A farewell party early this evening at St Philip's Church, Evington, for Alan Race. More than a hundred people turn out to express their good wishes to someone who has been an influential figure in inter faith work, not only in Leicester but also far beyond, for more than a quarter of a century.
Rev Canon Dr Alan Race has been Priest-in-Charge at St Philip's since July 2007. He helped develop a new outlook for St Philip's, which had become a church for a minority community among residents in the parish who are affiliated to other faiths. He has also been Dean of Postgraduate Studies next door at St Philip's Centre for Study and Engagement in a Multi-Faith Society. Alan is an Executive Member of the World Congress of Faiths and has for many years been editor of its journal,
Alan moved to Leicester in 1983, around the time when he was beginning to stand out as one among a small but persuasive number of scholars and practitioners extending the vision and experience of Christians to acknowledge and engage with the world views of other faiths. Leicester provided Alan with fertile ground to strengthen and deepen his studies and writings on this theme.
Alan chaired a conference at Leicester University's Stamford Hall, 5-8 August 2001 entitled "Multi-Ethnic Britain: What Future?", which took its lead from the Parekh Report, which had been published the year before. I attended that conference, which was in itself a very interesting occasion - although, as you can imagine faithful reader, whatever we may have said and done there was somewhat overtaken by events in New York and Washington hardly one month later.
Alan was on the panel of three (along with Angela Jagger and Tony Nelson) who interviewed me for my initial post with Leicester Council of Faiths, back in May 2007. Alan was Treasurer of the Council of Faiths then.
Alan is leaving Leicester to become Rector of St Margaret's Church in Lee, South London. He's sold me on the idea of going down there to visit him once he's settled, with his description of St Margaret's as part church, part art gallery.
Among his many published books (either solely or with others) are: Interfaith Encounter: The Twin Tracks of Theology and Dialogue (SCM Press, 2001) and Christian Approaches to Other Faiths (joint ed., with Paul Hedges, SCM Press, 2008). He is also editor of the intermationally renowned journal Interreligious Insight (previously called World Faiths Encounter). In 2008, Alan wrote a pithy piece for the Guardian on the topic, Should Religions Compete?
The cake served this evening was one of those ones that has a photograph reproduced in the icing. I got a piece that had Alan's head on it. I hoped that upon eating it, I would feel my IQ or my wisdom or something shoot up like a sugar rush. Sadly, it was not to be.
In the photo above, Alan Race (right) shares a joke with Resham Singh Sandhu at his leaving do, St Philip's Church this evening (Ramesh Majithia is in the background, between them). You could hardly get a more inter-faith photo about Leicester if you tried.
I'm attending the regular meeting of Leicester SACRE (Standing Advisory Council on Religious Education), held this time at Charnwood Primary School, Nedham Street.
I've brought two guests with me today: Sam Newton, Editor of the Leicester Wave, is here at my recommendation to make some contacts, gain interest and drum up support from teachers and govenors at this meeting for an article about young Muslim women in Leicester and the burka. I've also brought Rosemarie Fitton, who's shadowing me as part of her MA course in Inter-Religious Relations at St Philip's Centre for Study and Engagement in a Multi-Faith Society. The photo above shows (left to right) Sam, Rosemarie and Jill Carr (Secretary of Leicester SACRE). They're standing before one of the displays created by pupils of Charnwood Primary in the school's "Walk of Faith".
At today's meeting we bid farewell to Rev Dr Alan Race, Vicar at St Philip's Church and Director of Studies at St Philip's Centre. To describe Alan as a mainstay of SACRE would be an understatement to put it mildly. He's a mainstay of everything inter-faith in Leicester and farther afield. He'll definitely be missed around here.
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.
