Aaron Edwards has written a few articles on his Substack site about Islam and Britain. Some of the articles require paid subscription whilst others are available free. You can read the last one here.
One comment on the article which said:
“I read some comments from people living in the Midlands who are already living in an Islamist dominated culture and are in fear, outside their own homes. Oh, that the rest of the country could understand the threat that is slowly spreading throughout the land. Maybe the King, Queen and Archbish of Cant should spend a couple of days in central Bradford!”
I responded as follows:
“Bradford isn’t in the Midlands. I’m sure that anyone is willing to spend some time in central Bradford though. Or come to think of it, the actual Midlands. I’m from the former and live in the latter. If they do come and join is here, they’ll get to meet many Muslims who are just getting on with their lives. They’ll encounter the radicals too. In Bradford or Birmingham, they’ll get to see churches faithfully and joyfully serving the Gospel without this kind of fear,”
This prompted some discussion, mainly with Edwards about what counted as “fear.” It’s worth noting that the word was introduced by the person commenting. However, I have at times noted an alarmist tendency among some who comment on Islam and Islamisation. There were examples of this in tone in Edward’s article. So for example, in one paragraph he wrote concerning those who move into or holiday in rural villages and then complain about the sound of church bells:
Such people appear to have little conception that at the going rate of Islamic advance, uncontrolled immigration, mass housebuilding, declining church attendance, and a Prime Minister who seems to think “Islamophobia” is the greatest threat to British society, in half a century’s time there may be no such thing as “the English village” at all. If such a radical transformation were to occur, it would not be unrelated to the grumbling disdain of such people for something as apparently trivial as the sound of church bells on a Sunday morning.
Fascinatingly, people were making the same kinds of comments, with the same (or shorter) time frame back when I was a youngster. Maybe we are always a rolling 50 years away from Islam taking over.
Anyway, my primary point, as with this article here was and is that there seem to be two things going on without a proper conversation between the two parties. There are Christians who are talking a lot, in a culture war kind of way about Islamisation and the “threat of Islam.” As I note here, there can also be a conflation between what they say about an Islamic or Islamist political agendas and non-white immigration into the UK. Then there are those who live, witness and whose churches are in multicultural areas with significant Muslim populations. I think there is potentially a third category again: those who are specifically committed to Muslim evangelism including those who see debate, either one to one or with groups (as sometimes seen at Speakers’ Corner) as their mission.
My concern, as expressed in response to the comment is that it would be helpful for those wanting to comment from within the first category, to talk, listen, see first hand what those in the second category experience.
Encouragingly, Aaron and another person who was posting comments did start to ask some questions. Aaron asked:
“Dave, how many Muslims have become Christians as a result of your Gospel work in multicultural heavily Islamic cities? I don’t ask that facetiously. I used to run a postgrad mission module called Mission in Islamic contexts with a specific UK focus. I have found that the norm among evangelical churches in the UK is that they do not engage substantially with the Muslim communities at all (discounting, say, work helping individual Muslim asylum seekers). Those churches that make the evangelisation of Muslims more of a priority, do not see many conversions/disciples, if any. Has your experience been markedly different to this in terms of making genuine disciples from within these Muslim communities?”
That’s a good question to ask. My own experience was that growing up in Bradford in the 1970s and 80s, I had a lot of contact with Muslims at school and when our church engaged in door to door work in its vicinity. I’m not sure I was really equipped for Gospel engagement with Muslims. I still feel utterly inadequate today.
We currently live in a neighbourhood which is less multi-cultural than other parts of Birmingham and I don’t have the same day to day contact with Muslims that I had a few years back when we were in Smethwick. There are some more predominantly Muslim areas near by though and I’m hoping to spend more time in those areas.
The church I pastored for 10 years was in a community with a significant Muslim population. What this meant was that we had frequent day to day contact with Muslims over a number of years. Proactively we ran ladies ESOL classes where the reality and expectation was that we would mainly see Muslim women at them. We also ran after school clubs, special events, Messy church etc and less intentionally we would see significant numbers of Muslims coming along and engaging. We built up friendships with a number of people. If I have one regret about moving on after ten years and about the interruption of COVID it is that there were a number of relationships that had developed, not just with Muslims but with others in the community which felt on the cusp of bearing fruit. I also was personally committed to street and door to door outreach which frequently brought me into contact with Muslims.
To answer Aaron’s question, I think it is true from our own experience and from talking to others that it feels like the work is slow, hard and that you don’t tend to see much obvious fruit (with some exceptions, most notably those working with Iranian asylum seekers). We saw one definite and clear example of someone professing faith, getting baptised and going on with the Lord. There were others at different levels of engagement. It is possible that some had come to faith but for various reasons may not have gone public and so it is difficult to comment. I get the impression that this experience is not too dissimilar to what others experience. What we don’t tend to do at this point but probably should do is ask whether this is wildly different to what we experience in terms of evangelism and discipleship with the wider population. I’m talking bnoth in terms of numbers and the kind of time it takes to see visible fruit. I suspect that the difference is not as big as is sometimes presumed.
Another person asked me what I would want people to discover by talking to those who live, work and serve the Gospel among Muslims in the UK. Here are a few things in no particular order.
- I’d like them to get to know what individual Muslims and their families are like. So much of the conversation seems to be about Islam as an entity and a threat. Too much of the conversation is defensive, it’s about how we protect English people and English culture from Islamisation. Yet we are talking about people, lots and lots of people, made in God’s image but desperately needing the saviour. I’d like them to discover the history of people who haven’t been sent here as part of some soft jihad but whose grandparents came, invited to help work in factories and in other jobs after the war. They came to Britian from places that at that time were part of the British Empire. They already had a connection to Britian. We went to their countries first! For their troubles they often faced discrimination and racism.
- I’d like them also to get a feel for how ordinary Muslims often perceive Christianity and Christians. There are positives and some incredible stories. One of my favourites is of the church where the elders got a visit from some local Muslims. They believed their house was under demonic attack and had been told at the Mosque to go and see the Christians at the church because “they know better how to deal with that kind of thing”. However, there is a long and continuing conflation of modern western culture with Christianity in the eyes of many Muslims.
- I’d like them to recognise the complexities where talking about Islam. There’s a difference between what religious texts say and how those texts are interpreted. There’s a difference between those with a specific political agenda and those with more of a conversion agenda, although yes the two are not completely separate. There’s a difference between those who turn up at speakers’ Corner, host book tables in city centres and are prominent. There’s a difference between those who have been radicalised by Islamists and those who haven’t. There’s a difference between the different strands of Islam, Shia, Sunni, Sufi etc. There are differences between Muslism from different ethnic cultures. There’s generational differences too. This leads to the fourth thing.
- I’d like them to observe the ways in which living in Britain is changing the culture of families from South Asian backgrounds.
Those kinds of things cannot be covered in a quick blog post because they can be summed up as “it’s a bit more complex/complicated than that.” In other words, yes there is a tie up between Islamic faith and Islamic culture in a way that Western individualism doesn’t see. Yes there are those with specific agendas but that isn’t the whole picture.
The other stand out thing in Edward’s article is how much it presumes about the sense of a Christian Britain. This itself relies on some theological presuppositions that we may not share. So another missing part of the conversation at the moment is to what extent we can and should expect Britian to be/remain/return to being a Christian country? I may try and return to that question.
The final thing I’d like those blogging and commenting on social media about culture war to hear is that frankly those living worshipping and witnessing in these kinds of contexts are weary of the words, weary of being told that if we disagree with the culture warriors we must be either liberal or naive. What is needed is a little less talk, a little less dismissiveness and a little more prayer.
Faithroots 
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