Tag Archives: Islamophobia

University chaplaincies under threat

Posted on by symonhill

I wrote this article for the Church Times, who published it on 24th April 2026.

If you took your lead from the more disheartening corners of social media, you might think that humans could never get on with people different from themselves. I am lucky to have regular reminders that this is untrue — because I work in a university chaplaincy.

This really hit me after the far-right riots of summer 2024. That September, students of many backgrounds, faiths, and nationalities turned up at our university and undermined all the far-right’s myths in the first week of term.

One day that week, in the chaplaincy, I saw a student in a kippah and a student in a hijab chatting about the differences between halal and kosher. The next day, a student with colourful hair and revealing clothes sat alone at a board games event before a group of conservatively dressed Muslim women invited her to join their game.

At our weekly philosophical discussion group, I have watched students with passionately different views on the British Empire restrain themselves from interrupting as they listened to one another. Members of a generation routinely patronised in the media show a greater ability at dialogue than politicians three times their age.

Several academic studies show that Christian chaplains in higher education (HE) still outnumber chaplains of other faiths put together, but the numerical dominance is declining. There seems to have been a particular buzz around Muslim chaplaincy recently, with new books, conferences, and courses.

Christians have nothing to fear from multifaith chaplaincy: following Christ surely leads us to serve our neighbours of all faiths and none. Some students who come to our chaplaincy seek reassurance that our purpose is not to convert them. When we focus, instead, on meeting their needs, they are left with a much better impression of Christianity; and some end up asking about Christian faith.

The Revd Dr Jenny Morgans, an Anglican chaplain at King’s College, London, and author of Christian Women at University, reports that “chaplaincies particularly serve students experiencing isolation, including international students and LGBTQIA+ students, who may feel marginalised in other religious spaces”.

This echoes my experience. I am asked about Jesus and faith by students who would be unlikely to go to church — including some who would be afraid to do so — to ask such questions. Yet, I know one senior church leader who advocated withdrawing chaplaincy funding because it did not result in more people turning up at his churches.

The threat to Christian chaplaincy in HE does not come from Muslim, Jewish, or Humanist chaplaincy: it comes from university funding decisions — and from attitudes in churches.

Since the HE sector is facing funding problems, axing chaplaincy budgets can seem — to the sort of university managers who cannot fit pastoral care into a spreadsheet — a quick way to save a few pounds. But not all chaplains are funded by universities themselves. Traditionally, about half of the funding for Christian chaplains comes from churches. Some of that money is drying up.

It is not easy to find up-to-date statistics: several denominations are astonishingly bad at providing them. Go to a gathering of HE chaplains, however, and you will find that the mood of enthusiasm for our work is marred by a thread of sadness about cuts and under-appreciation.

The funding picture is varied, but some trends are visible. While academic research is inevitably a few years behind, experience suggests that it is no longer as unusual as it was in England to find a university without an Anglican chaplain.

Having spoken with several chaplains who are wrestling with funding negotiations, I do not want to put their chances in jeopardy by naming specific universities; but the examples are not hard to find.

The withdrawal of denominational funding can happen quickly and have significant consequences. A recent Roman Catholic decision to scrap the funding for both RC chaplains at a large redbrick university left the university’s chaplaincy team almost halved, putting significant strain on the other chaplains.

In the Midlands, meanwhile, an informal deal between the Methodists, Baptists, and United Reformed Church has broken down. There was a “gentlemen’s agreement” about which denomination would fund a Free Church chaplaincy post at which universities. But, as new people in each denomination faced pressure over budgets, they did not feel bound by a deal that sounded as though it had been written on the back of an envelope in a pub two decades before.

There need to be more than clearer structures and accountability, however: there need to be changes in culture so that chaplaincy is truly valued. Churches can learn from chaplaincies, and so can the world as a whole.

It is not true that difference must lead to prejudice, and disagreement must lead to hatred. It is true that God has created human beings different from one another and yet able to live and learn together. Many university chaplaincies testify to this truth through their everyday work. It is work that churches can do much more to support.

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Symon Hill is a Baptist chaplain at a university in the West Midlands. His books include The Upside-Down Bible: What Jesus really said about money, sex and violence (Darton, Longman and Todd, 2015).

Lamenting suffering while following Jesus

Posted on by symonhill

On Sunday 4th October this year, I had the honour of preaching at St Columba’s United Reformed Church in Oxford. This was the Sunday after the horrific anti-Semitic stabbings at a synagogue in Manchester. Below is the text of my sermon. I am sorry not to have posted it sooner.

To be clear: this is basically the text I wrote beforehand but in practice I deviated from the wording a fair bit and added in a few extra comments. However, the substance is the same. You can watch the service online on St Columba’s URC’s YouTube channel.

The sermon followed three Bible readings:

If you ask people to choose their favourite books in the Bible, I doubt that Lamentations would feature in many people’s answers. But it seems particularly appropriate given some of the horrific things that we have seen in the news this week.

The passage that was read to us earlier was actually part of Lamentations Chapter 1 and part of Lamentations Chapter 3. I dare say the people who compiled the Lectionary didn’t want us to hear Chapter 1 on its own. That’s not surprising. The content of Lamentations can be roughly summed up as follows:

Chapter 1: Everything’s dreadful.
Chapter 2: Everything’s still dreadful.
Chapter 3: Yes, everything’s still dreadful. But there are, possibly, some glimmers of hope.

And so it goes on. Most of the book is lamenting suffering and injustice. It describes how things feel sometimes. How things are sometimes. But as it goes on, glimmers of hope appear. They are never more than glimmers. There is no triumphant finale or happy ending. But this is a book that recognises the reality of suffering while beginning to find hope. 

Written probably around the time of the fall of Jerusalem in the sixth century BCE, Lamentations is a book that records people’s pain, the depth of suffering, the harshness of injustice. Not to glory in such things, not to celebrate them – but to acknowledge them and to show solidarity with those who experience them. I suggest that this is something that as Christians we can all too often fail to do.

The gospel of Jesus Christ is good news. Some Christians seem keen to preach bad news instead – they’re full of talk of sin and suffering as if they were telling us something new, as if the presence of evil in the world was not pretty obvious already. But on the other hand, there are occasions when Christians are so quick to talk about good news that we forget how shallow our words can sound. When I became a Christian in the 1990s, there was a popular worship chorus that included the line, “In your presence, my problems disappear”. What nonsense. What blasphemy – to present Jesus as an individual problem-solving machine. Telling someone that their problems will be over if they put their faith in Jesus will ring hollow if they are shivering in the cold because they cannot afford both heating or food, or because they are frightened of leaving their house because the far right have been marching in their street.

Those who preach bad news, and those who preach a trite positivity with no depth to it, both make the same mistake. They both overlook the reality and extent of suffering that people are experiencing.

Proclaiming good news does not mean pretending that suffering is not real. It means proclaiming hope – not trite, shallow hope but deep, meaningful hope – in the midst of suffering.

There are times when I want to ignore the bad news. Sometimes I want to pretend that I haven’t heard it – whether it’s global, national or personal news. But of course some of us can ignore bad news more easily than others. You can ignore war – unless you’re in the war zone. You can ignore news of starvation – unless you’re starving. The horrific and heart-stopping news of the anti-Semitic murders in Manchester on Thursday was so vile that we might be tempted simply to shut it out of our minds. And then this morning, we awoke to more bad news of bigotry and violence: there was an attempted arson attack last night on a mosque in Peacehaven in Sussex. But as has been clear in the last few days, ignoring the news of the synagogue attacks is not possible for many British Jews, deeply affected and frightened in a very personal way. Nor is it possible for many Muslims, understandably scared by the opportunistic rhetoric of far-right and Islamophobic commentators who nonsensically blame all Muslims for the actions of the killer.

As Christians, we are not proclaiming bad news. Nor can we ignore the bad news all around us. We must be prepared to recognise the reality of it, to listen to people who are hurting, to allow ourselves to be challenged or confused, to show solidarity perhaps to people under attack – whether that be Jewish worshippers in Manchester, Muslim worshippers in Sussex, refugees scapegoated by the far right around Britain, children bombed in Gaza, or trans people and disabled benefit recipients turned into convenient scapegoats.

Le’ts also recognise our own role in the sins of the world. The world cannot be divided simplistically into goodies and baddies. This week for example I have been very conscious of the times that I have failed to challenge anti-Semitism. Recognising our sins does not mean we should spend time beating ourselves up. Rather it means that we can rejoice in God’s forgiveness, pray for God’s forgiveness for others and ask God to guide us in the present and the future.

Because in the midst of the horrors that we experience, we can cling onto, and gently point others to, the good news that we find in Jesus. This is not a shallow hope that comes only when we’re feeling good. God loves us however we’re feeling. It is not a calculated optimism based on an analysis of probabilities. It is a hope found in Jesus Christ. A hope, a faith, that the Kingdom of God proclaimed by Jesus is ultimately stronger than the all the might and power and violence of the kingdoms and empires and armies of this world.

Earlier we heard a passage from 2nd Timothy. It’s usually described as the Second Letter from Paul to Timothy. A sizeable majority of biblical scholars agree that it is unlikely that Paul actually wrote it, as it bears the marks of being written at a later time than Paul’s lifetime, and it also shows far greater acceptance of social norms and hierarchy than Paul displayed in his authentic letters. However, that is not a reason to write it off! The passage that we heard is encouraging the reader not to be ashamed of sharing in hardships “for the sake of the Gospel” and to remember “the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus”.

This does not mean that we should simply sit back, accept things as they are, and wait for God to intervene in the future. Jesus promised his followers that the Holy Spirit would be with them. The Kingdom of God is both now and not yet, breaking into our mundane and often unjust realities even as we await its total fulfilment in the future. We glimpse the Kingdom of God in small moments of kindness and in global campaigns for justice. The Kingdom of God flashes into our presence when people reach across boundaries and recognise their common humanity. On Thursday we saw the reality of sin with the vile murders at the Manchester synagogue. And we glimpsed the Kingdom of God when people of many faiths and none declared their solidarity with Manchester’s Jews. Working at a university chaplaincy, one of the most memorable moments of the day for me was when a Muslim member of staff used the chaplaincy prayer room to pray for the victims and for British Jews in general. In the midst of horror, let us keep our eyes open for the flashes of light.

Let’s look at that passage we heard from Luke’s Gospel. If we have faith the size of a mustard seed, says Jesus, we could uproot a tree and plant it in the sea. Well, I admit that when I look at that, I think: my faith has never moved any trees. I used to think: does that mean my faith is so weak that it’s not even the size of a mustard seed?

Well, perhaps. But let’s remind ourselves of a few things. Mustard seeds, as seeds, might be pretty small, but the plants they grow into are large and difficult to control – as Jesus and his listeners knew very well. This was an agricultural society, remember. Do we have that sort of faith? And why would we want to uproot a tree? I don’t think forestry management is at the centre of Chrisitan discipleship. But down the centuries, God has given people faith to move all sorts of metaphorical trees. The advances we have now – in medicine, in human rights, in matters such as religious liberty and practices of mutual respect and understanding – have been achieved because our ancestors trusted that such things were possible, often motivated by their faith in a God of love and justice. Their faith moved mountains.

Sometimes they did not see the results of their endeavours. The first people to campaign against the Transatlantic slave trade had died long before it was abolished. The first women to campaign for the vote did not live to cast their votes. Those of us who campaign today for an end to the arms trade may not live to see that campaign succeed – as it one day will. As Oscar Romero put it, we are prophets of a future not our own.

The news in recent weeks and months has been particularly vile. It can be hard to believe that, as Martin Luther King said, “the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice”. The gospel we proclaim is not a naïve or shallow hope that things might get better one day. It is rooted in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, described in 2nd Timothy as “God manifest in the flesh”. The God we worship is not a God who inflicts suffering, but a God who experiences suffering, a God who suffers with us.

Jesus was sentenced to death by the Roman imperial authorities, who thought they could easily get rid of troublemaking Jewish peasant. They were wrong. When God raised Jesus from the dead, the victory of love over evil was assured. The forces of sin, oppression and empire were put on notice that their defeat had begun.

As Christians we are called to recognise the reality of pain, to show our solidarity with people who are suffering and not to judge those who find it hard to believe that good news is possible. We are all broken people in a broken world, and we are compromised by the sins against which we protest. Yet however often we fail, God will not tire of forgiving us. So when our focus weakens or wanders, let’s ask God to keep our concentration on the Kingdom of God, on the Christ whose love and justice are triumphing over the sins and evils that see us divided and mistreating each other. Hatred and injustice will not win. Love will triumph. This is the Gospel we proclaim. And it is good news.  

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My book, The Upside-Down Bible: What Jesus really said about money, sex and violence (Darton, Longman and Todd, 2015) can be bought in paperback or e-book, priced £9.99.