Companions in Faith

A Conversation with Reverend Andrew Teal

In Episode 94 of In Good Faith, Steve speaks with Reverend Andrew Teal, an Anglican reverend who works to build friendly, trusting relationships between different religions. A chaplain, fellow, and lecturer in theology at Pembroke College, Reverend Teal specializes in interfaith dialogue and frontier spirituality.

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I think we all have a sort of assumption about God and who we are. I realized pretty early on that there was a connection between different people, ourselves, and God. . . . And I didn't quite know how to work that out.

In my teens, I became confirmed. I lived with grandparents because my mother and father were divorced. And I started to go to church on my own with one set of grandparents and the other grandparents were practicing Anglicans. And it became a long journey, rooted, I think, in when my grandmother died.

I remember wondering why it had taken the death of someone I loved to make people at school more humane. Because even those people you didn't get along with at school—they not just tolerated you, but there was an awareness of bereavement and the cost of that. And I was reading Mark's Gospel at the time and that question—why did it take someone to die in order to make us more humane and more human—that became a really important beginning of a journey.

And I guess it's always been, for me, ecumenical. And there's always been a dimension of interfaith. So, although confirmed within the Anglican tradition, I've worked with the Roman Catholics, the Baptists, and the Methodists when I was a priest in Sheffield. I was ordained very young. I was ordained at the age of 23, which is not young if you go on a [LDS] mission. But to enter public ministry with a sort of visible clerical color at that age was quite something.

And I was in a very, very poor area of about 28,000 people, many of whom were not employed for many generations. And that sense of different denominations doing together what we could . . . left us with a tremendous sense of—there's something beautiful about service. So that's how the different ingredients of faith sort of came together.

When did you first have the impulse or opportunity to reach out to the Muslim community?

Well, in my first year at university when I was 17 or 18 years old, one of the things that we had to do was write a paper on Islam and Christian Muslim dialogue. And, rather than just write about different scholars, a friend of mine and I thought, well, wouldn't it be good to go to these different small little Birmingham mosques?

What a concept to have a dialogue rather than write about it.

And it was in the days before all the difficulties because these communities have now become a little bit more reluctant to welcome. But the sense of welcome and engagement was, well, pretty basic, looking back. But the point of it was, is dialogue possible? And that became published here at the age of 18. And I thought, oh gosh, what? And I felt very proud.

And then the year after, I was doing Hebrew and I find that quite hard. It's not a language that follows the usual patterns. So, I thought I'd go to the synagogue every Sabbath eve and ended up singing in the choir. Now that's something, trying to sing Hebrew with the music going backwards as well. But that was lovely.

And, in, sort of traveling alongside a community, I began to understand some of the traumas, not only that the Muslim community has in terms of immigration, but that the Jewish community has in terms of history. And suddenly you see the importance of God, and how important words are. And it doesn't mean we back away from difficult questions, but we do so with a twinkle in the eye, between friends. So, it was great to have that sense of freedom to do it under the umbrella of the academy.

So that moment of discussing differences respectfully and from a place of friendship—how does that scale up for the larger world? How do we make that happen? Do you just exemplify it and hope people catch on?

This week, I was very honored to be part of a dinner by the Wheatley Institution at BYU. The rabbi who spoke, he didn't hold back the academic complexity of his lecture. So, after dinner, we had a lecture of about an hour and a half, but the energy with which he gave it was great. But the thing that really happened was, beforehand, he had a friend who introduced him who was a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and grew up in New Jersey with him. And there was this authentic, fun engagement followed by a real hug, a bear hug between two people of different traditions, different colors, different races, different backgrounds. And with that, you know that the Lord's will, that unity, overcomes division.

And while I'm here in Utah, I feel that there's something very special about this place. Even when you fly in, you feel it. I was flying in from Phoenix the last time I came to General Conference. I saw the Y, and then as we were approaching Salt Lake, I was straining to see if I could see the Angel Moroni on top of the temple. And of course you can't because Zion’s Bank and the other buildings are all around it. But I just saw the tiniest flash of gold, and knew exactly what that meant, and it was like coming home. There's a real sense that Salt Lake City is a place where the currency of faith is valid, and if you see the [Cathedral of the] Madeleine, or you see the Orthodox Jewish community, or the Episcopal Cathedral—there's a real sense in which faith is valid. It's not a culture of suspicion, it's a culture of trust, and that's incredible in today's world.

It actually feels divine.

Yeah.

Well, you're a remarkable example of someone who does flourish in the academy, with both the intellectual side and the learning and the scholarship. And yet, to speak of grace the way you do? There's a stereotype that the more learned you are, the less likely you are to have room for God. But I certainly don't see any of that in you.

Well, I've got a very low attention span. I think my motivation in the academy is to join that wonderful adventure, to travel with that Lord, who, for our sakes became our companion in every twist and turn of our lives. And that excitement is what keeps me going, and that's what makes it worth exploring texts with other people.

To have been welcomed to look at some parts of the Book of Mormon, and to publish it as an outsider with people who are scholar-disciples within The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—it's a great honor to do that.

It's a great honor to look at bits of the Torah or the Quran with Muslims together and to have one's own reflections listened to by great scholars from within these traditions. And it's not because you're trying to tick boxes and be, you know, liked. It's about learning.

There is the mystery of God at the center of this. And that wonderful mystery, which within this tradition—and I believe this very, very truly—that a young, simple farmhand of New York in the nineteenth century, not a German philosopher who'd spent all his life in Tubingen and Vaughan and wherever else, but someone who was working on the farm, had both the audacity and the humility to ask God. If you lack anything, ask. And this is the great scandal, I think, of this church. God appears to him and shows himself as love, and lifts Joseph up, and sets him going in a direction that will invite the whole world into a vision of our experience where every moment is a door for God to come in. And if God shows himself to Brother Joseph, he will show himself to us. And I think that is a tremendous thing that the churches need to recover—that expectation that, actually, God will reveal himself to us.

On the In Good Faith podcast, host Steven Kapp Perry aims to build bridges of understanding between religions. In talking with believers of different faiths, he highlights personal experience and commonalities across traditions.

This transcript has been edited for clarity and length. Listen to the full episode, “Ep 94. Reverend Dr. Andrew Teal,” at https://bit.ly/422pWQI

Artwork by Raffaele Mainella.