Fr Dean reviews a book by Martyn Snow, the Bishop of Leicester. “An Intercultural Church for a Multicultural World” is a book which explores the theme of gift exchange in a diverse and multicultural world and how we might think and act with greater cultural sensitivity.
I often tell a story or two. The same ones. Things that stick with me and illustrate a point, stories that are ready to be pulled from my sleeve like a magician’s flower, slipped into a homily or a presentation.
I’m standing in the school dinner hall. A young lad points at me, shouts at me. “You’re Christian!” he exclaims. That’s all I need, a theological debate with a six year old. I lean closer. “That must mean that you’re Muslim,” I reply. “Yes!” he shouts proudly. And then silence. We lock eyes. And then he continues. “Christians and Muslims love God!” He joins the queue which brings him closer to the kitchen.
Some of the stories that Martyn Snow tells in his book, I’d gratefully heard before. He was a guest speaker at the ‘Ecumenical and Interfaith Officers Network’ meeting of the Church in Wales in Builth Wells in December 2022. It wasn’t long after the unrest experienced in his home city of Leicester when groups of Muslims and Hindus clashed just a few months before. He told us that his presentation would be very different if he had met us before this happened.
In his book, he talks of the self examination which followed in a city which had previously experienced good community relations, and he begins to explore some of the causes and lessons learned.
His book is based both on personal experiences of a city which is now predominantly of the Global Majority, and theological research and reflection.
He tells stories, and reaches out to the work and thoughts of others to deliver a book that speaks to the heart of our identity and what it means to build a community where each of us has something to give and receive. We are a gift to each other. Diversity is a gift. This is the heart of his book.
Admittedly, the experience he shares is from the English context, and there is much in Wales that is so very different but there is that common ground, too. Like a garden, which is a metaphor he uses to express a common space of encounter, a place to play and explore but which has its own boundaries and where there are possibilities of engagement and openness.
He starts the book tentatively, though, walking that fragile ground which has been marred by colonialism and white, middle-class privilege and suggests that his book is “an offering to a bring and share meal, a chance to contribute to the conversation. We are all invited to the table to eat. Even more than this, we are all invited to the kitchen to share in the cooking.”
The book also gives way to other voices, each of which brings their own cultural perspective to the kitchen in chapters which tie up what had been explored in the previous pages.
He argues a for a church that should take seriously an engagement and inclusiveness of different cultures through ‘gift exchange’. This itself is a loaded term and one that has often been abused and marred by conquest and colonialism, a belief that our gift is what you need to live better, a power struggle between the giver and the receiver. But he suggests a different way.
I loved the story he told us at the meeting of Officers in Builth Wells, and which is repeated in the book, when he was living in Guinea in West Africa among the Susu people. A woman knocks at the door, accompanied by her three children. They exchange the ritual greeting. And then there is silence between them. He invites her in. The same exchange is repeated. And then silence. This time more uncomfortable. She repeats the ritual greeting. And then more silence. When she eventually leaves, he rushes to his his local language teacher, afraid that he has insulted her or done something wrong.
“No, no, you are fine,” he says. “In our culture, it’s normal to greet someone new by going to the house, welcoming them and presenting a gift. My guess is that she is too poor to bring you a material gift, so she gave you something more precious. She gave you the gift of her time.”
The book explores what it means to give and receive gifts, and how we can be gifts to each other in a country that has been skewed by soundbites and caricatures of “the other.”
It’s also important to appreciate the different ways in which our gifts are exchanged, to understand the cultural differences of how we live and encounter one another, what we have to offer and what we can from receive others.
The author isn’t shy of dealing with some of the difficulties of immigration but he does open up the possibilities and the need to see life from a different perspective.
“This book is intended to argue that it is possible to preserve cultural distinctions even if there is bound to be some process of hybridisation with all cultures being changed though encounters with other cultures,” he writes. We enrich one another.
So many of the divisions which exist in our world come from never encountering someone different from us which means we never discover what we also have in common.
The book is a challenge not just to the Church but to Government and to society as a whole to create those spaces of encounter, to be able to give and receive in a mutually beneficial and enriching way.
Or perhaps it’s not a challenge at all, more an invitation to a “bring and share meal”, discovering that opportunity of giving and receiving, and rubbing shoulders in the kitchen.
And so I’m back, near the kitchen in the school hall where that young lad has expressed so eloquently a deep sense of his own identity. He knows what or who he is. He knows we are different. But he can also identify what we have in common.
Perhaps he will never remember the conversation we had. But, in that moment, he was a gift to me. And I’ve dined on it ever since.
An Intercultural Church for a Multicultural World is published by Church House Publishing.
South Cardiff Ministry Area 
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