CONVERSATION DEMANDS MUTUAL RESPECT

The Guardian's Comment is Free - belief website runs a weekly feature called The Question, posing one at the start of the week, then publishing commissioned responses on the Monday, Wednesday and Friday following (along with the facility for readers to post responses of their own). This week's question is, "Should Religions Compete?"

Here's today's response, from Rev Canon Dr Alan Race: Priest-in-Charge at St Philip's Church, Evington; Dean of Postgraduate Studies at St Philip's Centre for Engagement and Study in a Multi-Faith Society; and stalwart member of Leicester Council of Faiths.

Conversation demands mutual respect

Without trust we cannot talk about God, but to build trust we must avoid trying to convert or lecture people

Any great religion worth its salt exists to offer its believers a comprehensive view of life – a vision of transcendent reality combined with an accompanying pathway of transformation for the human condition. It is this comprehensibility which leads many to assume that the religions are inevitably locked into fierce competition with one another over the battle for souls. But how inevitable is "inevitable"? The successful development of the world-wide interfaith dialogue movement over the last fifty years suggests that we can expect something different from religious adherence in the future. It is a movement which is becoming embedded all over Britain.

Of course if we come across something which lifts our spirits to new heights we will want to communicate this to others, and this is natural. It is the witness which faiths bear to one another. But that is wholly different from insisting that the good, true and beautiful which has been glimpsed through my lens must become the basis too of your seeing and that any seeing of your own will necessarily be deficient. If evangelising means bottom-up telling the story and recounting the experience, then all well and good. But if it strays into the top-down accusation that "your" comprehensibility can never match "mine" then we will have overstepped what we can possibly know, as well as betray that sense of humaneness about religious commitment which we want others to see.

I minister in an Anglican Parish Church and Centre whose surrounding area is 85% people of faiths other than my own, mainly Muslim, but also Hindu and Sikh. When we meet for dialogue or work together on a practical project I do not seek to convert my neighbours. This is not out of cowardice but out of respect for the sake of building trust. Without trust there is no meaningful meeting between us and therefore also no discerning of "God" within either of us. Sometimes we agree and sometimes we disagree – on many matters, theological as well as social and political. We do not know enough about one another to make judgements about which is best and it is wise if we set them aside. As it is, we are likely, unconsciously, to compare the best of our own with the worst of the others, and yet what good can that do?

From a Christian point of view the permission for dialogue which the churches gave themselves fifty years ago has begun to bear fruit. The moral goodness, faithfulness, and intellectual keenness of my 'other religious' neighbours leads me to question any simple assumption that my way has got to be the way willy-nilly for everyone else too. What I understand of "God" seems to be at work among them and is plain to see. This brings a tension between dialogue and evangelism, which is the subject matter of the recent Anglican Report, Sharing the Gospel of Salvation.  The report, like all other church denominational reports on the subject, struggles to square the circle. Dialogue is yielding fruits – of shared spiritual questing, mutual learning, and common actions for local and national good – and these are reflected in the projects and case studies which the Report presents. Interestingly, it acknowledges that none of them are explicit about evangelising as their goal, and this is not counted against them. Meanwhile, the theological sections continue to affirm the traditional categories of Christian uniqueness which begins less and less to correspond to what is being learned through experience on the ground.

The only new thing in this report, from previous church accounts, is the recording of maturing encounters and dialogues which are taking on lives of their own and which act as a challenging feedback to the dogmatic tradition. It seems that theological theory has yet to catch up with changing Christian practice.