Lapido Media Blog

Ex-media consultant Paul Eddy deliberately wants to embarrass the Church of England into evangelising other faiths in

 The 40-year old trainee priest has ‘an agenda’ - as he puts it - to ‘gain access to the mic’.  So he’s pleased with the coverage he’s provoked over the withdrawal of his Synod motion this week  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2074486/Church-of-England-accused-of-censoring-debate-on-Islam.html That’s because, as he told me, he believes he’s ‘using the same tactics as the liberal lobby.’ 

‘For generations we have allowed other people to use the media and we have a long way to catch up.’ He sent out a press release claiming that the Synod machinery had been used deliberately to bump his motion off the next meeting in July – again. 

His accusations caused uproar in the press – but of the rude-boy kind that’s a pain to the rest of us.  His actual motion reads:   ‘That this Synod request the House of Bishops to report to the Synod on their understanding of the uniqueness of Christ in Britain’s multi-faith society, and offer examples and commendations of good practice in sharing the gospel of salvation through Christ alone with people of other faiths and of none.’ A good and timely motion.  But when it lost its slot through lack of signatures, Eddy saw his chance.  He sent out a press release crying ‘Foul!’ – and caught the nation’s unschooled ear.  Martin Beckford, the new Religion Correspondent at the Telegraph on Tuesday, wrote:  ‘His motion called on church leaders to clarify their strategy on whether they think Muslims and believers in other religions should be actively converted to Christianity in modern

 Well, that’s not my understanding of evangelism even if it’s Eddy’s, and perhaps I have some right to express a view. No one ‘converts’ anyone.  It simply isn’t like that.  The more you try, the less success you have – like torture.  It is the infection of the Spirit that ‘converts’, not the pressure of the sales pitch. 

Eddy, wrote Beckford perhaps disingenuously, also believed that ‘Christ himself ordered all Christians to actively recruit nonbelievers and followers of other faiths’. Neither Christ – nor Eddy - said anything of the kind.  Christ’s only ‘order’ was that we love one another.  Discipling – which is what Christ actually commanded - flows out of love and concern for others, not some New Labour-ish need to increase a quota, or meet a target. 

Certainly there is increasing frustration at our loss for words – in public - as to the truth of Christ in these complex times - whether Synod fixed the motion or not.  That’s the culture we’ve got to change.   Reticence in evangelism has been, at its best, a kind of misplaced courtesy stemming from more refined times of cultural coherence.  When the scandal of the cross becomes a scandal of silence at a time that’s crying out for religious leadership, the rude-boys will step up to the mic.   

It will take courage and resolve to change things – and a few indiscriminate verbal hand-grenades. A more robust approach to apologetics – explaining what our faith is for - is essential.  Most leading Muslims in Britain have never read the Bible and the government is spending millions on getting Muslims to understand their own version of ‘correct Islam’ rather than ensuring a working knowledge of the founding narrative of our island civilization. 

There is a problem in the church, going all the way back to the Faith in the City Report in 1985 which viewed the ‘arrival’ of adherents of other faiths as ‘present[ing] the members of Christian Churches with theological problems which they have not yet been able to resolve’ (para.3.26).  It’s still the case.  Its own solution was to ignore other faiths altogether: ‘There are places where Christian service to the community may take the form of helping others to maintain their religious and cultural heritage in freedom and dignity’ (para.3.28).In other words, because they vetoed mission when it could have done some good, those Anglican churchmen (and one woman) helped sanction the kind of ghettoes that have spawned the mess we’re in.   ends 

A CULTURE OF DENIAL
By Jenny Taylor

A report into the first riots in Bradford in 1995 warned that there were ‘politicized Muslim activists’ in Britain bent on using disaffected youth for sinister ends – and that policy-makers were burying their heads in the sand about it.

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by Revd Frank Julian Gelli

Fitna

Trouble and strife indeed. Fitna, the short film in Dutch by Geert Wilders physically hurt my eyeballs, like a video nasty would. Some of it is so harrowing, I had to cry. An attack on the Qur’an and the Prophet, no doubt. Implicitly, however, Wilders provokes deep and hard questions for strong believers of any faith, including myself.

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I believe the Archbishop has done something enormously courageous, perhaps without realizing it.  He’s dropped a bomb on multi-culturalism.

With his huge, dense speech on the shariah at the Royal Courts of Justice on Thursday night, he has woken the country from its self-delusion.  There have been whole university departments devoted to what’s called ‘comparative law’ in UK for twenty years at least, and a huge amount published on it – but no one pays attention to religion.  It’s because of secularization that the ABC’s speech has come as such a shock.

He is right that there is a system of parallel or plural legal systems already operative in UK - and not just Muslim.  All religions develop legal systems, though they all operate differently and to different ends.  Now we can no longer ignore the cherished secular myth of uniformity.  So what do we do now?  Do we ignore the fact as we have done for so long?  A cult of silence has been in operation for thirty years, to use SOAS Law Professor Werner Menski’s potent phrase.  Purposive non-discourse, he once said memorably, has been government policy a generation.  It’s what’s allowed all kinds of human rights abuses to get rooted.  And it has also allowed the rest of the country to operate a kind of silent apartheid,  a pretence that minority cultures would have no impact on the rest of us.

What do those who have reacted in such high dudgeon to the Archbishop think should be done about informal shariah?  What world are they living in?  Go on ignoring it?  Hardly.  Ban it ?  Surely not!  If you do that, you ban Muslims!  To be Muslim is to follow some form of the shariah.  So what’s left is to incorporate it – and so achieve a certain right to regulate its excesses, although the ABC did not quite put it that way. What he said was: 

The role of ’secular’ law is not the dissolution of [religious loyalties] in the name of universalism but the monitoring of such affiliations to prevent the creation of mutually isolated communities in which human liberties are seen in incompatible ways and individual persons are subjected to restraints or injustices for which there is no public redress. 

What the ABC is advocating is that secular positive law should recognize its own humanity in roots that are also religious – in this case Christian – and stop pretending it has the right to be so prescriptive, abolutising and uniform.   And anti-religious.  The famous ‘neutrality’ for which the law strives is more often a denial of difference than an affirmation of mercy and justice.

It was a brilliant, if sometimes opaque lecture – and a PR catastrophe.  Given the context of a cult of silence, the Archbishop probably would have done better not to accept this invitation, and thereby appear out of the blue to be suddenly sanctioning the shariah law.  It’s the last straw for many professional archbishop bashers. Given the way the lectures have been pitched it was a trap – and he’s walked right into it.

But there will be no ignoring the reality of migration any more.

Not one single government member attended a Westminster event on 24 Jan to showcase a rather special reconciliation effort that could bring hope for Britain’s troubled Muslim enclaves, reports Tim Scott.

It’s been left to the Tories to back Dr Prem Sharma’s and his group.  He’s a Hindu campaigner on interfaith relations, who has led a nationwide series of peace conferences that culminated in a meeting in Portcullis House last week.

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Recent news of British teacher Gillian Gibbons; a teddy bear called Mohammed and an encounter with the Sudanese Government has faded somewhat into the background with the dawn of a new year. The issues, however, are deeply rooted, and, still simmer beneath the surface.

What was it about Sudan and Mrs Gibbons that resulted in her humiliation and albeit brief incarceration?

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