Living as a minority

Our bishop, Nick Baines, has blogged today on comments he's made about being a minority. I think this is a very important debate to had - how do we function as a 'national' church if we're a minority. However, I'm not sure about Nick's suggestion that we should look to the Muslim community as an example. This is my response to Nick:

This may seem somewhat facile but is it not more appropriate to think of
dwindling Christian communities as early church, where they were more
mission-orientated and certainly a minority?

There is a fundamental difference in the histories of the two faiths. Christians look back to an early church that was persecuted; Muslims look to a more triumphalist origin. This creates a different mindset.

I agree with your final paragraph that there are important challenges facing the church, but what conclusions could we draw from the Muslim community?

It is certainly true that parishes in Bradford are overwhelmingly outnumbered, made all the more frustrating when members of the congregation 'drive in' to church on a Sunday having left some time ago when the tide of immigrants became a worry. (This is a worrying trend, perhaps - Christians who feel called to worship in an area but not live there?)

The concern is that we end up with a siege mentality if we compare ourselves with our Muslim brothers and sisters. Churches don't think of being active, rather it's about protecting their church, the culture and congregation. We are about maintenance not mission.

Instead, we should, as you suggest, see the opportunity, which is to rethink our strategy of outreach, how the building is used by the community, how we present the gospel, how we seek to find culturally relevant ways of presenting Jesus. These are all things the early church did. I am not, as a Bradfordian, convinced we see this in the Muslim community around us.

Perhaps I'm not seeing this in the same way?!

What do people think?