Guildford Diocese’s Project That’s Building Relationships Between Faith Groups

Published on: 1 Sep, 2016
Updated on: 2 Sep, 2016

The Diocese of Guildford’s Communities Engagement Team helps churches and their parishioners across Surrey in their work supporting their communities. This, in the first of a series of stories that focus the wide range of services offered by the team, features its Surrey Faith Links project.

The team’s Surrey Faith Links project builds relationships between faith groups and others so that they can better serve their local communities.

Kauser Akhtar of the Diocese of Guildford’s Communities Engagement Team leads its Surrey Faith Links project.

Led by Kauser Akhtar, her monthly newsletter gives news of inter-faith events and opportunities across Surrey.

The project aims to link up with communities that are sometimes harder to reach and to share information and understand need.

It also aims to bring different faith communities together to develop a better understanding of each other and a more cohesive society.

Kauser said: “One of the major events during the year in the interfaith world is celebrating International Day of Peace. This year I am working with the Interfaith Forums to organise the following events:”

Faith and Inner Peace aims to look at faith perspectives on mental health. It takes place on Monday, September 19, at the Thames Ditton Centre, at 7pm.

The Annual Peace Day event in Woking town centre (Mercia Walk) is on Saturday, September 24, from at 11am to noon. It features a poster/poem competition for primary school aged children. The winners will be awarded prizes by the Mayor of Woking, plus there will be entertainment and readings of peace from different religions.

Kauser is also organising two events in September with Surrey Minority Ethnic Forum around mental health and young people from the black and minority ethnic community. These will raise awareness about the issues faced by young people and also signpost to services that are available to support them.

She added: “I also deliver training to various organisations on faith and culture. This includes schools, hospital staff, businesses and other voluntary organisations.

“The training is tailored to address the type of clients the organisation has or the specific field they cover.

For more information on events or to receive a free monthly e-newsletter, email: Kauser.Akhtar@cofeguildford.org.uk or visit: www.surreyfaithlinks.org.uk

Surrey Faith Links has gathered a list of more than 600 faith organisations, which are spread across the county’s districts. Image reproduced from Surrey Faith Links website.

Responses to Guildford Diocese’s Project That’s Building Relationships Between Faith Groups

Bibhas Neogi Reply

September 7, 2016 at 6:13 pm

Kauser Akhter is a very energetic and hard working faith link adviser. I know her personally through the Guildford and Godalming Interfaith Forum and also as a member of Waverley Faith Forum in which I represent the Godalming Baha’is.

I have attended many events organised by her and other faith groups in Surrey. I thoroughly recommend other faith groups to join Surrey Faith Links group activities and promote friendship and social cohesion especially in these troubled times.

With so many different faiths and traditions, the core values are however the same. We should cherish the differences as we admire a garden full of different colours and fragrances without which it would be rather dull.

We have progressed to our current stage of social development and see the mingling of cultures in multi-national cities and towns. We are one human family and we live in this one planet. Peace and prosperity is unattainable unless we embrace all as one family.

So our aim should be, quoting from my Baha’i Faith, “Be generous in prosperity, and thankful in adversity. Be worthy of the trust of thy neighbour, and look upon him with a bright and friendly face… Be an ornament to the countenance of truth, a crown to the brow of fidelity, a pillar of the temple of righteousness, a breath of life to the body of mankind, an ensign of the hosts of justice, a luminary above the horizon of virtue, a dew to the soil of the human heart, an ark on the ocean of knowledge, a sun in the heaven of bounty, a gem on the diadem of wisdom, a shining light in the firmament of thy generation, a fruit upon the tree of humility.” as said by Bahá’u’lláh, the Founder of The Baha’i Faith.

He also said: “The Earth is but one country and mankind its citizens”.

I wish Kauser and her colleagues in Surrey Faith Links to continue promoting friendship among the various faiths and I look forward to hearing more about their work.