Christian & Muslim Dialogue

On Tuesday of this week, a unique event took place in Walsall. A meeting was arranged at one of the local mosques for Christians and Muslims to come together and learn from one another what 'faith' means to these two religions. The meeting was extremely well attended, with Christians from a number of different churches present, as well as members of the Aisha Mosque. The main part of the evening was a talk given by Vic Gledhill from the Walsall Community Church on faith from a Christian perspective, and then a talk from Imam from the Aisha mosque speaking about faith from a Muslim perspective. It was an extremely interesting evening, and our Muslim hosts made us feel very welcome.

There were a number of things that struck me about this event. First of all how important meetings like this are. There is a lot of fear and mistrust about Islam within British society, and so often this is born out of misunderstanding and ignorance, and building bridges so we can understand one another better is extremely important. This works both ways, because there were several things said by Muslim speakers in that meeting, which showed that they misunderstand some aspects of the Christian faith, just as I imagine we misunderstand parts of the Muslim religion.

One of the other things that struck me about the meeting, is that although there are big differences of opinion between Muslims and Christians on the person of Jesus and Muhamed, there is a lot of common ground between us, in terms of the importance our faith to our everyday lives, and there is mutual concern about the importance of family life, and how we encourage and support this. It was also interesting to hear one Muslim RE teacher, express his concern about how young people today (of all ethnic backgrounds) fail to see the relevance of God to their lives, and how we are to reach these young people - this is an extremely important issue for Christians as well.

The warmth of the hospitality, and the conversations we had afterwards as we looked around the Mosque gave me real hope for the future, and shows why it is so important to build bridges between Christians and Muslims.

The next event takes place as Caldmore Evangelical Church in Walsall at 7.30pm on Tuesday January 16th.