TAKING Jesus to the Sons of the Prophet is like throwing a lighted match into a fireworks factory, as two evangelists discovered in Birmingham recently.
Then Rod Liddle, in an excellent piece in this week’s The Spectator, weighed in with these words:
Well, fair enough, I suppose; if you wander into a Muslim area and start spraying Jesus hither and thither, you might expect one or two more hot-tempered locals to take offence. Islam is a peaceable religion and anyone who doesn’t think so will have their head cut off, etc, etc.
Given the sensitivity of the “Our delusions are better than your delusions” argument, it’s hardly surprising that the Church of England has decided to postpone a debate about Muslim conversion.
According to the Telegraph, a meeting of the Church’s “parliament” was due to discuss whether clergy should be doing more to convert British Muslims to Christianity. But the Church has now put the debate on hold until next February at the earliest – and will discuss the promotion of churches as tourist attractions instead.
This has led to an accusation of censorship by Paul Eddy, a lay member of the General Synod, who said his Private Members’ Motion on the subject should have been on the agenda at next month’s meeting in York as more than 100 other members had supported it – including three bishops.
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 Britain.
He believes it has been shelved because it would have shown up wide divisions in the Church over its attitude to converting believers in other faiths, at the same time as it faces schisms over the appointment of women bishops and homosexuality.
The debate would have taken place just 12 days before the once-a-decade summit of Anglican bishops, the Lambeth Conference. It would have piled more pressure on the embattled Archbishop of Canterbury, who earlier this year sparked a storm by claiming some parts of Islamic law would be adopted in Britain.
Eddy said:
From the telephone calls and emails I have received, people feel very aggrieved that, at this particular time in the church’s history, Synod was not given an opportunity to be debate evangelism.
Eddy believes Christ himself ordered all Christians to actively recruit non-believers and followers of other faiths, but that many bishops now downplay this missionary role. He fears that, by eroding the central place of Christianity in Britain, everything the country stands for is “up for grabs”.
Eddy’s concerns echo those of the Bishop of Rochester, the Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali, who last week said Church leaders had “gone too far” in their sensitivity to Muslims and had not done enough to spread the word of God.
Nazir-Ali put forward a striking account of how the cultural revolution of the 1960s had destroyed Christian values and Britishness, creating a “moral vacuum” which extremist Islamic groups were now exploiting.
However, his comments were condemned by senior figures within the Church.
According to this Telegraph report, The Rt Rev Stephen Lowe, the former Bishop of Hulme and the newly appointed Bishop of Urban Life and Faith (we kid you not), said:
Both the Bishop of Rochester’s reported comments and the synod private members’ motion show no sensitivity to the need for good inter-faith relations. Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs are learning to respect one another’s paths to God and to live in harmony. This demand for the evangelisation of people of other faiths contributes nothing to our communities.
The Freethinker was founded in 1881 by GW Foote, an outspoken critic of religion. After the publication of 
