Sometimes events outside Birmingham can have a big impact on people here and on relationships between people of different faiths. In the past few weeks Dr Andrew Smith has been involved in working with Muslims and Buddhists affected by the plight of the Royhinga people in Burma. This has resulted in some work to build friendships between the communities here in Birmingham and a statement from the Birmingham Faith Leader’s Group which you can read here. Statement on Burma
He was also part of a city wide group who write a response following the brutal murder of Lee Rigby in Woolwich on 22nd May. That response can also be downloaded and read here. Birmingham Condemns Woolwich Murder – Statement
On the 11th May the Catalyst course came to an end. The day finished with a graduation meal at Al-Faisal’s restaurant in Birmingham. About 50 guests attended and heard about what had happened on the course and the impact it had on the group members.
The evening concluded with the members being awarded a certificate and being presented with a personalised Catalyst hoodie. Major Sam Edgar from the Salvation Army and Rabbi Margaret Jacobs were representing the Birmingham Faith Leaders Group and handed out the certificates and hoodies.
During the evening the group explained that they are intended to continue meeting as a younger faith leaders group. Plans are well underway for their first meetings and updates on how to keep up with their progress will be coming soon.
‘Tomorrow members of the public are coming for a guided tour of London, your task between now and then is to research, plan and then lead a tour for them’.
How would you feel if that was said to you? well that was just one of the challenges the Catalyst group faced on their residential trip to London. They had less than 24 hours to plan a trip in a city few of them new well for people they had never met. It demanded that they drew on all the leadership training they had received through the Catalyst programme so far, and was a real challenge.
The four day trip also included a visit to the House of Lords to discuss being a faith leader in the public and political sphere. They were guided by the Rt Revd Bishop David Urquhart, Bishop of Birmingham and one of the Lords Spiritual who sits in the House of Lords. He gave a fascinating tour of the house explaining its workings and history and chaired a discussion for them to grapple with how to be a leader of faith in a society where faith isn’t always taken seriously or considered relevant to political or moral debate.
Having the chance to spend time together, socialise and eat together brought the group much closer and led to some really deep and profound conversations on topics such as women in leadership, salvation and gay marriage. Our evening reflections included the opportunity to reflect on pieces of art from different faith traditions, on the final day we visited Tate Modern and looked at art inspired both by a spirituality and by no faith or spirituality at all.
It was a fantastic time which drew us together as a group, challenged us all and developed leadership skills amongst this key group of emerging leaders in Birmingham.
The third Catalyst day took place at the Faithful Neighbourhoods Centre on Saturday 12th January. In a packed day the group learnt about basic planning for events including budgeting, risk assessments and safeguarding. After a wonderful curry for lunch the group thought about how their personality affects their leadership by going through an introduction to the Myers Briggs Tye Indicator personality test. This useful and entertaining session was led by Tom and Judy Walsh who helped us all see how personality impacts the way we lead and how we relate to those in our teams.
The final session of the day was on Leadership under pressure and was led by Jake Diliberto who brought a vast array of experience to the topic and described pressure situations he’d been a leader in that we all hoped we could avoid!
As a warm up for this session the group were all put under pressure as they were challenged to use £5 to buy ingredients for a tasty snack for us to share in the tea break. The pressure was added to as they only had 35 mins from receiving the instructions to needing to serve the food. In this time they had to buy the ingredients, prepare them and do a risk assessment on the activity. A beautiful fruit salad, mini fruit kebabs and cheese and tomato on ciabatta were the results.
In April all the members of Catalyst will have to prepare and run a Near Neighbours event, to prepare them for this task Immy Kaur shared her experience of running the Art for Action project in 2012.
Next up for Catalyst is our Residential trip to London from 28th Feb-3rd March. Look out for more updates
This was one of the questions that came out of our discussions at the second Catalyst day in December. The participants were asked to describe God in juts a few sentences and then to look at what other people had written. If they warmed to that description of God they put a tick. If they didn’t really understand what was written they put a question mark. If they didn’t describe God in that way they put a dot. One phrase that got an almost equal number of ticks and dots (but no question marks) was ‘My Best Friend’. For some this felt comforting, for others it was too informal and reduced God to our level.
Munpreet, who wrote the comment, has written a thoughtful blog post on why she wanted to describe God as her best friend. It’s well worth taking the time to read.
So what do you think? Too informal, an intimate and profound insight? And how might you describe God in just a few sentences?
Since September 2011, Near Neighbours has been encouraging people across the city to come together to make new friends, deepen relationships and transform their communities. We now have 92 projects that have been funded by Near Neighbours – initial feedback suggests 3,000 people have met each other through these events.
To celebrate these friendships between people of different faiths and ethnicities we comissioned 15 portraits taken by a professional photographer, Dee from Outroslide, that give the people and their relationship a context.
We shot the pictures and interviewed all the people involved during June, July, August, September and a bit of October, had bespoke display boards made that could fit in a car and be assembled as quickly as possibly (thanks to John at Morse-Brown Design) , hunted around for funding (thanks Transforming Church and Westhill Endowment) and eventually launched the exhibition on November 17th at St Martin’s Church in the Bull Ring.
The exhibition and its launch were featured on Central News – the piece included interviews with people who had been involved with the projects and some of those whose friendships are depicted in the portraits. You can watch the coverage here.
Since then the Exhibition has been seen at the launch of the Christian Muslim report into women’s work, at the national Together In Service event hosted by the Department for Communities and Local Government. It is booked by local primary schools, churches, universities and other places of worship but is available for anyone to borrow.
Booking forms and more details are all on our website – we really want people to see these pictures and think hard about the personal and political importance of friendships that bridge communities, challenge prejudice and broaden our imagination. Have a look at the pictures and stories featured in the exhibition on the Outroslide website.
(All pictures from the launch were taken by Helen Tomblin – thanks.)
One of the programmes funded by Near Neighbours is the Catalyst leadership programme for young leaders. Aimed at people aged 20-30, this programme brings together people of different faiths in that age bracket and provides training on leadership issues.
Catalyst Birmingham has a cohort of 13 which includes Sikhs, Buddhists, Christians and Muslims. On November 24th they met for the first time and spent the day getting to know one another and thinking through what the qualities of leadership drawing on their own experiences of leadership and inspirational leaders from within their faith traditions.
The group will meet once a month for the next 6 months and will cover topics such as conflict resolution, character and personality, practicalities of leadership, recruiting volunteers, risk assessment and faith and leadership in the public sphere.
They will also have to devise and run a Near Neighbours project as part of the course.
Our hope is that this group will go on to form the core of a group of young faith leaders engaged with inter-faith work and social issues in Birmingham.
The Faithful Neighbourhoods Centre will be hosting the Faith Encounter Programme as they run their accredited Faith Guiding Course
The Faith Encounter Programme seeks to train people of all faiths in Birmingham as Faith Guides, so that places of worship are better equipped to offer high quality educational visits.
The course is designed to provide participants with the knowledge, understanding and skills required for successful guiding around a particular place of worship. If you follow one of the major religious traditions represented in Birmingham, you are welcome to apply: Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim, & Sikh. Minor traditions are not excluded if they have a place of worship.
There will be 20 places available. Applicants must be over the age of 18 and have the ability to communicate well in English. Applications are welcomed from practising members of any faith community. In addition to completing the application form, applicants need to submit a reference from a leader of their local place of worship.
Course details The aims are achieved through the study of three key areas: 1. Knowledge of and ability to communicate the guide’s own faith 2. Awareness of, and competence in, tour guiding skills 3. Understanding of other faith traditions The course will include four visits to places of worship of different faiths.
The course is offered at the discounted rate of £33, which is the registration fee to the Institute of Tourist Guiding. This may be subsidised by the place of worship. Concessions may be available.
You can download a full brochure giving all the details of the course here
In September we ran our second ‘Faithful Conversations’ training evening here at the Faithful Neighbourhoods Centre. A group of 13 of us to met to think about how we can have conversations about faith in an informal and non-confrontational way with friends and neighbours.
The evening consisted of a number of activities that involved, amongst other things, people reflecting on their own faith journey, sharing how they celebrate festivals or what impact their faith has on their lives day by day. We also spent time thinking about how we speak and, perhaps more importantly, how we listen. Finally we considered how we cope when we find ourselves in disagreement over faith matters.
The different learning styles were appreciated by the participants who went on to make a number of positive comments about the events.
“The emphasis on simply asking ‘what do you believe’ and taking each person as individuals not representatives of their faith was good.” “It took pressure off me to defend my faith.” “It is more about building a relationship with love than winning an argument” “The variety of activities was very good to get us talking with others about our own faith stories”
The Faithful Conversations course is being run again in Walsall on 29th November. Details are on our events page.
We can also run the course in your area. If you would like to find out more please contact us.
Near Neighbours Eid Kabaddi event – Monday 27th August, 2012.
Matt Kendall of Aston Near Neighbours writes: Aston Cricket Club were keen to run a kabaddi event at the wonderful Aston Park Pavilion, and we decided to work with them to try to make the event more inclusive for the community and expand cross cultural understanding. The work also was a chance to open up the pavilion to the community as it has been empty and locked for much of its existence since being opened in 2009.
The event had two parts. One was an invitation only cross cultural discussion and explanation of the rules of Kabaddi and the celebration of Eid, and the second part was to enjoy the Kabaddi event.
As well as the general common issues around faith and celebration as a community, what really came from the cross cultural discussions was that the real drivers for a lot of the leaders who are active within their faith groups are to develop and support their community. We were fortunate to have a number of people attending who were senior figures within their various faith communities and all stated that they were strongly motivated by the community development work they are doing.
We still have still some more work to do to build relationships in the area, and we still have 2 more Near Neighbours events left to run – watch this space.
