The Church Times’s downbeat report of the evangelistic carol service in Whitehall last Saturday, to which I’ve addressed the last two posts, quotes “the C of E’s co-lead bishop for racial justice, suffragan Bishop of Kirkstall Arun Arora”:
Referring to Mr Robinson by his real name, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, Bishop Arora said that he was “delighted” that he had “recently come to faith in prison”, but suggested that “having embraced and accepted God’s welcome he can’t now restrict it from others who may be equally lost.
Truly, there is less joy in today’s Church of England over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine thousand Muslim immigrants who see no reason to repent.
I suppose it is most likely that Arora has simply swallowed the State’s story that Unite the Kingdom is a white supremacist front, and therefore that Tommy Robinson really wants to expel, or better still kill, all the non-whites in Britain. But in the unlikely event that the bishop took the trouble to learn how many non-whites actually took part in leading the service, perhaps he more accurately meant that Robinson is anti-Islam. (But he is demonstrably not anti-Muslim, the distinction being crucial, since the former position seeks, contra Arora’s accusation, for Muslims to turn from lost error to Christ).
It’s hard to reckon whether the church’s official “racial justice” position is invidious, or simply naive. I mean the position on the Muslim “lost” – the bishop’s disparaging position on Tommy’s conversion is simply un-Christian. A dear elderly lady in my church, with little knowledge of Islam, welcomed mass-immigration on the grounds that it would enable Muslims to witness Christianity, and be converted. And it is certainly true that, leaving aside the baptisms of convenience to avoid extradition, there are those turning away from Islam and towards Christ.
Much of that, though, has little or nothing to do with the bishops, and everything to do with apologists and evangelists like Bob from Speakers Corner or Hatun Tash, who face real physical risk by preaching gospel truth to actual Muslims. In the case of Bob he actually took part in Tommy’s carol concert.
But to see uncontrolled Muslim immigration primarily as an evangelistic harvest-field is either totally disingenuous, or displays total ignorance of the doctrines of Islam and the character of the Muslim communities here, let alone the plethora of examples of Islamic suppression of Christianity from The Levant and North Africa in the seventh century to Lebanon in the twentieth. If one lost sheep repents, whilst ninety-nine incoming strays are planning to trample the shepherd to death, then the whole flock is in grave danger.
To me the attitude seems on a par with encouraging the existence of the Soviet Gulags or the Nazi concentration camps because the occasional camp guard was converted through the perseverance of the religious prisoners.
In point of fact there seems little sense amongst the Anglican hierarchy – and let’s not forget the Baptist, Methodist, Salvationist, Pentecostal and other church leaders who condemned the event in their open letter – that Muslims are truly lost. Interfaith dialogue seems more the ticket than confronting them with Jesus the Son of God, faith in whose saving death and glorification is the only way to God. Or as apologist David Wood points out from long experience, they should be first dismantling the false claims of Islam so that Muslims are ready even to look at the gospel message.
OK, Christmas is coming, so maybe I should cut some slack at this time of goodwill. But just as my benefactor Richard Middleton reminded us when he said, “Let’s put Herod back into Christmas,” the birth of our Lord was a story of villains as well as heroes. And apart from Herod, it was the religious leaders in Jerusalem who, having correctly read the prophecies, in practice ignored the birth of their Messiah in Bethlehem, and acquiesced, at least, in the slaughter of the innocents that rendered the holy family refugees.
“He came to his own, but his own received him not.”
Whatever happened to our heroes of faith?
