For any Church of England church leaders who want to be socially responsible stewards as to who they invite into their churches to speak, perhaps you'd like to start off by looking at the
Jay Smith section a long with reading this piece and following any links herein. Thanks. Love from a Muslim.
Here I am to interact with a few comments by Beth Grove which seem to be a defence of
her in your face approach to “evangelism”. She comes across as a cultural Christian advocate who is bound by old bygone parochial ideas of nationalism which are propelled by a wild-eyed paranoia that Muslims are going to take the keys to "our" (Christian) kingdom. Rhetoric not too dissimilar to that coming out of Britain First - that well known beacon of evangelism. This is unsurprising seen as her influences come from America – a place riddled with
Christians who have conflated patriotism with Christianity. Let’s see what she’s got to say.
This erosion of Christian influence in public life continues, and at times encouraged even by ‘Christians’ engaged in public life. I refer to a symposium in 2015 whereby the speakers (Christian missionaries to Muslims) emphatically stated that we must “aid our Muslim friends to have as much influence in public life as we [Christians] do!”
I understand their motives. Essentially, their ideas are driven by ‘love’. Nonetheless, to encourage, or more accurately, to propel an Islamic ideology into public life, seems to be an action of misappropriated ‘love’ at the cost of ‘truth’? You see, if we love people, including Muslims, should we really transfer the keys to our kingdom to a people with no Christian memory?
OK, so smart people would have realised that the keys to her kingdom have already been taken away. That's why you have folks telling Christians to marry Bill and Bob (and Jill and Jane) to each other in churches or telling Christians to bake cakes which support lifestyles contrary to traditional Christian values.
The obvious question here is, why isn't she trying to get her keys back from the secularists? Erm, it's because they are seen as folks who share the same culture. Interesting considering Christians are meant to be "set apart" yet it's so difficult to distinguish them from Atheists in British society!
Secularist, are seen by the Christians to be their intellectual superiors, their professors, their family members, their friends and part of the fabric of the West (in fact the engine room and pioneers of the modern Western world). Not to mention liberators of Christian women, Christian women can now go out wearing whatever they want. Miniskirts, high heels and all that jazz! Not to mention the small matter of being able to divorce and remarry after the divorce.
Whilst Muslims are seen as pretty much the opposite thus when they see Muslims out-debating a Christian it turns their world upside down. The same happens when aboriginal Westerners convert to the faith of Islam. Westerners have been dropping the gown of Christianity for various secular ideals yet the eruption is barely palpable from the Church.
I’ll give you a couple of examples to illustrate this shared culture and inferiority complex when it comes to Secularists and Christians in Britain. Tom Holland, upon making the claim of Christianity being the root of Western civilisation, saw Christians were fawning over him. Little did they realise his main focus was on the “Christian” teaching of separation of Church and State (something that in the West has ironically precipitated the rise of faithlessness and secularism!). Folks like John Calvin would not have agreed but nevertheless the Christians were lapping it up – their superior (a secularist) dropped a bit of praise on their faith. If a Muslim had done the same I doubt the same servile attention would have been given to him/her.
Christians have even compromised their faith principles (relented on female pastors, gay clergy, gay marriage, divorce, marriage after divorce if the ex is still alive, turned a blind eye to sex outside of marriage, loosened the concept of modest dress, minimized the Bible, etc.) in an effort to accommodate and (try to) bring into the Christian fold the secularists. They prize the secularist because the secularist is their superior, their family member and their professor/fave celeb.
But contrast that with what they do to Muslims. The Muslim is the other. Not a superior like the secularist. Not an equal. But, effectively, a lesser specimen.
And that is why there's a hue and cry about Muslims and the "keys to our kingdom" but not a peep about those who currently carry the keys and will do so for the foreseeable future - the secularists.
I wonder if Beth Grove enjoys the taste of those cakes celebrating gay marriage which her co-religionists are forced to bake.
Ignoring their texts which call on them to wound and kill those who disagree with Islam (Sura 5:33).
Yawn, this is typical Beth Grove. You know, intellectually dishonest stuff she learnt from her predecessor Jay Smith.
That Quranic Verse was revealed in response to those who committed highway robbery (murder and theft), jurists may nowadays use this Verse to decide on the punishment of those who commit rape at knife/gun point.
It has NOTHING got to do with "disagreeing" with Islam. Of course Beth would have known that if she had shown an inkling to be fair and scholarly. Must be the
Jay Smith influence!
Many a refugee, the large majority being Muslim, have fled lands heavily controlled by Islamic doctrine. Some openly admit they have come here for economic and religious freedom. Quite a few even change their religion. Some become Agnostic, or outright Atheists (due to what they previously witnessed in Islam), and others turn to Christianity. The latter is what any Christian, who loves as Christ loves, would invest their best efforts towards. Many refugees from Islamic lands, who respect Christians but are not Christian, tell of their fears of that same Islam becoming an influential dynamic in this land. The threats of freedoms diminished is all too real to them as they see the numbers of influential Muslims gain, or given, access to some of the highest institutions of Britain and similar Western European Countries.
And the elephant in the room. There's credible evidence many of them just pretend to convert to Christianity or leave Islam to help with their asylum process. See
here.
As for this supposed paranoia that Muslims will take away their "freedoms" inn Britian and other parts of the West, erm, where's Beth getting this stuff from? Look, Muslims are light years away from having that type of influence. This is just the politics of fear-mongering. Muslims aren't going to be taking any Christian's miniskirt, porn stash or right to marry a person of the same agenda any time soon. Calm yourselves down. Most level-headed Brits will know where I'm coming from and will see such fear-mongering as ludicrous.
The Christian has a responsibility to speak against that which ‘sets itself up again the knowledge of the one true God’. The Bible is clear that we are in a battle, a battle for souls, and a battle for the soul of nations (2 Corinthians 10:4; Ephesians 6:12; Colossians 2:15).
Well, if you're in the midst of a battle Beth, where are you in holding the tide of secularism back?
The secularisation of Britain has been thrown into sharp focus by new research showing that for every person brought up in a non-religious household who becomes a churchgoer, 26 people raised as Christians now identify as non-believers. [The Guardian]
Beth also talks about the one true God. Has she stopped to think who that is. Clearly it was not Jesus, Jesus did not believe in a Trinity idea. That idea came about after Jesus. Muslims believe in the God of Jesus. Can Beth say the same or is she bound to a church tradition from the 4th century called the Trinity.
Edgar G Foster: Trinity Came After the Council of Nicea
Paula Fredriksen: Paul was NOT a Trinitarian
Ephesians 6:10-20 tells us to put on the ‘belt of truth’ and the ‘sword of the spirit which is the word of God’, and to be ready to share the ‘gospel of peace’.
Beth please don't mention the word "sword". All that springs to mind is the verse of the sword from the Bible which your colleague Lizzie Schofield was using to threaten Muslims into believing in Christianity. Threatening them with JESUS coming back and killing them with a SWORD.
Here's your
colleague in action.
And this is the irony, Beth talks about withholding the keys to the kingdom from a bunch of (mainly brown) foreigners migrating here but she's very open to worshipping a brown man who is foreign to Britain. A man who she believes ordered the killing of women and children in 1 Samuel 15:3, allowed the severe beating of female (and male) slaves in Exodus 21:20-21 and who her colleague believes will come back with a SWORD to terrorise Muslims (and those who have the keys to the kingdom, the Secularists)
Of course, that's Trinitarian Jesus in her mind.
We are to confidently engage a broken world, clearly exemplified in the one million Muslims (and a few others) who entered our lands these past couple years from the outflow of the bloody borders of Islam.
Ad nauseam we are told, this warfare is due to ‘cultural’ or ‘political disenfranchisement’ or accomplished by ‘crazies’. This I heard from an influential Christian working in close connection with the European Parliament. ‘Terrorism has no religion’ say our movie stars. The real experts of course. Whether they believe their rhetoric or not, we cannot know, yet all the evidence defies them.
Bloody borders? Erm who made those borders bloody? A bunch of Christians and/or those the keys to the kingdom.
As for the causes of terrorism, Beth Grove would do well to take off her current hat of Islamophobia and fear-mongering. How about actually thinking a bit deeper rather than imbibing the non-thinker's rhetoric of "oh it's their religion they are meant to kill us":
After the Manchester massacre… yes, and after Nice and Paris, Mosul and Abu Ghraib and 7/7 and the Haditha massacre – remember those 28 civilians, including children, killed by US Marines, four more than Manchester but no minute’s silence for them? And of course 9/11…
Counterbalancing cruelty is no response, of course. Just a reminder. As long as we bomb the Middle East instead of seeking justice there, we too will be attacked. But what we must concentrate upon, according to the monstrous Trump, is terror, terror, terror, terror, terror. And fear. And security. Which we will not have while we are promoting death in the Muslim world and selling weapons to its dictators. Believe in “terror” and Isis wins. Believe in justice and Isis is defeated.
[Robert Fisk]
In that vein, it is not the Muslim we are against; we are for them. Christ is for them.
As mentioned, your colleague believes Jesus will terrorise those who you are "for" with a sword.
He died for them!
What you believe Jesus died for Muslims? Erm,
not according to Christians like John Piper and James White who believe you're not preaching the gospel by making such a claim. Now this is an issue, how can you believe they have the Holy Spirit in them when they disagree with you theologically whilst you are imbued by the same Spirit according to Christian ideology?
It is the ideology behind their lives we critique.
Well considering
the ideology behind the lives of Muslims makes them the least likely to have sex before marriage out of all faith groups whilst those in the "kingdom" which Muslims should never get the keys to are
pumping out children out of wedlock at a rate faster than those who do not have Christian cultures. I think, you as a Christian who has a misguided sense of loyalty to a culture of yesteryear, should move over the divide. Go on, it beats churning out anti-Islam propaganda by isolating Quranic verses in order to make Muslims out to be killers in the waiting.
You may also want to think deeply about the ways in which your propaganda against Islam can amp up Islamophobia and anti-Muslim sentiment. As you should know,
your group Pfander Ministries has had followers who have levelled veiled death threats at Muslims as well as racist sentiment.
Is there any wonder that non-Muslims
even consider you and your group to be Islamophobic.
What would Jesus do? Would he really wantBeth Grove to be a propagandist against his brothers and sisters (yes, Muslims are the brothers and sisters of Jesus)?
Think about it Beth.
Churches part of the Church of England should also think about it.
Pfander Films Questioned Over Conversion Figures. Speakers Corner
Is Pfander Centre for Apologetics Islamophobic?
Muslim Defends John Sentamu vs Andrea Williams, Timothy Benstead, Christian Concern and James Gibson
Christians having dreams and converting to Islam
Learn about Islam
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