All in Good Faith

Author(s): Jean Potter, Marcus Braybrooke
Publisher: World Congress of Faiths

Page 48

Christianity and Interfaith Worship
The particular lesson of this experience was that Gentiles could become Christians without first having to submit to the requirements of the Jewish law, not that Christians may worship side by side with those of different faiths. What is relevant to the issue of interfaith worship is the fact that the church changes its mind about where to draw a line between the included and the excluded and it is made to do so in the light of its experience. The old wineskins of settled attitudes about the admissible and inadmissible are broken by the new wine of the work of God in unanticipated ways.
Much discussion about interfaith worship has become entangled in the meshes of the debate about revelation and salvation. Is God made known exclusively and finally in Jesus Christ and is authentic prayer and worship possible only for those who explicitly confess Christ as saviour ? Or is the truth of God, uniquely manifest in Christ, nevertheless revealed to the adherents of other faiths and the salvation of Christ available to them? Or are all our religious stories equally vehicles of that transcendent reality whom we name God and do all the many paths of salvation ultimately converge on him?
There is no prospect whatever of Christians coming to a consensus on this issue. But if we recognise the principle of 'lex orandi, lex credendi' and allow that it is the experience of worship which shapes doctrine rather than doctrinal pronouncements which govern worship, we may avoid the thickets of this dispute. It is in our meeting with God and with one another that we discover who are the ones with whom we may pray, not by consulting our creeds and catechisms however important these are as attempts to articulate our understanding of God.
Situational
Christian worship is situational, anchored in a given place and time. Worship is always inescapably contextual. It takes place somewhere and not somewhere else. It may be caught up into eternity here on earth it starts at half-past-ten. No act of Christian worship takes place in a social vacuum, unaffected by the character and events of the world around. Even sectarian patterns of worship which seem to take no account of any social context, which express instead an individualistic other-worldly pietism, are reflections of society in their very rejection of it.
When we worship we lift up our hearts to God but our feet stay on the common ground of our one world when we do so. Within the mainstream of Christian tradition worship has always been seen as an offering of that world to God. The life of the world which we offer to God
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