24th October 2001
Stapleford Centre: Christianity and Culture
Not long ago I was being interviewed on the BBC Heaven and Earth Show, in the aftermath of the appalling terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. As a member of one of the ethnic communities, whose members include a large number of Muslims (there are more Muslims in the Indian sub-continent than there are in the Arab countries), I was already beginning to see the first signs of anti-Muslim feeling: in towns and cities where previously nobody had looked twice at an Arab or Asian face, now there were barely-concealed reactions ranging from suspicion to outright hostility. It was the beginning of a backlash that would later see stones thrown through mosque windows and threats and abuse to the UK Islamic community.
Not long ago I was being interviewed on the BBC Heaven and Earth Show, in the aftermath of the appalling terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. As a member of one of the ethnic communities, whose members include a large number of Muslims (there are more Muslims in the Indian sub-continent than there are in the Arab countries), I was already beginning to see the first signs of anti-Muslim feeling: in towns and cities where previously nobody had looked twice at an Arab or Asian face, now there were barely-concealed reactions ranging from suspicion to outright hostility. It was the beginning of a backlash that would later see stones thrown through mosque windows and threats and abuse to the UK Islamic community.
Ignorance leads to confusion, mistrust & fear
One of the purposes of the BBC programme was to build some understanding between communities: and to explain, to anybody who might have come to such a conclusion, that not all Muslims are terrorists. Much of the confusion of course is caused by ignorance: many of us simply don’t know any Muslims, we have very little knowledge of their religion and culture and our paths cross very rarely. The unfamiliar Arabic script, the fact that Muslims tend to dress differently to ourselves, the fact that there are few connections between Islam and Judeo-Christian culture, and some high-profile tabloid stories such as the Bradford Muslims’ reaction to Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses all contribute to a climate of mistrust and indeed fear.
Understanding & building relationships
So the programme was intended to increase mutual understanding, and I was very glad to be invited to take part. It’s a classic component of Christian mission: if as Christians we are to make meaningful contacts with other faith communities and build relationships of trust in which conversations about faith can take place, we need first to know something about the people with whom we want to talk. That’s why missionary colleges run courses in anthropology and culture, why missionary societies organise short-term orientation courses for students and others who want to get their bearings in another culture.
That’s why I have written a series of books with my friend Margaret Waddell, in which we explain how to build friendships with Hindus, Sikhs and others as a necessary prelude to personal evangelism.
Understanding Christianity
It works both ways…
All this is very important. Much of the work I do is in this area. But one of the things I said on the programme was that we have to avoid the temptation to think that it’s only the ‘other faiths’ that need to be understood. To explain what I mean, let me tell you about my experiences of encountering Christianity and my first experiences of church. And I’ll do so under three headings.
Cultural alienation
I was completely ignorant about Christianity. For example, when I came to Britain with my family in 1967 I didn’t know that everybody has the right to go inside a church. I assumed I wasn’t allowed. Many of us spend a lot of time discussing how to make our churches welcoming – but so often we discuss furnishing, pictures, whether we use guitars etc – when some we hope to attract don’t even know they are allowed inside!
When I first went inside a church it was an extraordinary experience. In the Temples I knew from my own culture, it was unthinkable to enter without first removing one’s shoes. So I took mine off.
‘No!’ my companion whispered. ‘You mustn’t do that.’ It seemed a very strange way to behave in a place of worship, but I did what I was told and put them on. By then, my feet had experienced a lovely carpet on the floor: so I did what one does in a Temple, and sat on the floor. ‘No,’ my friend pointed out, ‘you must sit in the pew.’ I reluctantly moved across to the pew and sat there. Then the organ began! In my background, this kind of music always means something mournful.
‘Who’s died?’ I asked my companion.
It was the late 1960s and there were many people in my position, immigrants from foreign countries: and a great many churches, sadly, did not understand how their British churches looked to outsiders. But I want to emphasise that cultural alienation was not just a problem between indigenous and immigrant cultures. Britain at that time was a nation divided between cultures of its own. Young people often found they had nothing in common with their parents: they listened to different music, watched different TV programs, dressed in ways that the older generation found perplexing and alienating. And many initiatives of the church at that time were launched to meet this problem.
For example, a Northerner, Gordon Bailey, wrote poems that taught Christian truths but did so in the language of the everyday.
A Christian pop music culture was beginning then, too: many mistakes were made, the musicians often made some cultural howlers of their own. But at the same time – long before the professionally produced, commercially funded products of today’s Christian pop culture – some young people who would not have stayed in church for five minutes found that this music was listenable to.
Today, world-famous groups play at Greenbelt, and products of the highest quality are shown on the national media, and for that we must give thanks. But it’s all too tempting to think that modern culture has been successfully penetrated on a wide scale. If you wince when kids today watch The Spy Who Shagged Me video on a sleepover, it might be worth considering that this is the situation that 1960s parents faced, when their children dressed in beads and flowers and cut the collars off their jackets
Theological understanding
The curious thing about that first visit to church is that while so much of it alienated me, when the preacher began I was completely absorbed. After all, I had expected to hear something that was new to me – that was why I had come. It was the cultural presentation that had been the barrier, not the word that was spoken.
It was much the same in my first close-up contacts with Christianity. Once my family were all given books of Bible readings by The Scripture Gift Mission. I had no idea that the words were taken from the Bible. But I was enthralled by what I read, and re-read the whole booklet several times, learning large chunks by heart.
Later, in a London pub, when I was a lonely and depressed student really looking for a meaning to life, a group of Christian musicians arrived and began singing Christian songs. One, ‘He’s got the whole world in his hands’, so struck me that I invited the group back to my room. They gave me a Bible and we met several times for discussion. I was a slow learner and the meetings came to a stop, but I carried on reading on my own.
What convinced me to become a Christian was not cultural identification but theological understanding.
I had been brought up to believe that I carried the weight of my sins – karma –with me through life, and what I could not atone for in my own strength would be carried over into my next reincarnation. You had to do it yourself.
No guru had ever promised to remove my karma for me. But here was Jesus Christ, who had died to atone for my karma, to liberate me from a future of millions of lives all to be lived to achieve nirvana.
Here was my Satguru, the one who would take my karma away. When I realised this I committed my life to Jesus and became his follower.
Let me emphasise, this was not a matter of cultural identifiers. It’s all too easy to blur cultural distinctions, to draw in evangelism on other cultures without realising that what you have borrowed is teaching a different message than yours. I have spent a great deal of my work in fusion projects – CDs that combine East and West in worship celebration, a Christian version of the Hindu festival of Diwali. But at the heart of it all, right cultural orientation should be a way of bringing people easily to a point where they can think about truth, unobstructed by irrelevant cultural matters.
Christianity in the social fabric
The third aspect of my subject is the changing role of Christianity in British society. I arrived in Britain at the end of the Swinging sixties, when much was being changed for ever in British society – it was the era of the Beatles, of Carnaby Street, of love and peace and doing your own thing. But some of what was changing was not very visible: and one of those areas of change was the Christian base of British society. Something very important was being lost. Rev Sandy Millar of HTB has commented, ‘You can no longer assume that what comes out of Westminster has a Christian base.’
Billy Graham, returning to Britain decades after his earlier Harringay Campaign, observed that there had been a shift away from the previous Christian background of Britain. The great theologian and missiologist Lesslie Newbigin, coming back to Britain after forty years as a missionary in India, wrote a passionate book, The Other Side of 1984, in which he argued that British culture was approaching the end of its Christian foundation that was now a mission field like any other.
None of you who are teachers can have failed to see this in your daily experience. It’s common for an entire class to have nobody in it who could explain the difference between the Old and New Testaments, who could explain baptism even in the simplest terms, or could articulate to any extent a biblical view of anything (eavesdropping on discussions about computer piracy can be disconcerting, for example). Make no mistake, the children of today do have ethics and morality: it’s just that it can no longer be assumed that their ethics and morality will be Christian.
Part of the reason, of course, is the growth of multi-cultural Britain and the necessary investment in comparative religion this has caused. Some would say that it is the whole reason – which would be a dismal commentary on the Christian church’s response to the opportunities that immigration over the years has presented to it. But most historians agree that the roots of secular Britain go farther back. Lesslie Newbigin, for example, regards the failure of British culture in the twentieth century as the failure of the Enlightenment dream, and he is not alone in so thinking.
The challenge of this sea-change, as we seek to explore faith and culture from our chosen angle of one faith, many expressions, is to be rigorous in scrutinising our own cultures: identifying what is nominal and dead, and what is lively and thriving. Often the results will surprise us and sometimes embarrass us: what to us is reverent and worshipful can sometimes have very few links with the real world of other cultures, and the worship of those cultures can seem extravert, undisciplined and naïve. We should, I believe, seek a cultural expression of our faith that accurately reflects the multi-cultural society in which we live; we should be prepared if necessary to jettison what was once useful but is no longer: and we should bring people, young and old, to the point where they have a clear view of Christ and can consider his claim on their lives.
Stapleford Centre: Christianity and Culture
Ram Gidoomal CBE
Not long ago I was being interviewed on the BBC Heaven and Earth Show, in the aftermath of the appalling terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. As a member of one of the ethnic communities, whose members include a large number of Muslims (there are more Muslims in the Indian sub-continent than there are in the Arab countries), I was already beginning to see the first signs of anti-Muslim feeling: in towns and cities where previously nobody had looked twice at an Arab or Asian face, now there were barely-concealed reactions ranging from suspicion to outright hostility. It was the beginning of a backlash that would later see stones thrown through mosque windows and threats and abuse to the UK Islamic community.Not long ago I was being interviewed on the BBC Heaven and Earth Show, in the aftermath of the appalling terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. As a member of one of the ethnic communities, whose members include a large number of Muslims (there are more Muslims in the Indian sub-continent than there are in the Arab countries), I was already beginning to see the first signs of anti-Muslim feeling: in towns and cities where previously nobody had looked twice at an Arab or Asian face, now there were barely-concealed reactions ranging from suspicion to outright hostility. It was the beginning of a backlash that would later see stones thrown through mosque windows and threats and abuse to the UK Islamic community.
Ignorance leads to confusion, mistrust & fear
One of the purposes of the BBC programme was to build some understanding between communities: and to explain, to anybody who might have come to such a conclusion, that not all Muslims are terrorists. Much of the confusion of course is caused by ignorance: many of us simply don’t know any Muslims, we have very little knowledge of their religion and culture and our paths cross very rarely. The unfamiliar Arabic script, the fact that Muslims tend to dress differently to ourselves, the fact that there are few connections between Islam and Judeo-Christian culture, and some high-profile tabloid stories such as the Bradford Muslims’ reaction to Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses all contribute to a climate of mistrust and indeed fear.
Understanding & building relationships
So the programme was intended to increase mutual understanding, and I was very glad to be invited to take part. It’s a classic component of Christian mission: if as Christians we are to make meaningful contacts with other faith communities and build relationships of trust in which conversations about faith can take place, we need first to know something about the people with whom we want to talk. That’s why missionary colleges run courses in anthropology and culture, why missionary societies organise short-term orientation courses for students and others who want to get their bearings in another culture.
That’s why I have written a series of books with my friend Margaret Waddell, in which we explain how to build friendships with Hindus, Sikhs and others as a necessary prelude to personal evangelism.
Understanding Christianity
It works both ways…
All this is very important. Much of the work I do is in this area. But one of the things I said on the programme was that we have to avoid the temptation to think that it’s only the ‘other faiths’ that need to be understood. To explain what I mean, let me tell you about my experiences of encountering Christianity and my first experiences of church. And I’ll do so under three headings.
Cultural alienation
I was completely ignorant about Christianity. For example, when I came to Britain with my family in 1967 I didn’t know that everybody has the right to go inside a church. I assumed I wasn’t allowed. Many of us spend a lot of time discussing how to make our churches welcoming – but so often we discuss furnishing, pictures, whether we use guitars etc – when some we hope to attract don’t even know they are allowed inside!
When I first went inside a church it was an extraordinary experience. In the Temples I knew from my own culture, it was unthinkable to enter without first removing one’s shoes. So I took mine off.
‘No!’ my companion whispered. ‘You mustn’t do that.’ It seemed a very strange way to behave in a place of worship, but I did what I was told and put them on. By then, my feet had experienced a lovely carpet on the floor: so I did what one does in a Temple, and sat on the floor. ‘No,’ my friend pointed out, ‘you must sit in the pew.’ I reluctantly moved across to the pew and sat there. Then the organ began! In my background, this kind of music always means something mournful.
‘Who’s died?’ I asked my companion.
It was the late 1960s and there were many people in my position, immigrants from foreign countries: and a great many churches, sadly, did not understand how their British churches looked to outsiders. But I want to emphasise that cultural alienation was not just a problem between indigenous and immigrant cultures. Britain at that time was a nation divided between cultures of its own. Young people often found they had nothing in common with their parents: they listened to different music, watched different TV programs, dressed in ways that the older generation found perplexing and alienating. And many initiatives of the church at that time were launched to meet this problem.
For example, a Northerner, Gordon Bailey, wrote poems that taught Christian truths but did so in the language of the everyday.
A Christian pop music culture was beginning then, too: many mistakes were made, the musicians often made some cultural howlers of their own. But at the same time – long before the professionally produced, commercially funded products of today’s Christian pop culture – some young people who would not have stayed in church for five minutes found that this music was listenable to.
Today, world-famous groups play at Greenbelt, and products of the highest quality are shown on the national media, and for that we must give thanks. But it’s all too tempting to think that modern culture has been successfully penetrated on a wide scale. If you wince when kids today watch The Spy Who Shagged Me video on a sleepover, it might be worth considering that this is the situation that 1960s parents faced, when their children dressed in beads and flowers and cut the collars off their jackets
Theological understanding
The curious thing about that first visit to church is that while so much of it alienated me, when the preacher began I was completely absorbed. After all, I had expected to hear something that was new to me – that was why I had come. It was the cultural presentation that had been the barrier, not the word that was spoken.
It was much the same in my first close-up contacts with Christianity. Once my family were all given books of Bible readings by The Scripture Gift Mission. I had no idea that the words were taken from the Bible. But I was enthralled by what I read, and re-read the whole booklet several times, learning large chunks by heart.
Later, in a London pub, when I was a lonely and depressed student really looking for a meaning to life, a group of Christian musicians arrived and began singing Christian songs. One, ‘He’s got the whole world in his hands’, so struck me that I invited the group back to my room. They gave me a Bible and we met several times for discussion. I was a slow learner and the meetings came to a stop, but I carried on reading on my own.
What convinced me to become a Christian was not cultural identification but theological understanding.
I had been brought up to believe that I carried the weight of my sins – karma –with me through life, and what I could not atone for in my own strength would be carried over into my next reincarnation. You had to do it yourself.
No guru had ever promised to remove my karma for me. But here was Jesus Christ, who had died to atone for my karma, to liberate me from a future of millions of lives all to be lived to achieve nirvana.
Here was my Satguru, the one who would take my karma away. When I realised this I committed my life to Jesus and became his follower.
Let me emphasise, this was not a matter of cultural identifiers. It’s all too easy to blur cultural distinctions, to draw in evangelism on other cultures without realising that what you have borrowed is teaching a different message than yours. I have spent a great deal of my work in fusion projects – CDs that combine East and West in worship celebration, a Christian version of the Hindu festival of Diwali. But at the heart of it all, right cultural orientation should be a way of bringing people easily to a point where they can think about truth, unobstructed by irrelevant cultural matters.
Christianity in the social fabric
The third aspect of my subject is the changing role of Christianity in British society. I arrived in Britain at the end of the Swinging sixties, when much was being changed for ever in British society – it was the era of the Beatles, of Carnaby Street, of love and peace and doing your own thing. But some of what was changing was not very visible: and one of those areas of change was the Christian base of British society. Something very important was being lost. Rev Sandy Millar of HTB has commented, ‘You can no longer assume that what comes out of Westminster has a Christian base.’
Billy Graham, returning to Britain decades after his earlier Harringay Campaign, observed that there had been a shift away from the previous Christian background of Britain. The great theologian and missiologist Lesslie Newbigin, coming back to Britain after forty years as a missionary in India, wrote a passionate book, The Other Side of 1984, in which he argued that British culture was approaching the end of its Christian foundation that was now a mission field like any other.
None of you who are teachers can have failed to see this in your daily experience. It’s common for an entire class to have nobody in it who could explain the difference between the Old and New Testaments, who could explain baptism even in the simplest terms, or could articulate to any extent a biblical view of anything (eavesdropping on discussions about computer piracy can be disconcerting, for example). Make no mistake, the children of today do have ethics and morality: it’s just that it can no longer be assumed that their ethics and morality will be Christian.
Part of the reason, of course, is the growth of multi-cultural Britain and the necessary investment in comparative religion this has caused. Some would say that it is the whole reason – which would be a dismal commentary on the Christian church’s response to the opportunities that immigration over the years has presented to it. But most historians agree that the roots of secular Britain go farther back. Lesslie Newbigin, for example, regards the failure of British culture in the twentieth century as the failure of the Enlightenment dream, and he is not alone in so thinking.
The challenge of this sea-change, as we seek to explore faith and culture from our chosen angle of one faith, many expressions, is to be rigorous in scrutinising our own cultures: identifying what is nominal and dead, and what is lively and thriving. Often the results will surprise us and sometimes embarrass us: what to us is reverent and worshipful can sometimes have very few links with the real world of other cultures, and the worship of those cultures can seem extravert, undisciplined and naïve. We should, I believe, seek a cultural expression of our faith that accurately reflects the multi-cultural society in which we live; we should be prepared if necessary to jettison what was once useful but is no longer: and we should bring people, young and old, to the point where they have a clear view of Christ and can consider his claim on their lives.
