Presented by Jemima Presadum, a Christian missionary working in Birmingham. - Worship: a vital part of life for Christians. - The long tradition: a history of worship in Durham Cathedral. - Connecting earth and heaven. - Different styles of worship, different times and places, but the same message. - Beyond church: memorials and celebrations. - Respecting the past; finding new expressions of faith to ensure a vigorous future.
	Download all the documents for this section in Acrobat PDF format. This document includes the transcript of the video, the activities and the collective worship.
	My name is Jemima Presadum. I now live and work in Birmingham, but before coming to Britain I used to live in South India. It's a part of the world that is mainly Hindu, but my family was different. A hundred and twenty years ago, British missionaries so impressed my grandfather with their love and care that he became a Christian and my family remained Christian ever since. Those missionaries were following the command of Jesus to spread the good news, something that Christians have done through their words and actions for the past two thousand years. But the commitment that led to my family's conversion is a recent story and one that is represented by this collecting box, used by Victorians to raise money at home for missionary work abroad. During the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, the idea of spreading the gospel right round the globe caught people's imagination and many missionaries, financed through collecting boxes like this, packed their bags and set sail to the Americas, to Africa and to Asia. By the beginning of the twentieth century, Christians from Britain, Europe and America had reached just about every country in the world. But their arrival was often a mixed blessing. Many missionaries may have known their Bible, but few understood the people they went to convert. Most had little respect for the culture of the land and no knowledge of other religions. What's more, their work was often underpinned by colonial power, like the Raj in the case of India. It was far from being all bad though. At their best, missionaries transformed communities, creating the Church and bringing education and healthcare, particularly for the poorest, positive effects that you can clearly see today. A hundred years after the year that this box represents, something new is happening. Today's missionaries are called Mission Partners. And they aren't just sent from Britain - they are invited to Britain. I myself work as a mission partner within British churches and with the Church Mission Society. Now I am a parish priest in Birmingham. Here I have a congregation of African, Caribbean and White, one that lives with Hindu, Sikh and Muslim neighbours. Like the missionaries of the past, we live the gospel through our actions, based on Jesus' gift of fullness of life for everyone. But learning, from their mistakes, we try to positively identify with people and through a whole range of activities to build relationships between all the different faiths in the area. Mission used to be a monologue but I believe it can now be a dialogue - a two-way conversation leading not just to deeper friendship but also to mutual understanding and trust