Yesterday, I wrote about Ramadan having begun. Usually, at these kind of times of year, people want to know how best to engage with Muslim people. Sometimes they want to begin engaging with any Muslim people at all. Other times, they are wanting to know how best to engage with their Muslim friends.

For fairly obvious reasons, people are often anxious about engaging Muslim people for fear of offending them. It’s not that they don’t want to share the gospel with them or find out more about Islam, it’s just that they fear treading on landmines or saying the wrong thing. This well-meaning concern can often lead to total paralysis. Unless I know all about Islam, unless I am trained in exactly how to speak and act around Muslim people, I am just not equipped to do it. Which is to say, I won’t do it for fear of doing it badly or wrongly.

In an altogether different context, I had a similar discussion with somebody about reaching the poor and deprived in their community. They very quickly started talking about training and I very quickly disabused them of their assumption. I’m not of the view that training is unhelpful nor am I of the view that it can’t make us better. But I am of the view that there is a particular culture of being so fearful at doing things wrongly that we refuse to do anything at all until, as we judge it, we are properly trained. I tend to want to push back on this.

Let’s be honest, what do you really need to tell somebody the gospel? You need to understand the gospel itself, you need to be able to speak intelligibly on some level and you ultimately need to just get out there and do it. Now, if you’re a Christian with a working mouth and tongue, I suspect you have what you need already. You already know the gospel because you have come to believe it yourself and your working vocal chords allow you to utter those things out loud to another person. Again, that isn’t to say you can’t be trained to be better at it or to be more effective, but I think we need to stop stymying ourselves and making these things out to be more complicated than they really are. Telling people the gospel you already know and believe is as simple as the actual act of opening your mouth and telling someone.

You can do that with Muslim people whether you know the first thing about Islam or not. In fact, I would go as far as to say the person with absolutely no training whatsoever is often better than the person who has a bit of training and little knowledge. The person with a little knowledge may be more inclined to think they understand this other person, which is usually an unhelpful starting point for a conversation. The person who know nothing at all and has had no training tends to recognise that they don’t know much at all and, therefore, is more inclined to simply ask questions to find out about this other person as they go.

For my money, what this latter untrained person does is the approach most of us should take regardless. You might be a world leading expert in Islam. But you aren’t a world leading expert in what this person actually believes. The only person who is world expert on that is the person you are talking to. It is very easy to assume that the formal position of Islam is the actual position this person takes. Just as my church takes formal positions on things, but I’m fairly confident not everybody within the church would necessarily agree with or understand them all, the same is true for Muslim people too. To start arguing against the formal position of deobandism (for example) might miss the simple fact that, even if deobandi at all, this person may simply not hold to the formal doctrine under discussion. Knowing a bit about the formal teaching might be helpful in a number of ways, but there’s no value in knowing any of that if you don’t know what this particular person sat in front of you actually believes themselves.

So, what is the best way to reach Muslims during Ramadan? It is frankly the same as how you might reach Muslims outside of Ramadan. Namely, just go and talk to them. Ask them about their faith. Ask them what they believe. Ask them why they do all manner of things they do. Ask them to explain the significance of what they are doing. Don’t assume anything; just ask. And once you’ve asked and they tell you, find the appropriate aspect of the gospel to speak back into that thing. Tell them about what you do know about the gospel that you personally believe. It’s an exercise in compare and contrast, asking what they believe and telling, by way of contrast, the Christian gospel in response.

What training does one need to do these things? Not much. You need to know the gospel and you need to be willing to ask a few questions about faith. If you know nothing about Islam, ask what Islam is. Ask what it means for this person. Ask how it impacts their life. Ask all the same sort of questions you might ask of anyone who is interested in anything else you don’t personally do. Ask the things you might ask of anyone who operates in ways you don’t fully understand because it’s not how you operate. The biggest issue in reaching Muslims is not the need for bigger or better training, it is simply being willing to go out there, speaking to them about their faith and then offer some response in line with ours.