In the ten days since the terror attacks in Norway, pastors and church workers have played a major role in caring for survivors and the victims' families.
On the day that Anders Brehing Breivik, driven by hatred of Islam and of his country's political establishment, unleashed death and terror on an unimaginable scale in Oslo and Utoya, I lay on a treatment table in the Accident and Emergency department of my local hospital. The doctor attending to my pain and shock was a gentle young Muslim called Ali.
The recent horrific terror attacks in Norway seem to have been occasioned in part by the rise of fearful far-right movements which use Christian language as part of their guise. The answer to these should not be accommodation, says Simon Barrow, but an attempt to build robust civic alliances for social justice and against racism and xenophobia.
At least 92 people were reported dead in Norway, after a bomb blast and shooting spree on 22 July. There has been an outpouring of sympathy across the world for the victims, many of them young, and their families, and horror at this atrocity.
Last week few people had heard the name of Anders Behring Breivik. Today he is trending on twitter for all the wrong reasons, along with 'Freemasonry' and 'Christianity'.