Image: Harist Refian, Unsplash
Mahabba on Cross Rhythms: Building relationships with Muslims
Mahabba recently featured on Cross Rhythms' Breakthrough! Nights radio show. National director, Gordon Hickson, was talking about the charity and its work in helping Christians to engage positively with Muslims through prayer and action.
Cross Rhythms has just released the transcript of the interview in an article, and we are excited to reproduce a part of it. You can find the full article via the link below.
What does the work of Mahabba look like? What sort of things are you doing as a network?
Mahabba mobilises ordinary Christians across the country. For generations it's been a domain of specialists who understand Islam and have probably worked abroad, but we felt that the problem is the ordinary Christians. So Mahabba mobilises thousands of ordinary believers from ordinary churches to get out of their trenches of fear and begin to learn how to relate to Muslims in the community.
We are first of all a prayer movement and so we gather people together in prayer, mainly on a weekly basis across the churches. We find that unity with prayer is very important, because it's so important for Christians to know that they are one, but also for Muslims to know that we're one family and that when they approach us, they're not approaching a divided group of people. So we gather in unity on a weekly basis.
Those people that come, we then take them through our first course, which is called 'Friendship First'. It speaks for itself. It's trying to show people how to connect to Muslims in their community. It's about understanding the culture and simple care and friendship, to be able to reach out and connect to local Muslim people.
We have other courses as well, but that's the basic thing, that we're mobilising Christians across the country to connect to Muslims in their community.
It really helps with community cohesion and it breaks up the awful divide between the communities. It helps a journey of understanding on both sides.
Breakthrough! Nights focusses on the people, issues and initiatives of the Stoke on Trent area and occasionally national and global topics.
It offers a chance for people, Christian or not, to engage spiritually through contemporary worship, prayer, the prophetic and sharing amazing life changing stories.
Gordon was speaking to Heather Bellamy, and if you want to tune into Cross Rhythms, Breakthrough! Nights is on every Tuesday evening, and available on FM or online.