WHAT DOES IT MEAN to encounter Christians whose context is very different from our own? That was one of the questions behind my visit to Sri Lanka in July as part of the Mutual Encounter and Exchange for Transformation (MEET) programme at the Queen’s Foundation, where I am training for Methodist ministry.
MEET is deliberately not a ‘mission trip’ or a holiday. It is about crossing thresholds into unfamiliar contexts, being attentive, and ready for unexpected learning. The programme asks us to think about what we and our hosts might learn through an encounter that could not have happened if we had stayed at home.
That emphasis on mutuality mattered to me. I had never been to Asia before, and Sri Lanka was certainly unfamiliar. I went expecting to learn from students and staff at the Theological College of Lanka, broaden my understanding of global Christianity, strengthen my practice of ecumenism (working with Christians of diverse traditions), and challenge my assumptions about ministry.
But our group of 12 travelling from Queen’s was much more diverse than the description of ‘British students visiting Sri Lanka’ might suggest. The nine students and three tutors included people from Britain, several European countries, Argentina and Hong Kong, two with Zimbabwean heritage, and someone with Sri Lankan heritage who could speak Tamil. We arrived not just as British visitors but as a small reflection of the diversity of global Christianity ourselves.
And yet, one of the first things I became conscious of was how I was being perceived.
The old white man
I was asked several times whether I was a tutor or faculty member at Queen’s. I was called ‘Father’ and ‘Professor’, and people sometimes looked to me before speaking to the two female tutors who had travelled with us. As an older white man, I seemed to fit people’s expectations of what someone with authority ought to look like.
It was awkward and amusing, but it also became one of the most important things I noticed during the trip. I had travelled to Sri Lanka as a learner, but I couldn’t leave my own identity at the airport. I arrived carrying all the things that other people could see (and assume) about me before they knew anything about me.
In the UK, I am less aware of some of the privileges I experience because of my age, gender and ethnicity. Perhaps that was why another part of the experience began to trouble me: how much of my own context I had assumed was normal.
Learning to be a guest
Another lesson was about food. On our first morning we had milk rice with coconut and onion for breakfast, eaten with our hands. I had to get used to savoury food at times when I would normally expect something else, and finding vegetarian food was more difficult than I had expected.
More importantly, I became increasingly aware of how much I take food for granted. I am used to having more food than I need, and to having a lot of choice about what I eat. In Sri Lanka I had to become more flexible about both.
We also learned that food was part of the way the college lives as a community. The unmarried students take turns to provide (and sometimes grow!) ingredients for communal meals, making sure everything is organised for the cook to prepare. They also prepare the mess hall and serve the food at meal times. Married students live separately with their families and cook for themselves.
That felt very different from life at Queen’s, where food is provided, prepared and served by catering staff. At Queen’s, students have fewer responsibilities for the practical care of the community, and less experience of sharing these kinds of everyday responsibilities with one another. This is particularly true for students like me, who study part-time and only stay at the college for six weekends and one week each academic year.
I began to realise that I had been thinking about food primarily as something I was receiving. At TCL, food was also something students gave: their time, organisation and practical care for one another. Making sure a meal is planned, resourced and ready for a community is hardly glamorous, but it is an act of service to the people with whom you are sharing your life.
On Sunday, three of us travelled to a rural Anglican church. Our student hosts arranged a breakfast buffet for us on the way, which was generous but far more than we could eat. After the service there was a snack and a drink, followed by a hearty lunch with the priest and parishioners. Once again, there was more food than we could manage. The tutor who was with us described it as a ‘Vicar of Dibley’ day, recalling an episode of the British TV sitcom about a vicar who had four Christmas lunches in one day to avoid offending her parishioners.
Later, on the journey back to TCL in a tuk tuk, a three-wheeled open-air taxi, my colleague and I were quiet. The students seemed to think something was wrong, as they came to our rooms later with sweet treats to apologise. In fact, we were simply tired after an early start, an eventful morning, and a big breakfast and lunch!
It made me think about hospitality. Their generosity wasn’t measured according to what I thought I needed. It was an expression of care, and sometimes that meant offering more than I could receive.
I wrote in my journal that I was learning ‘to be grateful, flexible and to take what I need, not what I expect.’ I think that applies to more than food. Being a guest means recognising that my expectations are not necessarily the measure of what is normal.
By the final day, I had become comfortable eating with my hands. One of the staff noticed and said, ‘We’ll make a Sri Lankan of you yet!’ It was a lovely moment because something that was unfamiliar at the beginning had become ordinary just because I had joined in.
I hadn’t become Sri Lankan, of course. But I had allowed myself to be changed by the experience of being a guest and not assuming that my hosts should change to accommodate me.
Learning to notice
Food was not the only way I noticed my expectations.
There were several power cuts while we were at the college. They happened, and people carried on without comment. I wondered how graciously I would respond if we lost electricity while studying at Queen’s. I suspect that my fellow students and I might not be so accepting.
I also hadn’t anticipated taking off my shoes so often. In the college chapel we entered barefoot, as we also did in the churches and temples we visited, and when we entered people’s homes. I had spent time during the interfaith module at Queen’s thinking about the ways people of other faiths behave differently in their places of worship, and how easy it can be to assume that our own practices are somehow neutral or universal. Yet here were fellow Christians worshipping in a way that was unfamiliar to me.
It made me wonder what else I might take for granted about Christian worship. What would happen if, at Queen’s, I invited people to leave their shoes at the door and enter the chapel barefoot? Not as an attempt to imitate the Christian communities we encountered in Sri Lanka, but as an invitation to ask what our bodies might teach us about reverence, vulnerability, and entering sacred space.
I came away with a deep appreciation and gratitude for the faith, commitment and resourcefulness of the people we met. Their country has been through difficult years of economic and social disruption, and I became more aware of the ways those challenges shaped everyday life. As a tourist, I could easily have passed through without noticing them.
Sri Lankans are not necessarily any more patient than British people, and inconvenience is not automatically virtuous, but encountering a different context made me notice some of the things I regard as normal.
In the UK, I expect that I will be able to choose what I eat, that the electricity will work, that people will understand me, that plans will happen when they are supposed to, and that I should know what is going on. Perhaps one of the gifts of being a guest is discovering how many assumptions underlie those expectations.
What do we share, and what do we hold differently?
The Theological College of Lanka, near Kandy, is, like the Queen’s Foundation in Birmingham, an ecumenical community. A notice in the college auditorium identifies the Church of Ceylon, Methodist Church Sri Lanka, Sri Lanka Baptist Sangamaya [Association] and Presbyterian Church in Sri Lanka as federating traditions. That diversity was embodied in the people we met.
I had an interesting conversation with one student who was originally a Hindu, was now Methodist, and proudly showed off his diploma in interfaith dialogue. We compared our experiences of interfaith encounter. I also met a former Catholic priest, now a Methodist minister and tutor, and talked about the common ground between our traditions, as his journey echoes mine from Catholicism to Methodism.
Those encounters resonated with my own journey across Christian traditions and with the work I have been doing during my Methodist training. Ecumenism and interfaith dialogue can sometimes sound like institutional projects, involving agreements, structures and statements. In Sri Lanka I encountered them through people whose own lives crossed boundaries between traditions.
There was something humbling about that. I had gone hoping to learn about Christianity in a different context, and found myself meeting Christians whose stories were already more complex and interesting than the categories I might otherwise have put them into.
The question I didn’t expect to be asked
The experience of being perceived before being known also made me think differently about what I was choosing to reveal about myself.
We had been advised to be ready to share our testimony or preach at any time. Only a few days before leaving I discovered that same-sex sexual activity remained criminalised in Sri Lanka under legislation dating from the British colonial period. As a gay man, married to another man, that made me think carefully about what it meant to be authentic in a context where I did not know how my sexuality might be perceived.
I wasn’t asked to preach. I did give a short testimony to the English class, but it was briefer and less specific than I might have made it in a more familiar context. When I was asked whether I was married and had children, I answered yes to the first question and no to the second, without offering any further explanation. I didn’t feel that I was lying, but I was aware that I wasn’t telling the whole story either.
Then, during the English class, I was paired with a younger man who spoke about prison visiting and volunteering with the YMCA. I was able to share my own experience of chaplaincy in a prison and being a YMCA chaplain in England, so we had an immediate point of connection.
He then asked me what I thought about the disagreement within the World YMCA concerning the inclusion of LGBT+ people and people of other faiths. He told me that there had been resistance to these proposals within YMCA movements in India and Sri Lanka. I asked him what he thought – he simply said he believed everyone should be included, and I agreed.
Suddenly a question which could have seemed like an abstract issue for international organisations became much more personal.
I didn’t tell him that I am gay and married to a man. Some of the students have stayed in touch through Facebook, where my relationship status is clear, so they may now know something about me that I didn’t tell them directly.
I wondered what authenticity means in a situation like this. Does being authentic always require us to disclose everything about ourselves? Sometimes being truthful also means recognising the boundaries of what to share, particularly when we are guests in another person’s context.
What mattered was that I could participate honestly in the conversation without pretending that I didn’t have a personal stake in it. I could listen as well as speak, and that was more important than assuming I had all the answers.
Mutual exchange
There were other moments when the direction of the exchange went the other way. The day before the college graduation, the principal asked me to help a young student prepare to read a contemporary text about digital evangelism during the ceremony. I was glad to be able to help him prepare. The following day, when I watched him stand up and deliver it, I felt so proud of him.
It was a humbling experience. I had gone to Sri Lanka expecting to be the learner, yet here I was being trusted to contribute something to the formation of a student at the college we were visiting. It was a small contribution, but it reminded me that mutuality doesn’t mean that one side gives and the other receives. We all arrive with something to learn, and something to offer.
That became especially obvious during the final evening. Earlier in the week we had taught the college’s Children’s Guild (for the children of married students) the words and actions to Our God is a Great Big God, and we shared the song again during the evening service on our last day. One of the students from Queen’s also read from the Old Testament in the Sinhala language with the help of a Sri Lankan student.
Later, TCL students performed for us and invited us to perform too. We sang El cielo canta alegría (Heaven is singing for joy) from Argentina and Hakuna wakaita sa Jesu (There is no-one like Jesus) from Zimbabwe.
We weren’t just receiving something from Sri Lanka. We were sharing something of ourselves too. Different cultures, languages and traditions were present without any of them having to become the norm for everyone else.
Perhaps that is one of the gifts of the global Church: discovering that Christian unity doesn’t require uniformity.
What I brought home
When I applied for the MEET programme, I hoped the experience would equip me to serve with greater attentiveness, compassion and commitment to social justice. I don’t know yet exactly how Sri Lanka will change my ministry. Perhaps that is not something I can know just yet.
What I do know is that I came home deeply grateful: for the hospitality we received, for the faith and commitment of the students and staff, for the conversations about interfaith experience and Christian unity in diversity, for the opportunity to contribute my own experience, and for the welcome we received as strangers.
I am also grateful for the things that made me uncomfortable: being assumed to be someone in authority because I am an older white man; having to think carefully about what I could safely disclose about myself; discovering that my expectations about food, comfort and abundance are not universal. These were not obstacles to the encounter – they enabled and deepened it.
I was conscious of how other people perceived me before they knew me. I also had to think carefully about what I wanted them to know about me. Between those two experiences was a lesson about being a guest: I could neither control how I was perceived nor assume I had to disclose everything to be authentic. What I could do was listen, pay attention, and remain open to being changed.
The MEET programme asks students to cross thresholds into unfamiliar worlds and to be attentive to the possibility of unexpected learning. I came home understanding that the threshold works both ways. I crossed into someone else’s context, but the experience also brought me back to my own with fresh eyes.
I went to Sri Lanka expecting to learn from people whose context was different from mine. I did learn from them, but I also became more aware of the assumptions I carried with me.
I went expecting to receive hospitality. I discovered that receiving is itself a discipline, and that generosity does not always look like the thing I would have chosen.
And I went as a student, only to discover that mutuality means being entrusted to give as well as to receive.
Recent comments