Christmas comes but once a year and when it does someone starts daft stories about Christmas being banned. So lets get it straight, celebrating Christmas is not offensive to Muslims or any other faith. In fact blaming Muslims for a perceived need to be coy about celebrating Christmas is what's offensive.This month the Christian Muslim Forum have issued a statement ‘Celebrating Christmas Confidently’. This reiterates and updates something which they first said in 2006 and again 2009. Namely, we do not have to ‘ban’ Christmas for fear of offending others.
At PEN we promote the development of a confident Christian identity. From this base Christians can engage with their neighbours of other faiths. In doing so they discover that rather than being a threat, other faiths can inspire us to go broader and deeper in to our own. They encourage us to be bold in celebrating what we believe.
In Southall, Christians have adopted a traditional Sikh style of celebrating, a street procession, to confidently declare the approach of Christmas and what that means to them. They call it Bethlehem Comes to Southall you can see a picture here.
Southwark Diocesan newspaper The Bridge has done a centre spread 'What Christmas means to me' which includes an interview with some Muslim staff from a Church of England primary school.
This year BBC 1 is screening four episodes of a new production The Nativity, by Tony Jordan, (creator of Life on Mars and writer of Eastenders) The half hour epsiodes will be screened mid-evening in the week leading up to Christmas. Not only is this a bold public celebrating of the Christmas story, Churches Together in England have declared it will be a major opportunity to engage as people come to churches on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, having watched the series and wanting to work out what it means for them.
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