Until last year, Inter Faith Week (IFW) was coordinated by the Inter Faith Network UK (IFN). It was a loss to the world of good faith relations when the IFN was forced to close down earlier this year after the then Conservative government withdrew support.
However, a number of local interfaith groups previously in membership have come together to ensure that the IFW can be celebrated around England, Wales and Northern Ireland, and have created a new website to pool information. It has always been held in the second week of November, to coincide with Remembrance Sunday. This is being coordinated by the United Religions Initiative UK. Scotland has its own calendar.
Inter Faith Week serves several purposes
IFW serves several purposes. It showcases some of the long-term initiatives that various groups and faiths organise all year. It brings together people of different faiths and none, to enjoy and explore them and most of all, it provides anyone and everyone with some fun activities in a traditionally dark part of the year. This year, as always, there is a great diversity of activities on offer.
This year it has not been possible to map all the events geographically, unlike in previous years, and some will not be publicised very much in advance. Searching by date however shows the following major events are already arranged in and near the Central Bylines area:
12 November: Midlands Interfaith Conference, Coventry
16 November: Interfaith Moot: the divine feminine, Birmingham
18 November: Cuisines and Conversations, Preston
Young people, IFW and community cohesion
One of the aims of IFW has always been to engage new people, whether of any faith or none, who will be interested in exploring fresh ideas, honing their critical faculties, meeting new people, or just having a fun evening.
Because young people are the lifeblood of breaking down prejudices and misunderstandings, this year the Faith and Belief Forum is coordinating a whole array of activities for schools and clubs (which are listed on their website along with a selection of resources).
They note that, for teachers and people running youth clubs, for example, there are further advantages to celebrating IFW: celebrating diversity in their locality, building stronger links with their community, assisting their statutory duties to promote community cohesion and the spiritual, moral, social and cultural development (SMSC) of their pupils.
Ideas for activities broadly relate to the theme of ‘Sharing My Story, Building Our Future’ and include discussions about the challenges and hopes for RE teaching in schools, visiting places of worship and understanding sacred spaces, creating safe spaces for discussion and hearing about different types of lives and beliefs.
Inter faith contribution to our daily lives
Finally, it is worth seeing IFW in the context of the year-round contribution that faith groups make to so many of the activities that bind us together with common values: volunteering, use of their buildings for community purposes, opportunities to meet and share food amongst others. These are activities that happen all around the UK, day in, day out, but are not always noticed or acknowledged except by the people to whom they mean so much.
A recent report by the National Churches Trust (NCT) highlights one example of the equivalent monetary value of this type of activity: it indicates that the UK’s churches relieve huge cost pressures on the National Health Service, worth an estimated £8.4 billion each year. This is achieved by providing or hosting health-related services for people in urgent need, from youth groups to food banks, from drug and alcohol addiction support to mental health counselling.
And this is just Christian churches; other faiths are also often very active in community work, from Muslim involvement with the Trussell Trust to provide food banks in diverse cities, such as Peterborough, to all the Sikh gurdwaras around the country who offer the Langhar meal freely to all comers. As Sarah Mullally DBE, Bishop of London, said when welcoming the NCT report: “Churches and other faith groups play an extremely important role in the health and wellbeing of their communities, and in our collective health.”
Inter Faith Week is just one way of celebrating how faiths come together all year round for the common good.
