ABSTRACT
The spirit of Gairdner's approach to Christian witness in a Muslim society was crucial to Warren and Taylor's own thinking about the meeting of faiths. Even in the 1960s, however, it was felt to be dangerously radical and alarming as far as many in the Church of England were concerned. "Christian presence" surfaced as a theme in the Catholic worker-priest movement in France after the Second World War, where close, incarnational involvement with workers alienated from the church produced a call for a radically new approach to mission in an industrialized society. The essence of true dialogue is that it is an activity of listening, mutual listening. Unless that attitude is recognised as basic there will always be the danger of dialogue becoming an argument and even degenerating into a shouting match, however discreet the shouting, neither party to the dialogue paying serious attention to what the other is saying.
