AS PART of my training for Methodist ministry, I recently studied a module on ‘Christianity & Interfaith Engagement’. One of the assignments asked me to reflect on my own life, faith journey and experiences, and consider how they have shaped the way I feel about interfaith engagement in my future ministry.
As I began to reflect, I realised that my understanding of other faiths – and of where God might be found – has changed considerably. More importantly, I realised that this change has happened primarily through encounters with people; through meals, conversations, and shared experiences. And, sometimes, through moments of discomfort when someone else’s faith has challenged my assumptions about my own.
That made me wonder: where is God when we encounter people whose faith is different from our own?
Where I thought God was
I grew up with a fairly clear idea of where God was (and wasn’t) to be found. Or so I thought.
My early formation in a Catholic family and community during the 1970s and 1980s was shaped, implicitly, by a lingering understanding of the Catholic Church’s ancient teaching: ‘Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus’ (a Latin phrase which translates as ‘outside the Church [there is] no salvation’).
Although the Vatican published Nostra Aetate [In Our Time], a declaration on the relation of the Church to non-Christian religions, in 1965 which shifted the Catholic Church from a posture of condemnation to one of dialogue and recognition of truth in other faiths, that development had not impacted my early education. The older idea that there was ‘no salvation outside the Church’ cast a long shadow. Other religions were still viewed as places where truth was lacking and salvation was uncertain.
I didn’t think about it in those terms at the time. But looking back, I can see how it limited my understanding of where God might be found. It also raises a difficult theological question: if God’s grace is as generous as I believe it to be, can I really draw a boundary around where God is at work?
I didn’t begin with an answer to that question – I began with encounters.
A meal that challenged my theology
One of the experiences that has stayed with me happened when I visited a Hindu temple as part of my training for ordination in the Catholic Church in my twenties.
We were welcomed with remarkable hospitality and offered prasadam – food that had been offered as part of Hindu worship. It was a simple act of generosity, and an encounter with another person’s faith. One of my fellow students, however, refused to share the food because of concerns about eating something that had been offered to idols, referring to St Paul’s teaching about food sacrificed to idols in 1 Corinthians 8.
I don’t remember every detail of the conversation that followed, but I do remember the discomfort. It left me with questions that have stayed with me ever since:
How are our Christian convictions embodied in the way we encounter people whose faith is different from our own?
Is holiness expressed primarily through separation? Or can holiness sometimes be expressed through gracious, relational presence?
I don’t think there is a simple answer. Christian faith involves convictions and boundaries; it is not simply a matter of declaring that every religious belief is equally true. But I have become increasingly uncomfortable with an understanding of holiness that makes withdrawal from difference its default response.
The person standing in front of me is not a theological problem to be solved. They are my neighbour.
Learning to encounter rather than categorise
My understanding continued to develop through university, where a multi-faith chaplaincy introduced me to meaningful relationships with people of different faiths and none. Later, theological study, engagement with Nostra Aetate, learning about world religions and visiting diverse places of worship all contributed to a gradual movement in my thinking, from separation towards encounter.
Since moving to Liverpool in 2003, that encounter has become part of ordinary life. I live near a synagogue and a mosque. I have taken part in Holocaust Memorial Day commemorations and shared in Iftar meals during the Muslim month of Ramadan.
These experiences have taught me something that books alone cannot teach. Faith is lived, and expressed in hospitality, remembrance, food, prayer, community and relationships. It is found in people’s stories and in the ways they care for one another.
And sometimes, in those encounters, I have caught glimpses of God.
That doesn’t mean that I have stopped being Christian, or that I have decided that all religions are simply different versions of the same thing. My own journey has not taken me towards a relativistic pluralism in which Christian distinctiveness no longer matters. Instead, I have found myself holding two things together: a commitment to the uniqueness of Jesus in human history and an openness to the possibility that God’s activity is not confined to the Church.
That is a tension I now live with, rather than expect to resolve.
Seeing the spectrum
Another significant part of this journey came through my involvement with Spectrum of Spirituality, a group that organised interfaith events as part of Liverpool Pride between 2010 and 2016.
The name itself became a useful metaphor. A spectrum can be understood through the colours of a rainbow, but it also evokes the way light is refracted. Something that appears to us as a single beam of light can reveal a much richer range of colours when it passes through a prism. I wrote more about these interfaith celebrations for Pride in two earlier posts from 2013 and 2016.
I don’t want to push the metaphor too far. Different religions are not simply colours of one religious rainbow, and genuine theological differences matter. But working alongside people of different faiths and identities to create an inclusive space for LGBT+ people taught me something important about difference:
Unity does not require uniformity.
We didn’t need to agree about everything in order to work together. We needed to listen, to understand one another, to negotiate differences and discover what we could do together for the sake of something larger than ourselves.
That experience changed the way I think about interfaith engagement.
Where is God already at work?
Eventually, I found theological language for something that my experiences had already begun to teach me.
Mission simply means joining in with God’s work in the world – God’s desire for the flourishing, reconciliation and transformation of creation and its people. The concept of Missio Dei [the mission of God] takes this a step further: mission begins with God, rather than with the Church.
If mission comes from God rather than the Church, the question in interfaith engagement should not be:
‘How do I take God to these people?”
Instead, I believe it needs to be:
‘Where is God already at work, and how might I join in?‘
Instead of arriving as someone who possesses God and needs to deliver God to someone else, I arrive as someone who is also learning to discern what God is already doing.
For me, that connects naturally with the Methodist understanding of prevenient grace: the conviction that God’s grace is already at work in people, drawing us all towards truth, love and transformation.
That doesn’t make every religious belief automatically Christian. Nor does it remove the need for discernment.
But it does make me much more cautious about assuming that God is absent simply because someone doesn’t share my faith.
Perhaps the Spirit has got there before me.
What does it mean to witness?
Another word that I have sometimes found difficult, but now find helpful, is ‘witness’: to witness simply means to tell others about what we have seen, experienced or come to believe. In a Christian context, it means sharing something of what we have encountered in Jesus and how our faith has shaped us.
This is where our tutor Andrew Smith’s Vibrant Christianity in Multifaith Britain has helped me put some of these experiences into words.
Smith argues that interfaith engagement is not a specialist activity for a handful of experts. It is part of ordinary Christian discipleship – the lifelong process of learning to follow Jesus and allowing our faith to shape how we live and relate to others – in our multifaith society. He challenges the tendency to think in terms of ‘us’ and ‘them’, encouraging Christians to approach people of other faiths as neighbours rather than ‘targets’ for conversion.
That word – neighbour – matters.
It also makes me think differently about evangelism – the Christian practice of sharing the good news of Jesus with others, in the hope that they might discover for themselves the faith, hope and relationship with God that Christians have experienced.
I remain convinced that the good news of Jesus is something worth sharing. My Christian faith gives me hope, purpose and a relationship with God, and I don’t want to pretend that these things are unimportant simply because other people believe differently. But there is a difference between wanting someone to discover something wonderful and treating them as a ‘target’.
Smith’s emphasis on ethical evangelism is helpful. Witness should be open and honest, but never coercive or manipulative. People must be free to say no. Christian witness should not depend upon exploiting someone’s vulnerability or denigrating another person’s faith.
And most importantly: dialogue and witness do not have to be opposites. Listening can be an act of faithful presence.
It is easy to imagine evangelism as something I do to someone else: I speak, they listen; I proclaim, they respond; I succeed or fail according to what happens next.
But what if faithful witness begins with listening? What if taking someone else’s faith seriously enough to hear it properly is not a retreat from God’s mission, but a part of it?
What if friendship isn’t simply a strategy for creating an opportunity to ‘target’ someone for conversion to Christianity, but is valuable in itself because the person I have encountered is my neighbour?
From boundary to participation
Looking back, I can see that my journey has taken me a long way from the assumption that faithfulness requires me to stand apart from people who believe differently.
I have moved, instead, towards encounter, discernment and participation.
I want to remain faithful to the particularity of the Christian gospel while being genuinely open to the possibility that God is present and active beyond the boundaries of the Church.
I want to share the good news of Jesus without imagining that I have to diminish someone else’s faith in order to strengthen my own.
I want to practise a holiness expressed not through withdrawal from the world but through loving engagement with it.
And I want to enter interfaith encounters asking not only,
‘What do I need to say?
but also:
‘What might God be showing me here?‘
These are questions I will carry into ministry. They are not questions I expect to have completely answered. But perhaps that is the point.
Interfaith engagement has taught me that faithfulness can sometimes mean having the courage to cross a boundary, the humility to listen, and the discernment to recognise that God may already be there.
Recent comments