are not superficial private matters that can easily be ignored.
The Iranian regime thinks of itself as ‘the virtuous city’, to use the term of the Arabic philosopher Al-Farabi (reshaping some Platonic terms); in practice, it is more a group of sad old men leading a rather dysfunctional constitutional model; it appears to be a contradictory combination of public representation with the absolute rule of the Jurist cleric. The assumption for this kind of regime is that the common good is obvious, and any sensible Shi’a Muslim must surely agree with the same policies and vision of the religious rulers. The Ayatollah figures are there to guide and direct everyone in the same direction. When ‘democracy’ was finally imposed on Iraq after the American invasion in 2003, the same type of constitution (under American supervision) was developing in a context where Shi’ites formed the majority and religious leaders had to play a role in the decision-making process.
Understanding Islamic law and society here is important. Scholars of Islamic law, such as Wael Hallaq, have pointed to the ‘impossibility’ of establishing a modern Nation State based on Sharia as statutory civil law, simply because Islamic law is not meant to be a centralised system in a bureaucratic state; as such, the concept of a civil law, or civil society, where ideas of natural law and reason as fundamental human properties, are historically alien to traditional Muslim societies. Liberal democracies have not been possible in most of the countries in the Middle East. Whilst there are some contemporary Muslim thinkers, such as Abdullahi An-Naim and Anver Emon, who are trying to engage with these questions, the Middle East has oscillated between secular despotism and the so-called Islamist rule. In Iran, it seems, those who question the authority of the jurist cleric and his ability to interpret the divine will are bound to suffer.
Islam of course is not monolithic. However, one might argue that it is a great deal easier to develop this illiberal view when the religious tradition understands the Quranic revelation as hegemonically frozen in time. This is different from the historical evolvement of doctrine that St John Henry Newman talks about in reference to the Truth as a dead man on the cross, when the saeculum of St Augustine of Hippo sits between the Incarnation and the Parousia. Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, like Martin Heidegger, believed in a particular understanding of union or annihilation in Being; for Khomeini, this is based on a type of Sufi thought and practice, solving the Cartesian riddle of mind/body at a stroke. But as we know, Heidegger was a Nazi.
Therefore, the assumptions made about democracy in the Middle East suggest a good level of ignorance about the history of where the liberal democratic tradition comes from. The justification for the offensive against Iran as regime change is vulnerable to the kind of unhistorical optimism which characterised the American invasion of Iraq.
However, if you thought that was enough religion to engage with, Tim Stanley added in one of his Telegraph op-eds recently, with his characteristically good satirical humour, how ‘Trump’s reckless Iran war is underpinned by bad theology’, namely eccentric American Christian Fundamentalism. Similarly, in a recent Spectator podcast, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Williams, spoke of America’s ‘demonic’ political climate, adding his voice to Pope Leo’s critical interventions, the Pope being someone who got to his position at a very challenging time in international relations indeed.
How can one distinguish between good or bad theology? First, it is important to remember that contemporary American Christian fundamentalism is essentially modern. As George Marsden pointed out, the fundamentalist conception of truth is derived from a scientific age. It is formed on the analogy of natural science as seen in the Newtonian mould. Therefore, fundamentalists tend to have a ‘scientific view’ of the bible; a series of ‘hard facts’ apprehensible by the ‘common sense’ of the sincere believer’.[1] It is an interesting fact that this movement flourished in North America more than in any other traditional context.[2] Its foundational method of reading the Bible is not dissimilar to the foundation of modern America with its disregard for history, local tradition, and law. The immigrant whites came to consider America as the new free land, where they can do what they wish with total disregard to the local traditions and no sense of belonging to the indigenous culture.[3] This formative narrative, one might suggest, is fertile soil for eccentric fundamentalisms. It has allowed America to look in the eyes of Middle Eastern peoples today as a counter ‘Jihad state’. Indeed, Trump’s foreign policies are not new American policies. When I visited Washington DC in February/March of 2025, I was told by those who should know better that Donald Trump looks back to the example of the 25th US President William McKinley (1897-1901), who had similar expansionist and tariff policies.
If Tump and some of his Right-Wing allies like to talk of the Christian heritage of the West, we need to ask what this means; for this is not simply about Christianity being the dominant faith. Rather, it is more importantly about remembering that the history of the Church and its engagement with political powers in Europe made it clear that political power in Europe was to be argued about; political leaders were always answerable to justifying their legitimacy before the law and before God. This much we can learn from the medieval text of Thomas Aquinas too. Without denying the Church’s illiberal past, many contemporary thinkers remind us that the Enlightenment protests that shaped modern Europe did not come from nowhere; much of it rests on theological arguments that would not have been possible if the Church were not a distinctive body in the society challenging those with various interests and agendas vying for power.
Both the Trumpian model and the purely secular rhetoric in Europe have left us vulnerable to different types of unhistorical optimism, because both of them either disregard the Church as an enemy (Trump vs the Pope) or at best consider it a private institution; this has allowed our assumptions about liberal modernity to turn into an absolute, tyrannical, pseudo religious ideology, not dissimilar in fact to radical political Islam. The rise of what some regard as unwelcome elements in European politics comes with the gap created by this total disregard to this aspect of the Christian history of Europe; a forthcoming book by Dr Michael Bonner, The Crisis of Liberalism, argues that without faith in God, Liberalism faces an existential crisis.
The challenge in the West, therefore, is to be able to engage critically with this history, preserving a European distinctiveness in the midst of all of this requires that we ask what is the specific moral and European substance that shaped European history and that can engage with the world of Islam in a clear and productive manner. In the absence of any such clarity, many religious and non-religious thinkers have warned, we find ourselves in the postmodern dilemma of competing relative narratives vying for power without any clear perception of the wider common good; not to have a clear moral and spiritual foundation today means being trapped in violent reactions.
The challenge in the Islamic context, whether in the Middle East or in Europe is to go beyond the dangers of essentialising the text and turning it into a system. There are limits to the Quran’s claim to textual finality, as a purer account of the divine. As a friend scholar of Shi’ite thought once noted to me: ‘A divine voice that seeks to remain aloof to the complexities of history risks falling victim to it’. Is it possible for an Islamic tradition to raise anything equivalent to the biblical argumentation with God, as opposed to the power play of who can provide a better exegesis of sacred texts? This is not only characteristic of Iranian religious institutions. It’s also there in other Sunni establishments.
As I noted elsewhere before, the path forward in Muslim contexts lies in focusing more on certain elements of Islam’s mystical dimension and the quest for a “humbler” position where the revealed text’s contingency and human limitations are more clearly recognised. It might be a difficult position to take given the insecurities of the post-colonial Muslim majority states. But it is this kind of acknowledgment that will encourage a culture of argumentation and intellectual humility that the best of the Enlightenment brought. Whilst there are complicated and rich debates in classical Islam on questions of Theodicy, God’s law and justice, it was my medieval Muslim friend, al-Ghazali who came closer to the Christian understanding of natural law, albeit not entirely the same either. Without this exploration, or perhaps even transformation, ‘the common good’ of the Middle East is going to end up simply being defined by tyrants of different types.
The challenge for us here in Britain is how to revive greater engagement with theology and religious studies for the common good so that our universities can be havens for arguments and a better culture of political negotiation; the government has a responsibility to promote such collaboration for universities and indeed fund it. Theocracies, or pseudo theocracies as well as ideological secularism provide a final claim that might be functionalist, but they are an escape from the complexities of history, and they see the world with one eye. The society deserves better, and they won’t get there if the focus lacks engagement with theology, because, as Aquinas noted, theology is the sort of subject that relates to everything; its pedagogy is that of wholeness, inviting us to an entire process of engaging with all the sciences through our participation in wisdom. We ignore it at our peril.
Rev’d Dr Yazid Said is a Senior Lecturer in Islam at Liverpool Hope University. After being ordained an Anglican priest, he completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge (2010) on the medieval Muslim theologian Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (d. 1111). His research is focused on medieval Muslim political and legal thought and on Christian-Muslim theological encounters, with reference to the manner in which Greek philosophical thought was appropriated in both Christian and Muslim texts.
[1] Marsden, George, Fundamentalism and American Culture, pp. 7-8.
A guest post written by Abdul-Azim Ahmed, editor of On Religion magazine, a current affairs publication with a focus on theology and religion. Abdul-Azim is a PhD candidate researching British mosques at Cardiff University’s Centre for the Study of Islam in the UK.
I arrived just before sunset on a Monday evening at my local mosque, Dar ul-Isra. The mosque, a former church hall, is packed with people. On the bottom floor, volunteers in matching T-shirts frantically set out food to be eaten by worshippers for the iftaar. It’s the holy month of Ramadan, and Muslims are fasting from about 3am until 9.30pm, and many will come to the mosque to break their fasts and share a meal with others.
I stand in the foyer and remove my shoes. In the corner of the foyer is a large red bucket filled with tinned food. It’s a collection for the Huggard Homeless Centre nearby. As I make my way to the main hall, I’m greeted by the sound of dozens of Muslims reciting the Quran in the final minutes before sunset. I look around the large hall and find the group I came here to meet, a delegation from PeaceFeast, a charity that aims to build links between communities by sharing food. I sit with them until the call to prayer is given. I break my fast, and then join a congregation of about a hundred and fifty in performing one of the five daily prayers of Islam.
This isn’t an extraordinary day in the mosque. In many ways, it is business as usual. This snapshot of the daily life of a mosque is a million miles away from the images we are treated to in some corners of the media. Daily Mail articles about “mega mosques” and radical preachers are examples of the torrent of negative press British mosques receive. Perhaps unsurprisingly then they have become the targets for hate crime. Tell MAMA, the UK-based charitable organisation measuring anti-Muslim assaults, recorded over a dozen attacks on mosque in the past year, the most serious of which is the case of Pavlo Lapshyn, a Ukrainian PhD student who murdered an elderly Muslim pensioner and then detonated three bombs in mosques in the Midlands.
Yet away from the negativity, mosques are incredible places of hope. Some accuse them of being spaces of segregation, where Muslims isolate themselves from wider-society. This accusation is naïve at best. To the contrary, mosques play an important role in allowing Muslim communities, often disengaged from mainstream politics, to engage in civic life. From one-off surgeries with local councillors, to Friday sermons on the importance of voting, the mosque is often a gateway into a wider political world. By holding interfaith and community events, mosques also allow for meaningful relationships to be built between peoples of all faiths and non-religious people, in a way that otherwise would not be possible. Those who criticise large mosques in British cities as symbols that Muslims do not want to integrate fail to appreciate that by establishing a mosque in Britain, British Muslims have made a powerful statement that here is home.
Mosques are also places of charity. A survey by The Times found Muslims are one of Britain’s most charitable communities. Much of this charity takes place in mosques, with aid organisations such as Islamic Relief raising millions through collections and fundraisers at mosques across the country. Charity of course starts at home, and alongside international organisations such as Islamic Relief and Muslim Aid, local charitable projects can also be found. These include collections for the homeless and tinned food drives.
It is not uncommon to hear the refrain “a mosque is a community centre” amongst Muslims. This often highlights the vision that a mosque should be a part of the local neighbourhood, not apart from it. As such, it is possible to find many activities you would expect at a community centre being held at mosques. These include Scouts groups, fitness classes, GCSE and A-Level tuition, and CV-writing workshops. Naturally, these are of interest not only to Muslims but to non-Muslims alike, and I’ve seen mosques where their services and activities are utilised by a wider cross-section of society.
Not all mosques of course hold the projects I mentioned above. It is sometimes easy to forget that the word mosque might refer to everything from tiny terraced homes used for worship to purpose-built landmarks with built-in restaurants and gyms. Further, there is still much work to be done on providing greater access for women, in training and recruiting Muslim Imams and religious professionals who can lead a new generation of mosques, and facing up to the dangerous Islamophobia in Britain that often leads to attacks of mosques.
Yet when we consider how much mosques have developed in the past fifty years alone, one can be certain that mosques will play a central role in the future of Britain.
Within and beyond my work at the William Temple Foundation, I am an active member of the interfaith movement in the UK and Europe. And there are many, many reasons why I love this work. But I have a guilty admission; one of these reasons is the food! Religious communities can be fantastically hospitable, from sangar at Sikh gurdwaras, to the feast of a Shabbat dinner, I have happily munched my way through numerous interfaith encounters. Recently the subject of food in religion has been on my mind for the Islamic month of fasting, Ramadan began last weekend. It is a very special time for many Muslims; a time of reflection, spiritual renewal, and in my experience, delicious communal iftars (evening meals) at the breaking of the fast each day.
In the religious context, food and community are inextricably linked. As a Church of England Priest recently reminded, it is no surprise that eating and drinking is at the heart of the Christian liturgy. The bread and the wine of Christian worship, whilst food for the soul rather than nourishment for the body, demonstrate the power of sharing and eating together.
In the interfaith context food offers a handy stating point, as something which we can all discuss from our differing perspectives, thereby offering a space from which further discussions might grow. It is also an opportunity for giving, receiving, and sharing, thereby developing bonds of trust from the start. As such, members of British Muslim communities have developed all sorts of ways for none-Muslims to experience and understand their fasting, and (most excitingly for a foodie like me) to share in the breaking of the fast. One example is a project called Dine@Mine, started by one of my closest friends with the aim of matching Muslims who are eager to share their hospitality, with non-Muslims keen to learn more about Ramadan.
But whilst food can be a great source of celebration for many faith groups, in recent months, it has also been a great cause of concern. Food has become the junction where religion and politics meets. Responding to the dire needs of their communities, faith groups up and down the country have set up food banks. Whilst these projects might be seen as another example of the hospitality of faith groups, food banks rarely exist for the purpose of sharing communally; of eating and drinking and being together. For how can they? The rise of food poverty in Britain is a stark reminder of the most basic need of food. And what becomes clear is how poverty is not a mere matter of physical deprivation, but that it also robs basic dignities, diminishes spirituality, and limits the ability to be social (with inevitable impacts on mental wellbeing).
The invaluable social capital of faith-based organisations is undoubtedly filling vital welfare gaps. And for all we might celebrate these chances for outreach and service, as my William Temple Foundation colleague Chris Baker recently pointed out, the success of such programmes may come at the dangerous cost of normalising food banks. In doing so, we risk normalising the notion that the state no longer exists to assist in the most basic needs of its citizens.
Further, in responding to food poverty there is the risk that religious hospitality becomes a culture of giving, rather than a culture of sharing. And there is, of course, a distinct difference between the two. Unlike giving, which implies a one-way transfer, sharing is imbued with commonality, commitment and equality. In a society that has more than enough to go around, gaping inequalities risk starving us of more than just physical nourishment.
Charlotte Dando is Assistant Director for Communications & Development at William Temple Foundation
How should Christians relate to Muslims? Are they a problem, unwelcome, a threat? Recently there has been a lot of interest in, and disapproval of halal slaughter. We also learnt that the broadcast of the call to prayer in Channel 4’s Ramadan Seasonlast year received more complaints than anything else aired by the broadcaster. Meanwhile Britain First – a “patriotic political party and street defence organisation” – has been entering mosques with their shoes on, giving Bibles to worshippers, and a Presbyterian pastor has denounced Islam from the pulpit. Internationally, we have heard worse things of women being killed and another being sentenced to death.
I admit to being particularly attuned to it, but Muslims are rarely out of the media. Sometimes I am asked, ‘How should Christians relate to Muslims?’ Many have already made up their minds. In some ways the question is new, but it is also very old. We don’t have far to look to find a ‘Saracen’s Head’ pub (Saracen = Muslim) or organisations called ‘Crusaders’. Historical tension and animosity between Christians and Muslims is woven into our culture. In the present, we encounter many negative stories and impressions of Muslims in the media, whether it is, so called, ‘Islamist terrorists’ or a Muslim ‘Trojan Horse’ takeover of schools.
Many people have a negative perception of Muslims because of media coverage, so that if you ask them who Al-Qaeda or Boko Haram are they say Muslim, rather than terrorist. Channel 4 sought to challenge the negativity with its Ramadan Season but was then accused of “imposing Islam”, or not giving an honest picture.
For the Christian perhaps, there are more important theological or religious questions about Islam: how can we relate positively to a faith which explicitly denies the central tenets of Christianity? How do we navigate these difficult questions, especially where minds are already made up?
There are clues in our past, both Christian and Islamic. One ancient story is that of St Francis of Assisi who, in the middle of war, when a city was being seized, went out to the Caliph’s camp and engaged in dialogue with the leader of the Muslim army (this was in the days when both Christianity – Christendom – and Islam were geopolitical entities). Francis entered, held deep discussions and left in peace. He did not persuade his dialogue partners, but there was mutual respect and listening (just as Jesus spoke to the Samaritan woman that no one else would have spoken to).
At another time of great difficulty, when believers were being persecuted for their faith, they were sent to another country, where a fair-minded religious ruler would keep them safe. This is the story of Muhammad sending his followers from Mecca to the Christian kingdom of Abyssinia. Another example of dialogue is when a Christian delegation came to meet with Muhammad and discuss their divisive differences in beliefs about Jesus. When it was time for the Christians to say their prayers they prepared to leave, but Muhammad encouraged them to pray in his mosque.
Peaceful encounters between our two faiths go back to the earliest days of Islam, there is no reason why they should not continue today. But such opportunities can be derailed by our difficult history. There is much talk of ‘truth’ when interaction between people of different faiths is being contemplated. Should ‘truth’ be a barrier for us, keeping others out so that we cannot even be the witnesses that Jesus asked us to be, or to adopt an attitude of searching? – as the Puritan John Robinson said, ‘the Lord has yet more light and truth to break forth from His Word’.
As people of truth we should not be swayed by perceptions but seek to discover the reality, just as the Apostle Paul sought to be ‘all things to all people’ (1 Cor. 9.22) in order to communicate with his society. In my own experience many people, including Christians, take issue with the idea of ‘all things to all people’ as mealy-mouthed, ‘political-correctness gone mad’. Perhaps because the words have drifted loose from their context of passionate, robust, honest and committed engagement. In fact, we may not realise, Paul is actually role-modelling how the Christian should ‘do’ inter faith encounter and dialogue.
Inevitably, in my own work I am often speaking up for Islam, bringing to bear what I have learnt, or more often, and more likely, what I have experienced. Some would say that this is the point at which inter faith work has gone too far, and I might agree if that was all that happened (yet without forgetting Jesus’ simple but challenging words, ‘Do unto others …’). Because the reality is that Muslims are also speaking up for Christians, supporting, for example, David Cameron’s comments about Britain being a Christian country, or speaking up on behalf of Christians suffering at the hands of mobs and unjust rulers in Muslim-majority countries. Or on hearing a Muslim colleague (who was educated by Scottish Presbyterian missionaries in India) quote those important and well known words from Micah 6.8, ‘this is what the Lord requires of you: only to act justly, to love loyalty, to walk humbly with your God’. Again the prophetic wisdom, speaking to someone in another tradition, gives a blueprint for inter faith (or any other) encounter – being balanced, developing committed and trusting relationships and not being too proud in this world, as if we have nothing to learn from anyone else.
But perhaps, ultimately, our principles – dogma and theology – will get in the way and make it clear that inter faith does not fit with the Gospel. Yet, one of my colleagues Dr Andrew Smith, formerly of Scripture Union, now the Bishop of Birmingham’s inter faith advisor, found that as a school worker in Birmingham the only way to talk about Christianity was in a dialogical way. The way of dialogue involves listening as much as (or more than) talking, taking account of where the other is and giving them space for their own witness. These principles became local guidelines for sharing faith, and eventually developed into the Christian Muslim Forum’s Ethical Witness Guidelines.
All of this does mean that for some of us, it is our calling to follow the way of Francis and Paul, to take the bold step of encountering the other deeply; just as Jesus did, when others were turning away and saying, ‘No, that’s too far for me’. It is only in the deep encounter that we can begin to have some insight into the other’s beliefs, values and to walk with God.
A Victorian Gothic barn of a church, with most of the pews still anchored in place, on a cold wet Saturday afternoon in February. The parish in a multicultural inner city in the North of England has struggled to survive, but remains committed to evangelical mission and community engagement. Twice a term now we put on a Messy Church session, advertised mainly through the majority Asian Church primary school that stands next door. The vicar’s wife, a retired teacher does most of the work of planning and preparation. The vicar himself does most of the platform presentation, and the team of a dozen or so volunteer helpers are predominantly aged over 60, white and English.
From 3pm the church fills with parents and children, mostly families who attend the school, and maybe two or three who regularly come to worship on Sunday mornings. It’s mostly women and children, though there are a handful of dads. There is a group of white working-class mums, some of them lone parents, who obviously know each other and spend a lot of time chatting and letting the kids get on with the activities. But as the number of people in the building rises to 90 we realise this is the most popular Messy Church since we started 18 months ago – and that over half of those attending are Muslims. One of the women is dressed in a black abaya, worn with a niqab – though she does remove the face covering when she has become comfortable with the social setting inside the church. Several other women and girls are wearing hijab (headscarf) and are in modest Asian dress.
One of the Muslim women who had encouraged friends to come is a single parent who first came along to a Messy Church a few months ago. We got to know her better through the midweek job club in the church hall. She had been unemployed, and destitute because she had been sanctioned for some trivial breach of benefit conditions by the job centre. We had helped her with food parcels, friendship and eventually to find a job in child care, and though she does not say she is a follower of Jesus or attend Sunday worship, she clearly feels herself to be part of the church family.
As usual Messy Church is a mixture of games, child-friendly Jesus songs, craft activities, a story and eating together. The vicar tells the story of Joseph, bringing out the importance of family and forgiveness. The crafts features coats of many colours, camels and silver cups. People are invited to write their prayers for forgiveness on coloured paper cut in the shape and size of their hands and to stick these to a board at the front of the church. We then share in food which church people have brought along – sandwiches, cakes, biscuits and some fruit (up North this is known as a Jacob’s join). Probably we should have thought more clearly about making sure there were halal options, but vegetarian items mean everyone found something they were happy to eat. By five o’ clock the helpers were anxious to start clearing up but several people just wanted to stop and chat, so it took a long time before we could all go home, tired but encouraged.
How do we reflect on what was happening here? The situation has all the characteristics of what William Temple Foundation’s Chris Baker and John Reader have labelled a “blurred encounter”. There were a wide range of expectations and motives in the room. Christians were there with the hope of sharing the gospel. Children from a variety of backgrounds were just happy to be together and to have fun. Parents of various faith backgrounds and none were pleased to have something for the family to do on a cold February afternoon, that didn’t cost anything, and had some free food thrown in.
Sociologically speaking it seems that the parish church, though its close involvement with the school next door, is able to offer a safe social space for the banal everyday encounters on which social cohesion can be built. The school and the relaxed informality of Messy Church, linked with other community involvements such as the job club offer a milieu for building bridging social capital, crossing boundaries of communities which some commentators suggest are trapped in parallel lives. Religion is not in itself a barrier, but rather seems to offer common ground where trust can be built. It is significant too that Messy Church is an environment where women and children go first – perhaps typical male approaches to faith would be more dogmatic and divisive. There can be everyday good neighbourliness, friendship and trust across faith communities at this level. However it is also the case that in the local community there are examples of barriers and racisms directed against Muslims, while we also know of painful and hostile experiences when someone from a Muslim background “comes out” publicly as a follower of Jesus Christ.
Theologically one can also ask what is going on in this situation and how is God at work? A classic evangelical answer would be that to some degree at least, the Gospel of Jesus Christ is being preached, if only implicitly, or at least proclaimed by deeds and attitudes. A more liberal approach would be to stress that the values of acceptance, friendship, trust, love and forgiveness are signs of the Kingdom of God, and of the Holy Spirit at work. Whether or not anyone discerns or names the name of Christ in this situation, God alone knows what is happening in people’s hearts, and He alone is the final judge of us all.
It might be worthwhile to reflect on NT Wright’s recent perspectives on Pauline theologywhere the emphasis is placed not so much on individual justification before God as on incorporation into the multicultural community of those who are “in the Messiah”. However, this raises many questions about how in such blurred encounters and ambiguous social and religious spaces, people may or may not find “salvation” — amidst all the competing definitions of that term one may come across in our theologically diverse environment.