Social Justice - Interfaith Dialogue
Developing Criteria for Congregational Interfaith Dialogue
produced for Toronto Conference by the InterChurch InterFaith committee
By the very nature of life in Toronto Conference, we as The United Church of Canada, are in increased contact and interaction with faith communities that are non-Christian. The need has been expressed to develop guidelines for formal congregational contact with other faith communities. The United Church of Canada is a mainline Christian church. Care should be taken to determine how representative the guest or group is of their own faith tradition.
WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF THE DIALOGUE?
A. To learn more about another faith tradition. This can be as simple as inviting a speaker in to address a group about the other tradition and what it believes. Often a question and answer period would follow and the event would end. This really isn’t dialogue, it is knowledge gaining. This may be the congregational equivalent of a comparative religion course.
B. To genuinely try to find out how God is moving in another faith tradition and what it might say to us as Christians about God. This takes us into new and potentially risky areas. We examine what we believe and why through the eyes of non-Christians. We admit the possibility that we may have to change some of our ideas about God and that God may be working independently of Christianity.
WITH WHOM DO WE DIALOGUE?
Preparation for dialogue is critical. The success of the dialogue will owe in large measure to the amount of preparation that is done. It is important that we know with whom we are in dialogue.
A. We would want to know what the person knows and understands about the theology, faith and ethos of the United Church. How do they feel about the social gospel emphasis of the church? What about inclusive language, female clergy, male-female stereotypes, and a fairly democratic organizational structure?
B. Are they people who have group process skills? Will they be willing to enter into an equal dialogue?
C. Are they prepared to participate in an ongoing evaluation? Evaluation is critical to dialogue because the subject of discussion is so sensitive. Leadership must be aware of what is happening in the group and whether the experience is meeting the needs and the goals set out.
For assistance, contacts or more information contact the Toronto Conference InterChurch InterFaith committee @ 1-800-446-4729 or 416-241-2677.
From Leonard Swidler’s foreword to Jewish Monotheism and Christian Trinitarian Doctrine: A Dialogue by Pinchas Lapide and Juergen Moltmann; Fortress Press, Philadelphia, 1981.
At the first level interreligious dialogue is a dialogue, that is, a conversation on a common subject between two or more persons with differing views, the primary purpose of which is for each participant to learn from the other so that he or she can change.
In dialogue each partner must listen to the other as openly and sympathetically as he or she can in an attempt to understand the other’s position as precisely and, as it were, as much from within, as possible. Such an attitude automatically includes the assumption that at any point we might find the partner’s position so persuasive that we would act with integrity, we would have to change our own position accordingly. That means that there is a risk in dialogue: we might have to change, and change can be disturbing.
To have such [interreligious dialogue] it is not sufficient that the dialogue partners discuss a religious subject. Rather, they must come to the dialogue as persons somehow significantly identified with a religious community. […] Only thus can the whole community eventually learn and change, moving toward an ever more perceptive insight into reality.
