Reflective of larger European trends, in which Islamic populations are burgeoning while Christians recede, an old Methodist church in Britain is now becoming a mosque.
Significantly, the local Methodists supported the Islamization of the former Mt. Zion Methodist Church, which was preceded by a heated debate by the town planning committee over the zoning approval. Decades ago, the dwindling congregation abandoned the church, which afterwards became a factory for scarves exported to the Middle East.
"This is a basic issue of human rights," said the Rev. Christopher Cheeseman, superintendent minister of the Clitheroe Methodist Circuit, as quoted in the United Methodist News Service. "These are people of faith who wish to find a place to worship." Cheeseman urged the zoning commissioners to approve the mosque's permit, which they did by a vote of 7-5.
Opposition to the mosque in the small city of Clitheroe, in northern England, was portrayed as bigoted by some church officials. Clitheroe's population of 14,000 has 300 Muslims who plan to worship in the former Methodist Church.
By some estimates, there are now 1.6 million Muslims in Britain, though it's not certain how many of them are active mosque goers. The Methodist Church of Great Britain has declined to fewer 300,000 members. Regular church attendance in Britain is believed to be about only about 6 percent among the nominally Christian majority.
A microcosm of Britain's decline in Christian practice is Cliltheroe's 800 year old Anglican St. Mary Magdalene Church, where worshippers have dropped to about 90 people on a typical Sunday, according to The New York Times. The church's vicar told the Times: "People don’t have a conscience about religion; they don’t come anymore.” The average age of his active congregants is about 75.
But Britain's surging Muslim minority, though still less than 3 percent of the population, does have a "conscience about religion." And its verve and level of practice is far livelier than in Britain's dying, older Christian churches.
As a further illustration of the demographic trend, only a few hundred yards away from the former Mt. Zion Church is another former Methodist chapel that has since become The Emporium wine bar. For many of the once temperance embracing Methodists, this must be even more painful than the church-turned mosque!
Methodist official the Rev. Cheeseman and other clerics defended the mosque application, faulting the rightist British National Party for anti-Islamic sentiments in Clitheroe. Opponents were labeled as "racist" by one local clergyman who heads an interfaith group that lobbied for the mosque. Perhaps there was some truth to their charges. And Muslims, like all faith groups, are entitled to purchase property for their worship purposes. Unlike in most Islamist countries, minority religions in the West are not and should not be inhibited by discriminatory regulation.
But the Christian clerics who promoted the mosque sometimes seemed blissfully unaware of the demographic trends that prophesy their own potential demise in Britain and in an increasingly Islamicized Europe. Amid their quickness in painting mosque opponents as semi-fascist, they showed little sadness over a once vibrant Christian church becoming a place of worship for Allah.
A local Muslim who helped orchestrate the mosque creation in Clitheroe told the United Methodist News Service that he was "humbled by the support, understanding and empathy from the Methodist community" and others who supported Clitheroe's Muslims. "It was really amazing to experience people who understand what it is for another community to want a place of worship, understand where that need comes from and then go all out to help us achieve that," said Sheraz Arshad, who is of Pakistani descent. Having experienced "ignorance and bigotry," he vowed the new mosque community would "act as champions for interfaith cooperation." Continue >>
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The "quietly" engineered introduction of sharia law into Britain in August, 2007, must be the government's "Amen"!
A modest "interfaith" proposal: that both Methodist Christians and the Muslims share the same building; and without removal of the Cross, "of course"!