Yesterday, I encouraged us not to bemoan a world that doesn’t view everything the way we do. You can read that here. Pagans will not think like Christians and pagan nations, within which Christians of any sort (and I take the broadest, self-identifying view of that term here) are a declining minority and Evangelicals, even taking a fairly broad view of that term, are a particularly tiny minority (c. 3% of people at best by last count in the UK). If that doesn’t kill any claims to our being a Christian nation, I really don’t know what will. Whatever we may make of that, the point is that we shouldn’t be surprised that most British people don’t think like we do, don’t take our assumptions for granted or consider important – if they even understand it at all – the things we might consider important. The average person considers Evangelicalism much like it does Sikhism; which is to say not so much with any great animus, as just not much at all.

When you consider my immediate context on those terms, it paints an interesting picture. We minister in an almost exclusively South Asian Muslim area of Oldham. Largely dominated by people from Pakistan or of Pakistani heritage. That means, we are one UK minority group in an area dominated by another minority group seeking to reach both that dominant minority group in our own area and a UK majority group who understand neither the dominant minority group in our own area nor the minority group that we belong to. It is quite something when you think about it! We belong to a group that has around 2 million adherents (c. 3% of the country), reaching an area dominated by another minority group (Muslims) with more adherents than us (c. 4m adherents, around 6% of the country) largely drawn from one nation in our area (Pakistan) with almost as many people from it in the UK as there are adherents to our particular minority group (Evangelicals).

Now, let’s have a little think about Easter in that context.

We could, of course, get grumpy that nobody seems to have much interest in Easter and they seem to know nothing of “holy week”. I mean, let’s be honest, as a nonconformist Evangelical church it’s hard to get too worked up when over the last 400 years or so we have hardly waxed lyrical about the culturally Anglican Church Calendar. It hardly seems legitimate to get so irritated that our predominantly Pakistani Muslim area, and even the unchurched white British working class nearby, don’t have enough interest in Easter when we, the nonconformist Evangelical Church, are not exactly known for our penchant for the liturgical year. Some of us not only need to get to grips with the reality of where we are nationally, but also with the particular stable we come from!

The truth is, the lack of knowledge of Easter in our area is not a result of the moral and theological nosedive some wish to make out that it represents nationally. Our local situation is a product of what an entirely different bunch of cultural crusaders wish to lament; multiculturalism and, for some in particular, the growth of Islam. Of course, those latter folks must also come to terms with the figures. There may be twice as many Muslims in the UK as Evangelicals, but at 6% of the population, we can hardly be said to be overrun with them. It is felt a little more keenly in areas like mine, where Muslims have congregated together for a raft of social reasons, but they still only represent c.25% of our borough, or c. 60,000 people in hard figures. That is as many as the number of self-professed Atheists in the borough.

But here is the bottom line. Around 50% of the borough of Oldham are either Atheist or Muslim. One half of them has as much knowledge of Easter as the average white Brit does of Vaisakhi because their own religious and cultural commitments make it irrelevant to them. The other half, whilst having some broad residual cultural knowledge of Easter, have actively rejected it and all that it stands for. That covers half the borough we work in. That is 120,000 of the people here. Neither set of those 120,000 are likely to be moved very far by offers of invites to Easter services. They’re happy for us to do whatever Easter things they assume we’ll probably do, but as far as they’re concerned, it’s not for them nor got anything to say to them. An annual service that relies on a lot of cultural good will and shared cultural assumptions simply isn’t going to do anything. It’s not even a drop in the ocean.

Long before we even get to questions of invites to services, most people will be asking a much more basic question: what has any of that got to do with me? We are starting way back. There is no religious reason why they should be interested, no cultural reason they should be interested and no day to day apparent reason they can fathom why they should be interested either. Trying to invite them to whatever Easter offerings we’ve got, when that is the context, is no different to a Hare Krishna inviting you to some festival you’ve never heard of. You might not have any great animus towards the offer, but you’re essentially wondering what it has to do with you and you probably have a few assumptions, I suspect none of them especially good (whether actually true or not), that make the chances of your taking them up on the invite vanishingly slim. That is the context in which our invites for Easter are largely heard now, especially in communities like mine.

What does all that mean in practice for us? Neither more or less than that we are starting from much further back. Before anyone will think at all about Easter, we have quite a bit of work to do helping them understand the first thing about it. We have a similar, if not greater, amount of work trying to overcome that inbuilt sense that it may well be very nice, but it really has nothing at all to do with them. Inviting people to an Easter service will be received much like somebody inviting me to a German opera. Fine for you if you like that kind of thing, I’m certainly not going to fall out with you about it, but I don’t get it and I’m really not convinced it’s for me. Only sheer curiosity might get me anywhere near close to agreeing to go and, in the general busyness of life, mere curiosity probably isn’t going to put it high on my list of potential ways to spend my time given my starting assumptions about what it probably is (true or not as they may be). I assume I won’t like it and you need to do a fair bit of work to change my mind. In the end, I might go if I’m particularly close to you and I know it means a lot to you. I might go for your sake, but that’ll only be the case if we’re already close and I’ve already got a sense of just how important it is to you.

For our Easter invites then, the work starts long before Easter. It starts with being friends with the people we’re inviting. It involves being open and honest with them about how much we love Jesus and how we value his church, not so much in a bid to convert them but simply because it is true and friends talk about what they care about. Your friend might like opera; you might like Jesus. These are the things you talk about. Over time, you may just find – in the same way as you might go to opera for the sake of your friend, your friend may just come to church because it would mean something to you. They may not get it, they may not see what all the fuss is about, but because they like you they may just come then. We’re starting so far back that we aren’t dealing with people who need convincing Christianity is true, we’re dealing with people who think it’s a hobby that got a bit out of hand for you; like train spotting or something. Slightly weird people do it, they don’t get the appeal or understand why, but if a good enough friend turned out to be an enthusiast, they might just ask the odd question or, with enough talk from their friend about how it’s not what they think and is genuinely really great, might just be inclined to give it a go once, even if just for the sake of their friend.

Of course, if all that’s true, Easter isn’t really that big an issue at all. The invite at Easter hardly matters. What will spill out of us is not our love for Easter, but our enduring love for Christ and his church. What we talk about with our friends is unlikely to be Easter per se, but about Jesus and his church and their role in our lives. Our friend may pull our leg about it a bit, they may have their questions to ask here and there, they may even agree to come with us sometime to check it out because it’d mean something to us even if it means nothing to them. They may hear all that we say about it and wonder whether their assumptions are right.

But it all boils down to those relationships again. Apart from long term relationships, we’re viewed essentially like Hare Krishna’s in strange clothes, chanting odd words like gouranga and banging unusual instruments. Nobody has any desire to stop them, but they don’t get it and can’t see what any of that has to do with them, their lives or speaks to any of their concerns. When you’re viewed like that and invited to a service (whatever that is!), what else is anyone supposed to think? But if your friend, who you like and don’t think is totally off their rocker, seems to think this Christian lark is worth a look and would be made up if you at least considered what it was about, even if it’s for their sake more than yours, then we might just begin to find those invites aren’t wasted.