How Do You Connect with Muslims and People of other Faiths?
I want you to take some time and listen to Eboo Patel, a Muslim, as he makes an appeal to all Christians. The story at the end of the talk gets to the heart of his message. As Christians, we are called to be Christlike, like April in the last story.
Q | An Interfaith Dialogue from Q Ideas on Vimeo.
So what did you think of the video? What questions linger in your mind? What does it cause you to think about? How do you approach interfaith dialogue? How do you honor and respect people of different faiths and still hope, pray and call people to consider Christ for all that He is?
Why are some Christians so afraid to love their Muslim neighbors? I have a number of Muslim friends who I am close to, love, pray with and deeply respect. Many of them outshine most Christian’s I know in most every area of their life – from devoutness, kindness, faithfulness, prayer life, purity and hospitality (for some specifics). I desire them to know Jesus like I’ve been given the chance to know Jesus, but I also have much to learn from them.
I do not support interfaith prayer and gathering. But, we should be preaching the Gospel to all nations, calling all to repentance and faith in Jesus alone.
This is not a rant, but an honest question. How do you “pray with” people who pray to other gods?
If you mean praying for them in Jesus’ name, then…sure, I can do that. That would be an invitation to them to talk to (and listen to?) Jesus as well.
But if you mean sharing in an “ecumenical” prayer to some homogenized “god” of common theological ground, I’m not interested. I realize that those who seek God will eventually find Christ, if they keep seeking and don’t give up. But I don’t want to encourage people to feel good about their “god,” and so distract them from finding God.
I hope that doesn’t sound like I’m closed-minded. I’m really mainly focused on people coming to God, and knowing the Truth. Isn’t that what Jesus was all about, too?
John,
I appreciate your question, and it is a good one. As you may know, a faithful Muslim prays five times a day, and has a very specific approach to prayer. I asked if I could join them in their prayer time, which I have done a number of times. While I joined them in certain motions, we each prayed individually, so I prayed to God in Jesus name and they prayed to Allah. After I prayed with this group at their house the first time, one of the guys asked me, “So how do you pray?”
I basically took them through a rich walk through the Lords prayer and then we prayed together.
Those are some of the specifics of what I meant when I said I prayed with my Muslim friends. Does that make sense?
For my two cents, a great balancing act is called for. It’s not that we are to be relevant OR truthful, we need to be relevant AND truthful.
For me, it means I try to build little bridges to The bridge. This calls for a humble student of other view who is slow to speak, quick to listen & affirm all that is in sync with the Christian worldview while loving/serving people fiercely. This love will often earn a good hearing for the Gospel; when it does may we have the wisdom and guts to boldly and unapologetically represent Christ as He is.
I can’t help but think that we need to imitate the apostle in instances like 1 Corinthians 9 (Paul becoming all things to all men), Acts 16 (with Lydia, the slave girl, & the jailer), & 17 at Mars Hill (where Paul was quoting pagan poets) … Paul was certainly not a universalist, but he found ways to reach theologically diverse people with the Gospel.
I watched this video when it was first posted and have prayed on how to reply without offending. J.R. I have no doubt that you are sincere in your quest to build dialog with people of other faiths; however, I would be much more impressed if the talk this man was giving was befor The Muslim Brotherhood than with a Christian audience. To me he is just using the old con man “flip” to turn us into believing we share the Muslim propencity to kill anyone who does not worship as he does. It is his prophet who demands the sword for Christians or any other religion and not the other way around. I could not help but see him as arogantly trying to dupe the sincere. http://actforamerica.com/index.php/learn/multimedia/video