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Take a look at Ed Stetzer’s article on Multifaith and the Global Faith Forum - Part 1.

As a rule, I don’t do interfaith meetings. Our goals generally do not line up. Yet, next week I will be speaking at the Global Faith Forum at Northwood Church (led by Pastor Bob Roberts) in Keller, Texas which will be one of the few times I am on the same platform as those of other faiths—the last time being a meeting at the Washington Post building with the Religion Newswriters Association.

Five years ago, however, I found myself sitting in an interfaith meeting. Gracious people from different religions and denominations had gathered together to plan for common research on congregations. We met at the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America headquarters in Chicago to plan the ongoing work of congregational research, a project launched and funded by a major grant through a charitable endowment. The goal of the Cooperative Congregational Studies Partnership was to bring together participants from Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, Baha’i’ and Orthodox churches to research and compare the realities of our work.

I was one of those participants but was unsure if I belonged. During one of the main sessions, the facilitator explained that this research should lead to cooperative resourcing to help all our respective congregations. He suggested that we could jointly create, publish, and distribute resources to help congregations deal with faith development, growth, and other issues.

At the appropriate time, and with my best smile, I raised my hand and said something like, “I am here for the research. I appreciate the funding which allows us to survey our churches and I think it is helpful to use similar questions and metrics for better research. But, I am not here to form a partnership to help one another and our congregations. I want to help the churches I serve, but part of the reason they exist is to convert some of you.”

I paused, smiled, and worked hard not to sound menacing. Some of them looked at me as if I had just used a string of profanities. But others nodded in agreement. And then the Muslim Imam seated next to me spoke up and said, “I actually feel the same way.”

Though we were in a minority in that group of (predominantly) liberal Protestants, we represented the growing groups. We believed in sharing and growing our faith, we did not think that we were all worshiping the same God or gods, and we were not there to pretend we believed the same things. In other words, our goal was not a merging of faiths, a blurring of belief, or even interfaith partnership.

In any case, we were able to help move the meeting back to its original intent—doing better research with the funding of a major endowment and using some similar metrics for comparison.

The Imam and I had a good laugh after the meeting. At the same time, we realized that we were not of the same faith and, honestly, we would each be overjoyed if we could bring the other to the truth.

Without using the word, we were acknowledging that we were “multi-faith. ” By “multi-faith,” I mean to acknowledge that we are not all of the same faith, we are not sharing a faith, but we are representing differing, multiple faiths. Acknowledging our distinctive belief systems, even when they contradict, is critical to bringing value to our existence. Anything else is at least dysfunctional, and more likely dishonest at the core. Simply put, we do not all worship the same God, we are not on the same path, and those who say so are naive at best.

Multi-faith, if the word catches on, is simply a recognition that within a particular group we are more than one faith. Worldwide trends indicate that a multi-faith approach is reality and our future. Adherence to the major world religions is growing. German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche declared “God is Dead” well over 100 years ago, but statements declaring the death of God were apparently premature. In fact, although Nietzsche’s angst was against Christianity, secular thinking has long embraced the idea that religion was the problem of society, not so much the solution.

“God is Dead” has been replaced by the declaration “God is Back.” Economists John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge (an atheist and Roman Catholic) wrote a fascinating book by that title:

Statistics about religious observance are notoriously untrustworthy, but most of them seem to indicate that the global drift toward secularism has been halted, and quite a few show religion to be on the increase. One estimate suggests that the proportion of people attached to the world’s four biggest religions - Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism - rose from 67 percent in 1900 to 73 percent in 2005 and may reach 80 percent by 2025.
John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, God is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith is Changing the World, New York: The Penguin Press, p. 16]

The phrase multi-faith might sound strange to you. Yet the idea makes much more sense if peaceful co-existence and understanding in a crowded religious world are important—and I think they are.

For years people have promoted the concept of “interfaith dialogue.” The idea was to discover common ground that unites us and work as one for the good of humanity. That sounds good, until we begin to analyze what that really means.

In an interfaith world there is often a desire to all work together on everything as if there are no issues. This always fails to work among serious believers of any faith because the differences are clear and pronounced.

In a multi-faith world, we recognize that we are not worshiping the same God, gods, or goals. And, we must not be offended by our desire to proselytize one another.

Yet, we will be NEAR one another. I do not believe in interfaith partnership, but we can be what Francis Schaeller called “cobelligerents,” battling everything from poverty to pornography. However, we have to recognize when it comes to the souls of men and women we have a very different vision for the future. We can (and should) all serve the poor, and perhaps even work to not overlap our efforts, but for the poor in spirit our message is quite different. Those messages must be able to be freely given to those in need of good news.

The core belief of many in the interfaith dialogue business has been that at the core, all religions teach the same thing so we should be able to work together, standing on common ground, to make the world a better place. Hindus and Buddhists, Muslims and Jews, Christians and Animists ultimately are all saying the same thing and therefore should be able to cooperate to improve society. But how true is that assumption?

Check in next week and I will share more about why I believe Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life and that no one comes to the Father but through him. Yet, I know I will proclaim that message in a world where others believe something very different—and I want to know them and their views, respect them, love them, and have the freedom to hear their views and present the good news of Jesus to them.

Feel free to weigh in as long as you do so in accordance to the comment rules. I will be giving the opening talk at the Global Faith Forum. What you have read above is the beginning of my presentation—and I will share more of it next week. Also, I look forward to learning from others involved, including Mark Galli (Senior Managing Editor of CT), Mark DeYmaz, Al Weiss, Ray Bakke, Vance Pittman, and Os Guinness.