At the heart of The Feast is a desire to bring together Christian and Muslim Teenagers to build friendships, explore faith and change lives. The way we work is basically to build good relationships with Muslim and Christian young people and then invite them to events where they can meet one another.
The relationships with the young people have to be developed in distinctive ways with the two communities as they both have different structures and youth programmes here in Birmingham. There are a number of secondary schools where the majority of pupils are Muslims but none where they majority are Christians, however there are a number of Churches that run youth groups for Christians but very few Mosques that do the same. Consequently we seek to work with Muslim young people in schools and Christians in churches before bringing them together.
The events we run are totally youth focussed. They use good youth work practice and have the interests and needs of the young people at heart. A typical event involves warm up activities, discussion starters, group work, games and refreshments. We also make sure that the needs of all the young people are catered for including provision of halal food and prayer times for both Christians and Muslims.
The topics we discuss are ones of concern to young people rather then ones that faith leaders, theologians or other adults think they ought to be discussing, and in all this we facilitate the young people to share their beliefs, experiences and ideas with one another rather then telling them what they ought to be sharing.
The events we run tend to be small in number (typically 20 maximum) and we work hard to make sure there are equal numbers of Muslims and Christians. Over the years we have found that small events have a much bigger impact on the young people than large events. Whilst we could run 1 event for a hundred young people running 5 events for 20 will be more effective but also more costly in terms of time and money, but an investment that we think is worthwhile.
The discussions we have look at a topic of interest to the young people (eg fashion, peer pressure, the environment etc) and then explore what Islam and Christianity say about that issue. As we do this we highlight both the similarities and the differences between our two faiths, and encourage the young people to find ways to disagree peacefully. To help the discussions flow and to avoid unhelpful conflict we have developed our Guidelines for Dialogue which are used at every event to set a framework for our discussions.
Following the events we encourage the young people to take the lessons from The Feast out into their everyday lives. This might be reflecting on the way they treat people at school, inviting friends to future events or by spreading the word through videos or blogs.
