Thursday 19 March 2015

Welcoming People, Hosting Events

Much has been written about the service of Muslim prayers held at St John’s Waterloo earlier this month. Excerpts from the service, and interview clips with participants, have been made available on YouTube.

Andrew Symes, Anglican Mainstream, suggests that “the motive behind this service was probably to build trust, to reconcile where there is division, to bring different communities together for greater cooperation and mutual understanding,” while offering “a radical and prophetic challenge to both faiths to be more ‘inclusive’ – Mosques should allow women to lead, and churches should include other faiths in their understanding of salvation.”

But, as Andrew Symes points out, offering a church as a venue for an Islamic prayer services contravenes canon law which states that all divine service must be in accordance with Church of England doctrine. Indeed, even cultural events hosted inside a church need to be “consonant with sound doctrine.”

Why object to Muslim worship in a church but tolerate it in a mosque or conference centre? The language of sacred space is probably not helpful here. Maybe the distinction between printers and publishers helps. Muslim (or indeed Christian) printers who refuse to print cartoons of Mohammed might get into trouble in contemporary British society, if their customers are willing to take them to court. But there is good reason why such cartoons are not published by the International Islamic Publishing House (IIPH). One can argue that printers should not refuse any customers whose printing demands are within the law, while strongly believing that it would be entirely inappropriate for the IIPH to publish them.

Conference centres, like printers, fulfil a certain role in our society. Their owners presumably cannot choose whether or not to host a congress for climate change deniers or a gathering of publishers of pornography. Church buildings, like publishers, also fulfil a certain role. They cannot host such events in the same way.  One does not need a concept of sacred space to allow that for Westminster Abbey to host the UKIP party conference would be inappropriate. Indeed, there are civic spaces, maybe a large town hall, which would be similarly inappropriate as a venue for any one political party.

The church is of course to practice radical hospitality. But it is the hospitality of welcoming people into our homes and indeed welcome them to come home to God. Hosting events is a different hospitality which may or may not be appropriate.  To follow Jesus who welcomed tax collectors may mean for a church to host a financial advice centre but radical hospitality does not mean that a church should make its facilities available to tax enforcement agencies and loan sharks. To follow Jesus who welcomed prostitutes might mean that a church building is kept open for longer hours with church members offering hot drinks and a safe space to sex workers; radical hospitality does not mean that a church might as well allow a brothel to operate within its facilities.

For some, among them Kelvin Holdsworth, it is perfectly obvious that a Muslim prayer group in need of a room should find shelter within church buildings – no questions asked. What is less clear is whether this is based on a concept of Christian hospitality which demands that we must make space to each and any group or whether Muslim prayer groups are “all right” (in ways in which other groups might not be) because we are after all worshipping the same God. Arguments have been brought forth both from hospitality and from the view that we are co-religionists (Kelvin Holdsworth considers it “bizarre” to deny that Muslims worship the same God as Christians).


In any case, it should not be too difficult to see that there is a difference between being hospitable to people and hosting events, between inviting Muslims to a Christian act of worship and, say, inviting them to proclaim the Shahada in church.