Do you have a working relationship with other faiths?
We do. In Birmingham, where I'm working at the moment, all of the Christian communities - there's about 19-20 different groups including Methodists, Anglican, Welsh Chapel, all kinds of groups - form a group together called Believing in Birmingham. We meet together often, once every two months, and we organize a Justice of the Peace section, a worship group, a prayer group and different events, which brings us together as a community of the faith because we believe in one Christ, who is one Lord, one Father of all. We share information as well as saying "How can we witness to Christ in this city, together as one community" because Christ always said that they may be one. He always desired the unity of everyone, as He and the Father are one, that we may be one. As a Catholic church, as an Anglican church, we're all trying to work together to celebrate our faith in Christ. The relationship is important. We have Believing in Birmingham for the Birmingham city, and then we have local churches together. Events, and then interreligiously for Birmingham there's a community organizing foundation who are involved in justice and social issues and we're part of it. Here in Birmingham we have what we call Birmingham Citizens, in East London it's Telco, the East London community organization, and they're about bringing together all the faith communities - Hindus, Muslims, Gurdwaras, Sikh temples and all those, and the Christian community as well as unions, schools, laygroups, and secular groups who are interested in making a political change. Not in terms of being part of politics, but being an active voice of transformation in their community, like living wage for the city, social housing, secure neighborhood, cleaner neighborhoods and cleaner parks. Churches and religious communities come into contact with a lot of migrants, especially asylum seekers, but also people who have overstayed their stay here who are undocumented migrants in a sense, who are working hard, being treated rough, who are finding themselves in difficulty. We've come across a huge number of them now, and through Birmingham Citizens we're becoming a voice together of our experience and saying "Look, we need to do something about the undocumented migrants in this country, because there's about half a million here who are undocumented and they're suffering and they're being taken advantage of and we need to do something about it." We will be constructively putting forward suggestions to the councils, to the local authority, to the government to say "Can we not create an amnesty here in some workable way to help?"
