Islam and Mission Opportunities in the UK
by Matthew Vaughan
Dearie me, this whole Islam debate can get a bit heated, can’t it? It seems that just about any news story which is related in any conceivable way to Islam is guaranteed to make the front page. The cultural clash between Islam and the West is particularly newsworthy. As soon as a British teacher in the Sudan is jailed for naming a teddy bear “Mohammed” or the Archbishop of Canterbury mildly suggests that British law might accommodate elements of Islamic legal practice swarms of journalists start hammering away at their laptops, forests of trees are cut down and turned into newsprint, and angry people from Middle England start writing letters to the Daily Mail. The strength of opinion, on both sides, is really something to behold. You should have read the letters sections of the Luton newspapers after Muslims chanted “Baby killers” at soldiers marching through the town centre last year. They made Alf Garnett sound like one of the Teletubbies.
A few months ago a lady rang me up at work asking for advice. She had heard that “the Muslims” – always a telling phrase, I find – were planning to march through London to express their desire that Britain become a Muslim country and that Buckingham Palace be turned into a mosque. She was absolutely livid and refused to believe me when I assured her that it was an event organised by a handful of extremist crackpots who were shunned by just about every mainstream Muslim in the country. For her this was a direct attack on British democracy and the freedoms we enjoy and she was furious. An indicator of how utterly incensed she was feeling was the fact that she intended to write a letter to her MP about it which, for a British person, is the equivalent of burning down an embassy in protest. Similar levels of sentiment can be witnessed whenever certain trigger issues pop up – the Islamic veil, the construction of mosques and the treatment of those who convert away from Islam are good ones. You can almost hear the grinding coming from the teeth of tabloid readerships as they try to cope with the rage boiling up within them. If you want to fill newspaper space, it seems, all you need to do is cobble the words “no-go areas”, “shari’ahlaw” and “burqa” into some semblance of an article, add something about “indigenous British people” or “traditional freedoms” or, preferably, an unemployed Muslim person living on benefits, and wait for the angry letters to start flying in. As soon as an angry white person says “it’s time to stand up and be counted” you know you’re onto a winner.
One of the saddest things about this combustible state of affairs is the fact that the presence of millions of Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs and people of other religions in Britain represents a missionary opportunity of proportions which are unprecedented in British history. Did you know, for example, that there are currently something like 20,000 students from Saudi Arabia currently studying in the UK? That there may be as many as 250,000 Somalis currently living in the UK, 55,000 Afghans, 75,000 Iranians and 60,000 Moroccans as well as millions from the Indian subcontinent? Can you imagine how difficult it would be to get enough missionaries into Saudi Arabia to have daily contact with 20,000 Saudis? Or how much time and effort you would need to invest to get millions of Bangladeshis and Pakistanis to the point where they could have regular contact with Christians? I work for a mission organisation and getting missionaries into these countries takes a lot of time and money. And even once they’re there, they are often unable to witness as boldly and openly as they might like. Yet here we are, in a country with a church in virtually every village and probably at least one Christian on every street and in every block of flats, and the world has come to us. People from the most unchurched countries on earth, from the regions which are most hostile to Christianity, are living on our streets, working in our shops, are sharing our parks and our buses and our Underground carriages. Thousands and thousands of people who would probably otherwise never have met a Christian in their lives are living within earshot of a church. Up to about fifty years ago you would have had to spend two months on a boat if you wanted to meet a Muslim from Pakistan or Somalia; these days you can meet one by popping across the road to buy a pint of milk. By failing to recognise the historical magnitude of this epic diaspora and of its arrival in what is still a strongly Christian country we run the risk of missing out on one of history’s biggest missionary opportunities.
This wouldn’t be the first time that Christians have missed out on a missionary open goal. In the 13th century the Mongol Empire was the largest land empire the world had ever seen, stretching from Korea to Poland and from China to Arabia. It was bigger than the Roman Empire and the Islamic Caliphate put together. Mongol armies were pushing into the Middle East and threatening to destroy the territory of Islam. By 1241 Mongol generals were invading Europe, had conquered Hungary, Poland and Transylvania, and were knocking at the gates of Vienna. In 1258 they sacked Baghdad, the centre of Islamic power, and slaughtered hundreds of thousands of its inhabitants. The Mongol khanssent a string of letters to the Pope requesting him to submit to their authority or be destroyed. It’s hard to imagine the threat that this horde of battle-hardened warriors posed to the Western world as well as the Muslim world. And yet, amazing as it may seem, Christians had the chance to influence them at the highest possible level.
In 1266 the Mongol Emperor Kublai Khan sent a message to Pope Gregory X via Niccolo and Maffeo Polo (the father and uncle of Marco Polo) requesting that one hundred Christian scholars and engineers be sent to the Mongol Empire to preach the Christian gospel and to strengthen the Christian faith that was already present there in the form of Nestorian Christians. He also requested that some holy oil from the church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem be sent to him. The Pope decided that he could only spare two Dominican friars and duly sent them out, together with a 17 year old Marco Polo. Even this rather lame effort came to a premature end when the two friars, presumably after taking a quick look at a map of the world and realising just what they’d signed up for, decided to give it a miss. The 17 year old Polo actually made the trip, amazingly, but by sending a single gawky teenager instead of a hundred experienced Christian missionaries the Pope had clearly missed the boat. It’s impossible to know how things might have turned out if a hundred experienced and dedicated Christians had arrived in Mongolia and had been given free rein to spread the Christian message. Might the Bible have been translated into the local languages? Might court officials have embraced this faith? Might Kublai Khan himself have become a Christian and expected his subjects to do the same in the way that Constantine the Great did back in Roman times? The implications for the global church and particularly for the church in Eastern and Central Asia might have been staggering.
But we’ll never know, because Christians either failed to recognise the opportunity when it presented itself or failed to make the most of it. I wonder if, in fifty years, Christians might look back at Britain in the early 21st century and admit that we did the same thing. My worry is that, with the intense debate and anxiety over the presence of several million Muslims in the UK and the accompanying debates over issues such as the veil, community cohesion and radicalism, we’re losing sight of the fact that the multicultural makeup of 21st century Britain represents one of the greatest missionary opportunities in the UK for many, many years, perhaps the greatest ever. There are thousands, even millions, of people from the most unchurched countries in the world living on our doorstep. Men, women and children from the most anti-Christian states in the world – Somalia, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen – have done us the favour of coming to the UK, thereby saving us the trouble of paying for an airfare to go to them. Furthermore, this epic diaspora often retains strong links with their original communities back home, opening up even greater vistas of missionary potential. I was at a church on the south coast a while ago where an Indian Hindu lady had come to know Christ. As she flew back home regularly to catch up with family and friends she took her new-found faith with her until the whole community, in a remote and rural area of north India, had followed her example and converted to Christ. The diverse ethnic and religious makeup of our country presents challenges, of course, but we need to recognise that it also presents opportunities of incalculable potential. The tragedy of this situation is that, while we have often been quick to highlight the potential dangers of immigration from Muslim countries, we have been lamentably slow to recognise the missionary potential that is staring us in the face.
For Christ’s sake – and I mean that very literally – let’s not repeat the Mongol mistake. This opportunity to reach out to people from so many unchurched countries might not last forever. God, in his sovereign power, has brought people from all over the world to live in the UK, a country which, despite what you might think, is still strongly Christian in many ways. As Christians it is incumbent upon us to be hospitable to these new arrivals (have a gander at Leviticus 19: 33, for example) and to show the love of Jesus to them through what we do and say. When we’re dealing with people from different religious and ethnic backgrounds then obstacles do emerge: language barriers, issues surrounding interfaith apologetics, cultural differences like the roles played by men and women, for example. With training, all of these are surmountable. I wonder if the biggest obstacles, on the other hand, are the ones inside our own heads: the fear of outsiders changing “our way of life”, the fear of people who don’t speak our language or understand our customs, the fear that some Muslims may seek political power. Let’s pray that God would enable us to see beyond the fear which mass immigration may provoke and to recognise the opportunity which we have. If followers of Christ engaged wholeheartedly with the diaspora on our doorstep it could have consequences for the world church which are as thrilling as they are huge.
Matthew Vaughan works for the mission agency Interserve, editing their quarterly magazine “Go” and working as PA to the Director, Steve Bell. He is a keen writer, has been published in a range of Christian and secular publications, and also works with Muslims in his spare time.
These posts are by guest authors for Fulcrum