Conversions in the Middle East

Recently, I posted some links to articles about Muslim conversions to Christianity. One of the articles, from Charisma, I referenced but had not read. I read it this morning, and it contains a variety of stories of Muslim conversions. It ends with these statistics:

How the Holy Spirit is rising within the world’s most radical Islamic nations

Mission researchers estimate more Muslims have committed to follow Christ in the last 10 years than in the last 15 centuries of Islam. Yet Islamic governments make up some of the worst persecutors of Christians, according to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF). Despite the persecution, reports indicate God is moving dramatically in Islamic strongholds such as Indonesia, Pakistan and the following Middle East hot spots:

Iran: At the time of the Islamic Revolution in 1979 there were only about 500 known Muslim converts in the country, according to missions almanac Operation World. By 2000, there were a reported 220,000 believers, including Muslim converts. Even children of government ministers and mullahs have been converting to Christ, missions agency Open Doors reports.

Iraq: It’s estimated that before 2003 there were only about 600 known born-again followers of Jesus Christ in the country. By the end of 2008, Iraqi Christian leaders believed the number had risen to more than 70,000. Meanwhile, millions of Arabic New Testaments and Christian books have been shipped into Iraq since the ouster of Saddam Hussein in 2003.

Egypt: Revival is reportedly widespread among nominal Christians within the nation’s historic Coptic Church, whose members number about 10 million. Yet Coptics are under severe attack, according to Voice of the Martyrs. Also, the USCIRF’s list of “Countries of Particular Concern” now includes Egypt, where since January 400 Christians have been murdered, hundreds more injured and multiple churches burned.

Peter Leithart rounded up some of the things that he has read about this issue in a recent column for First Things. Here’s an excerpt about the reasons for conversions:

The reasons for conversion vary. Many of the converts say that Islam failed to meet their spiritual needs. No matter how faithful they were in fulfilling Islam’s demands, they had no confidence that they were saved, no assurance that they would spend eternity in paradise. Formulaic prayers left others spiritually dry, and they were surprised by and attracted to the intimacy of Christian prayer. Women find in Christianity a refuge from belittlement and abuse. Many converts claim that Isa Masih, Jesus Messiah, appeared personally in visions or dreams to call them to follow him.

In his many interviews with converts and leaders in Christian ministry to Muslims, [Joel] Rosenberg found that Islamic radicalism has been a paradoxical preparatio evangelii. When the Ayatollah Khomeini led the Islamic revolt in Iran in 1979, Muslims suddenly saw Islam as the rest of the world sees it. An evangelist told Rosenberg that Khomeini exposed Islam “not just to the Christian populace but to the Muslims themselves. . . . it’s as if God used that man, the Ayatollah . . . to expose Islam for what it is and for Muslims to say to themselves, ‘That’s not what we want; we want something else.’”

September 11 had the same effect. Many Muslims joined Americans in horror as they watched the airliners slam into the World Trade Center towers. Their sadness and shock turned to anger when they saw other Muslims rejoicing at the carnage. “Is this who we really are?” they began to ask themselves. “Is this what it really means to be a Muslim?”

Ethnologue

A while back, a Desiring God blog post linked to Ethnologue, which describes itself as “an encyclopedic reference work cataloging all of the world’s 6,909 known living languages.” The page they linked to categorized languages by the number of speakers, and included subgroups such as different types of Chinese and Arabic. Anyway, a pretty cool resource.

Evangelism and discipleship in oral cultures

John Piper wonders about the implications of his contention that Christians are “weakened” by preaching that “leav[es] the people unable to see for themselves how these points are the meaning of God in the texts.”

Does this inference (this huge therefore) imply that preliterate people, who hear biblical preaching, but cannot read, are thereby weakened?

Not necessarily. One of the strategies that missionaries are using today is teaching evangelists and pastors in preliterate cultures to memorize hundreds of Bible stories verbatim (which they can do much better than we can). When this kind of “text” becomes the basis of an exposition, we have in principle the same situation as when I preach, while sharing a written text with my people.

Whether the preliterate people will be weakened will depend, as in literate cultures, on whether the expositors show the hearers where their points come from. Do they come from the recitings of the Holy Book (the “text”), or from the preacher’s ideas?

Oral strategies in missions today raise significant questions, and wonderful possibilities. But, while we wait for the hard-working Bible translators to do their crucial work, these strategies need not weaken the new disciples by focusing authority on the preachers. Authority is finally in God, and in his written word. Verbatim memorization and recitation of that word enable preliterate preachers to root their message in the very word of God.

The links in the last paragraph are interesting. The first is Piper’s consideration of some issues of the gospel in pre- and post-literate cultures, and the second a Lausanne document on oral learners. The Lausanne page contains a link to this 2006 Christianity Today article by Dawn Herzog Jewell discussing the same issue. Here’s a section from the article:

Reaching the oral majority for Christ requires communicating in forms familiar to oral cultures, such as stories, proverbs, drama, songs, chants, and poetry.

The Lausanne paper tells the testimony of an Indian Hindu, a pastor named Dinanath, who came to Christ in 1995 through the work of a cross-cultural missionary. When Pastor Dinanath returned to his village in 1998 following two years of Bible college, he began preaching in the way he’d been taught. But few villagers showed any interest, leaving him discouraged and confused.

The next year, Pastor Dinanath attended a seminar on storytelling methods. He realized that a lecture style and printed books couldn’t reach his people, so he changed his preaching. He began telling Bible stories and singing gospel songs put to traditional music.

By 2004, his village church had multiplied into 75 churches with 1,350 baptized members. “This is the next wave in missions,” Willis says, “like a Gutenberg II.”

A former senior vice president for the IMB, Willis saw the door for cross-agency collaboration open in 1995 at the AD2000 and Beyond Movement’s Korea gathering. It was there that he publicly repented for the Southern Baptists’ pride in believing they could reach the world by themselves. Later, at the Amsterdam 2000 conference, a group of nine mission leaders including Willis formed an informal organization, Table 71, to begin talking about ways to work together. In February 2005, ION was formed.

Willis is quick to cite the gifts of agencies involved in ION: “Wycliffe brings the integrity of Bible translation, the IMB contributes church planting and Bible storying methodology, Campus Crusade brings its global media expertise in the Jesus film and its work on college campuses, YWAM brings its training and recruiting gifts, Trans World Radio has the ability to put stories on radio, and so on.”

That’s not to say that the agencies agree on everything. Although Wycliffe actively participates in ION, it remains committed to literacy training and Scripture translation for the world’s minority language groups. Freddy Boswell, Wycliffe International’s vice president for Scripture promotion, hesitates to throw his full support behind the orality movement. “There’s an emotional rush to meet oral needs. It’s something new and exciting to say, ‘Hey, can we do something to reach 70 percent of the world’s population?’ ” he says. “But let’s not forget literacy and translation.”

A North Korean student’s testimony at Lausanne

Bill Walsh at Desiring God posted a video of her testimony and also linked to the reaction of Michael Oh, the Korean president of Christ Bible Seminary in Japan.

Oh recently wrote another post on the Desiring God blog and his mission in Japan was profiled here.

A whole gospel for the whole world

I recently listened to a conversation about the Lausanne Movement (a group seeking to help evangelicals from around the world work together), in which John Piper asked Doug Birdsall, Christopher Wright, and Lindsay Brown about the global evangelical church and the upcoming Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization in Cape Town.  Here’s a link to the video and audio.  I found it very interesting and encouraging.

One part of the conversation that stood out was when Christopher Wright brought together the greatness of God and the enormity of global issues. Wright said that “the gospel is big enough to address all the bigness of the problems of the world in the cross,” and these things are explicit in the New Testament:

• Jesus bore our sins for our forgiveness
• the cross breaks down enmity and hostility makes possible reconciliation, “so peacemaking is at the heart of the cross.”
• Christ defeated all evil and death on the cross, including earthly oppression and disease
• creation is reconciled to God through the cross, so Christians address environmental issues “under the banner of the cross ”

Instead of getting “personal salvation in the cross” and then engaging with the world based on other things, “the cross has to be the center of a holistic gospel which addresses all the brokenness of the world.  The gospel is big enough because the cross is big enough to address all that the world throws at us.”  Piper remarked that he appreciated Wright’s explanation because rather than saying that the whole Bible is the gospel, he showed the relevance of the cross specifically to each of these areas.  You can find this portion of the conversation at about the 6-minute mark.

The conversation also covered the 6 topics in the Lausanne Global Conversation:

• AUTHENTICITY and INTEGRITY: Living a Christ-like lifestyle
• PARTNERSHIPS: Serving together in love and humility [as the developing world is becoming the demographic center of the church]
• TRUTH: Bearing witness to the truth of Jesus Christ
• NEW MISSIONS PRIORITIES: Discerning God’s priorities for the future
• WORLD FAITHS: Loving our neighbours of other faiths/worldviews
• RECONCILIATION: Pursuing peace in our broken world

Christianity Today has been running articles in cooperation with Lausanne since last October, which you can find here.  Christopher Wright’s article, which kicked off the series, is here.  I drew the title of my post from Lausanne’s statement about the meaning of world evangelization, quoted in Wright’s article and referenced in the conversation: “Evangelization requires the whole church to take the whole gospel to the whole world.”

TRUTH

Bearing witness to the truth of Jesus Christ

John Piper: Rejoice over the reach of world Christianity, but don’t be complacent

From his recent sermon, The Legacy of Antioch:

Meet the Global South

Let’s review the situation of the world today in regard to the spread of Christianity, and what this new term Global South means. The Global South refers to the astonishing growth of the Christian church in Africa, Latin America, and Asia while the formerly dominant centers of Christian influence in Europe and America are weakening. For example:

• At the beginning of the twentieth century, about 71 percent of professing Christians in the world lived in Europe. By the end of the twentieth century, that number had shrunk to 28 percent. 43 percent of the Christians now lived in Latin America and Africa.¹
• In 1900, Africa had 10 million Christians, which was about 10 percent of the population. By 2000, the number of Christians was 360 million, about half the population of the continent. This is probably the largest shift in religious affiliation that has ever occurred, anywhere.²
• There are 17 million baptized members of the Anglican church in Nigeria, compared with 2.8 million in the United States.³
• “This past Sunday more Anglicans attended church in each of Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda than did Anglicans in Britain and Canada and Episcopalians in the United States combined.”
• “The number of practicing Christians in China is approaching the number in the United States.”⁴
• “Last Sunday . . . more Christian believers attended church in China than in all of so-called ‘Christian Europe.’”
• Kenya has more people in Christian churches on Sunday than Canada.
• “More believers worship together in Nagaland than in Norway.”
• “More Christian workers from Brazil are active in cross cultural ministry outside their homelands than from Britain or from Canada.” In other words, the churches of the Global South are increasingly sending churches.
• Last Sunday “more Presbyterians were in church in Ghana than in Scotland.”⁵
• “This past week in Great Britain, at least fifteen thousand Christian foreign missionaries were hard at work evangelizing the locals. Most of these missionaries are from Africa and Asia.”⁶

“In a word,” Mark Noll says, “the Christian church has experienced a larger geographical redistribution in the last fifty years than in any comparable period in its history, with the exception of the very earliest years of church history.”⁷

The West Is Not Done in Sending Missionaries

This is a great cause for Christians to rejoice in the sovereign grace of God. But what it does not mean is that the day of sending missionaries from our churches in the West is over. That would be a tragic misunderstanding of the situation. Partnership in mission with the Global South does not mean that all the unreached peoples of the world can be reached by people who are in the Global South. Don’t buy into the idea that we should send our money, not our people. That would sound very much like: “Let them shed their blood, not ours; we’ll just send money.”

The point of the sermon was this: “The Legacy of Antioch is that it was a mission church that became a sending church through the partnership of Barnabas and Saul, who in the end were sent out by the church to which they were sent.”  Piper also highlights the need for Christian instruction after conversion:

In all your evangelism and church planting, don’t neglect to teach the converts and to take them deep into the gospel and build them up so they are stable and strong….

In other words, he would do what Barnabas and Saul did. They saw a great ingathering, and they taught and taught and taught. They strengthened the believers. They sank the roots of the people down deep. They brought stability. They built a foundation for missions.

All over the world (you read this in all the literature), the cry is for trained, strong, Bible-saturated leaders. What will your part be in raising them up?

The perils of short-term teaching missions

The Desiring God series on short-term missions took one day to look at short-term teaching missions, linking to an article by David Livermore.

In his article, Livermore studies the difference in perception between the American trainers and their students in the global church.  Here’s his rationale:

I’ve spent a great deal of time studying training initiatives done by Western church leaders in Nonwestern contexts. There’s little question that there’s compelling need to serve the global church with theological and leadership training. The expansive growth of the church around the world is producing a shortage of theologically equipped pastors and church leaders.
• There are approximately 2.2 million evangelical churches in the world
• 85% are led by men and women who have no theological training.
• 7000 new church leaders are needed daily to care for the growing church.
• If every Christian training institute in the world operated at 120% capacity, less than 10 percent of the unequipped leaders would be trained. (WEA Consultation in Iguassu)
Statistics like these make me more than a little passionate about the need to offer theological training and equipping to church leaders around the globe. But I find great dissonance with my desire to run hard at meeting this need and my fear of perpetuating the subtle but real imperialistic tendencies we bring these kinds of training endeavors.

Short-Term Missions

Last week, the Desiring God Blog posted on short-term missions throughout the week.  This is the wrap-up with links to their different posts.  The major messages that came through were that those going on short-term missions must have a servant’s attitude, take care that their efforts don’t harm the poor and the local Christian efforts that they mean to help, and realize that those who go on the trip often receive more than those they mean to help.

Two articles from the Chalmers Center at Covenant College were particularly interesting.  They sought to differentiate between relief and development, arguing that when the poor can help themselves we must pursue development.  The second article that I linked to provides this suggestion (the DG Blog quoted a shorter section of this):

Despite these words of caution, STM trips can play a positive role in the lives of all those involved, but a different paradigm is needed. Rather than going as “doers,” some powerful dynamics can be unleashed if STM teams go as “learners” from the poor or as “co-learners” with the poor. Consistent with an asset-based model, going as a learner emphasizes the gifts which poor people have to share with others: the spiritual, intellectual, physical, and social resources that God has already placed in their community. Listening to poor people and asking them to share their insights affirms their dignity and reduces the tendencies towards pride on the part of the outsiders. Furthermore, the poor really do have something to teach us, for they have unique insights on what it means to trust in a sovereign God to “give us this day our daily bread.”

This article also had a good discussion of different cultural views of time:

An important dynamic that affects the interaction of STM teams and low-income communities is that there are often core cultural differences with respect to time. Most Americans are from a monochronic culture which believes that time is a very important resource that should not be wasted. Of course, there is some good in that perspective, and it enables Americans to produce a lot. But many other cultures have a polychronic view that says time is primarily an opportunity to invest in relationships. In such cultures, knowing and serving others is more important than pursuing many new projects or activities. Hence, people from polychronic cultures may not feel unduly impatient or burdened if life unfolds a little bit slower than the people from monochromic cultures would like.

STM teams that fail to understand these dynamics can inadvertently undermine long-term development. For example, when Americans gain a reputation for needing to do things very quickly, it can foster an attitude in poor communities that discourages local people from doing things to improve their own situation. Locals start to say, “We don’t need to do anything. Let’s just wait and some outsiders will show up and do it for us!” Again, if the STM teams would focus less on “doing” and more on “being and learning together,” this problem could be mitigated.

Missionaries who stood up to empire

Peter Leithart posts a quote from Vinoth Ramachandra about missionaries who stood up for local people.  Since it’s a short entry in his blog, I’m passing on Leithart’s whole post:

Vinoth Ramachandra (Subverting Global Myths: Theology and the Public Issues Shaping Our World) acknowledges that there are “many shameful stories to be told of Western missionary complicity in colonial practices of domination,” but adds that “the more typical stories of missionaries and local Christian leaders in India, Africa or the South Pacific who courageously defended native interests and combated racist theories and stereotypes propagated by their fellow countrymen are missing from the anti-Orientalist corpus.”

Specifically: “From the initial commercial ventures of the East India Company to the heyday of the British Raj, colonial administrators were mostly hostile to Christian missionaries and made every effort not to interfere with local customs, religious beliefs and values.  Ironically, and contrary to many anti-Orientalist writers, it was onlt when the Serampore missionaries and Ram Mohan Roy . . . convinced the governor, Lord Bentinck, that sati . . . had no authority in the sacred Hindu texts, did the British abolish the practice in 1829. . . . it is rarely mentioned that some British Christians in India such as C. F. Andrews were criticizing British racism and advocating full independence for India rather than dominion status within the empire long before Gandhi and the Congress Party took it up in 1924.  So impressed was Gandhi himself by Andrews’s integrity that, in order to break the deadlock between Congress and the Muslim League, he made the remarkable proposal to the Viceroy Lord Mountbatten in 1947 that Andrews be appointed as the first president of independent India.”

As I mentioned in my book recommendations, missionaries were an important part of exposing King Leopold’s exploitation of the people of the Congo.  Ramachandra’s book looks like an interesting one as well.

Missionaries from Malawi

Bill Walsh at Desiring God writes:

As an example of how God is stirring up former “receiving” nations into missionary-sending nations, Joy to the World Ministries (JTW) of Malawi is hosting its second annual Chosen Generation Missions Conference, July 2-5.

This conference will be held on the beautiful campus of the African Bible College in Lilongwe, the capital city of Malawi. Its purpose is to equip and mobilize the young people of Malawi and neighboring nations to play a role in seeing God’s name hallowed in southern Africa and across the planet.

We really are seeing a global Christianity with many centers.