Bill Nikides

7 October 2011

Rediscovering the Church: WRF Conference, Istanbul 2011

BackgroundI believe that we are living in the twilight of modern Western evangelicalism. Of course, this seems an almost impossible thing to say in light of Lausanne, the megachurches, the Christian celebrities, magazines, parachurch, and schools. Nevertheless, I believe that Western evangelicalism, at least in terms of its leadership, is actually running out of steam. Even as we call for translations of the Bible in every language on earth and for Jesus in every nation, Western evangelical leaders grow ever less confident in the face of a disinterested civil society, a disapproving social and academic elite and intimidated by non-Western religious commitment. We are ready for compromise. Aggressive evangelism, always the hallmark of evangelical confidence is giving way to approaches that promise great results without risking great pain. As we lose confidence, we also begin to flow with the streams and eddies of popular culture coursing just beneath the surface of our evangelicalism. Many of these new streams of thought represent a departure from traditional Christianity. Proponents of new Western missional strategies such as insider movements (a missiology that proposes that Muslim followers of Jesus remain within Islam) see these changes as a very good thing. I fear that they have created something that threatens the very witness of the church in the world.

We need today to see two things. First, that much of what passes for missiology is a consummate Western compromise with culture, not the embrace of culture difference (as we would prefer to think). It represents a quiet form of Western cultural colonialism that imposes a contemporary Western understanding on young, non-Western Christians. It is because it is so Western that a great backlash is forming in nations where insider methods among other things are practiced among Muslims; one which

�1

threatens the unity of the body of Christ. We need to hear this because any movement that purports to bring people to Christ without bringing them into the same visible family is not a movement of God. Second, I want to suggest that this issue is also of greatest significance because it points the way toward a new global future and a new role for Western missionaries. I believe that we are living in a revolutionary time in the history of the church. While contemporary Western missiology often strays far from Scripture and any Reformed understanding of the church, its rejection by non-Western, Muslim background Christianity sets up a far brighter future for the gospel in the world.

We are going to look at the ways in which many different historical, cultural, and theological changes have come together to create the methods and even the structures that we take for granted. In other words, what I hope to do today is make us all aware of how some of these new approaches to Muslim outreach evolved and what they mean within the context of the wider historical church. Then I hope to offer a counter-proposal. If God says NO to the sorts of anti-ecclesial, syncretistic approaches seen in insider movements, what then does he want to say to all of us?

We need to get underneath the skin of insider movements and similar missiologies such as “churchless Christianity”, but moving beyond the stories and hype is no easy task. Shrouded in mystery, trying to get to its roots is a bit like Rudyard Kiplingʼs blind men trying to describe what is in fact an elephant by discovering it one part at a time. It seems too big, and is too diverse for any single perspective to provide a coherent picture. In part, I think this confusion is deliberate on the part of its formularies and missionary practitioners. Insider movements grew in the dark. Most of us never even knew they existed for decades. Then, when we, the various parts of the Christian church began to enquire, we were met with missionary success stories taking place in unknown locations as recounted by people with pseudonyms. Even this month’s Evangelical Missions Quarterly (EMQ) carries a story about fruitful ministry practices in the Muslim world, but it mentions no verifiable facts, no places, no real names, and no detail on the practices themselves. Proponents also add that insider movements are a spontaneously generated work of the Holy Spirit and therefore cannot be described. I disagree with these characterisations. I believe that insider movements and other dramatic changes to missionary approaches are understandable. I think looking at insider movements as extensions of Western, and in particular American evangelical expressions can help us understand them.

The identity issue

�2

The importance of church history

Christian missions have always depended on an identity that was anchored in a particular historical perspective. That perspective emerged as Christians saw themselves in continuity with believing communities found in the covenantal assembly, the Qahal, which developed into early Christian ekkelsias or churches. Men and women who thought that everything they believed found its origin in the early church sparked the Reformation. While the mediaeval Roman Catholic Church departed from this identity, the Reformers felt compelled to regain it. Contemporary evangelicalism however is moving strongly away from that Reformational conviction. It has followed a different trajectory, sometimes unknowingly, embracing the views of second century Gnostics, 16th century radicals and 19th century Protestant liberals that the early church was already not to be trusted; a Gentile corruption of an older, purer biblical faith. Everything following Constantine is seen as a departure from the Bible, or so goes their thinking. Just so you know: everything that followed Constantine includes the teaching and creeds produced by the early church councils. See, the point is that it was during these councils of the early church; doctrines concerning the deity of Christ, the Trinity, and the meaning of the gospel were hammered out. This is not to say that the early church councils were peaceful events reflecting virtual consensus. We all know they were contentious. Nevertheless, they did demonstrate that early Christians all had an understanding of church that was continuous with covenantal Israel. Consider Ephesians 2:

So then you (Gentiles) are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord. In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit.

Then compare that to Ignatius of Antioch, writing in the first decade of the second century:

You consider yourselves stones of the Father’s temple, prepared for the edifice of God the Father, to be taken aloft by the hoisting engine of Jesus Christ, that is, the Cross, while the Holy Spirit serves you as a rope. And thus you all are fellow travellers, God-bearers and temple-bearers, Christ-bearers and bearers of holiness, with the commandments of Jesus Christ for festal attire.1

Ignatius of Antioch, “Epistle to the Ephesians” The Epistles of St. Clement of Rome and St. 1

Ignatius of Antioch. Ancient Christian Writers (New York: Newman, 1946) 63f.

�3

Ignatius’ addressed the young Christians of Magnesia, an ancient city in Lydia, a few days drive from here. It is absurd to have Jesus Christ on the lips, and at the same time live like a Jew. No; Christianity did not believe in Judaism, but Judaism believed in Christianity. What he was saying was that Christianity emerged from within the same 2

covenantal stream as Judaism and that Judaism pointed forward beyond itself to its fulfilment, not just in Christ, but in Christianity, its corporate expression. Christianity, in other words, was not a worldwide Judaism, but that Judaism and Christianity were both branches in the same covenantal tree, making Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians one in Christ. No one in the early church or the Reformation saw faith in Christ couched in individual, internal, spiritual terms. Think, for example of how God describes true believers in the Book of Revelation. They are, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation (7:9); the 144,000, who comprise an army, sealed from every tribe of Israel (7:1-5); who follow the Lamb wherever he goes as first fruits of God and the Lamb ((14:4); who are the fulfilled people of Israel who wander through the wilderness through the Red Sea (Compare Ex 15 and Rev 15) to the marriage supper of the Lamb (Rev 19). How devastatingly different this is from contemporary evangelicalism and missionary approaches, whether that is expressed in the West or on the global stage.

Christianity is, and has always been, a corporate, global historical body, not just a parochial, voluntary or spiritual one. A radical scepticism of the church engendered by modern evangelicals, however, often finds its source in the distrust of the early church. We can see how modern evangelicals approach this historical fork in the road and decide who they think they are, in large part, on the basis of how they understand their own past. Once again, methodologies such as insider movements do not spontaneously erupt in the world through the imagination of the Holy Spirit. Rather, they emerge from the minds of missionaries who have a very particular understanding of themselves. This is of singular importance as evangelical missions have always depended on a historical foundation. I simply point out that this historical identity and perspective has changed. More significantly, this new Western self-identity is not matched by a similar view by newer, younger Muslim background Christians.

Signs of the times: Liquid modernity

We are talking about missions today, but we often make big mistakes in not looking outside the box of missions to understand what we have inside the box. The changes happening in missions are not new. Historically, European and, subsequently, American, culture had been shaped by Christianity. It revolutionized the Roman Empire, outlawing

Ignatius, “Epistle to the Magnesians” 72.2

�4

the gladiatorial games, abortion and infanticide. Cities such as Geneva, Switzerland, once known for its lawlessness, corruption and anarchy, became places of peace and order due to the influence of the Reformation. The ages that followed, however, beginning with the Enlightenment, produced worldviews that radically separated haven and earth. The world of the here and now became all we could know and heaven, a location only attainable with a leap beyond reason. Science and technology eventually began to crowd out Christianity as pathfinders in culture. The fabric that bound together society eventually began to give way in favour of a militant individualism. Rather than having Christianity shape culture, the church took a backseat, a subordinate role to rationalism, individualism, and consumerism in the West.

This led to changes taking place in Western Christianity, even as Western churches began to send out missionaries in large numbers. Missionaries, have always tried to be faithful servants of Christ, but they were always embodied in worldviews. When missionaries first went to Brazil in the 1550s and thereafter all over the world, their Christianity had the sweet fragrance of the gospel, the early church and the Reformation. As the centuries advanced, however, they began to reflect a Christianity that looked and sounded like the changes taking place back in their home cultures. As science and new theories of knowledge were introduced into Western culture during the Enlightenment, they filtered into Christianity as well. The tension between biblical and external knowledge has always been a factor. What happened was that the external worlds definitions began to influence the church more than vice versa.

Erich Kahler, a literary critic and scholar noted significant changes in American and European worldviews in the late 1960s. His observations are worth quoting.

We live in an era of transition, on which old concepts and structures, are breaking up, while new ones are not as yet clearly recognisable. In such a state of flux-more rapidly moving than ever-is the incessant turmoil of novelty, of discoveries, inventions and experiments, Concepts like wholeness, like coherence, like history are widely discredited and looked upon with distrust and dislike. Not only are they felt to be encumbering the freedom of new ventures, they are considered obsolete and invalid.3

Kahler noticed a growing trend among Western thinkers to discard traditions, structures, and conventions for the sake of new projects designed to maximise freedom. People wanted to be free of constraint and, even at the risk of losing corporate identity, the old

Erich Kahler,The Disintegration of Form in the Arts (New York: George Braziller, 1968) 21.3

�5

ways were distrusted and then discarded. Forms were considered either unimportant or compared to prisons. This radical mistrust of history, tradition, structure, standards and constraint we now call postmodernism. The only thing that may have developed since Kahler wrote in 1968 seems to me the deeper level of mistrust. So, as a consequence, change becomes the highest value and change Is driven by consumer desire. So, rather than people being shaped by organization like the church, the believing community, churches begin to change in order to cater to the local culture.

Zygmunt Bauman, a highly influential sociologist has coined a term that he believes better explains than postmodernism what we are all experiencing. He calls it “liquid modernism.” In describing the rapid rate of change, the discarding of old forms for new ones, seems more like liquids than solids. In a liquid state, social forms and institutions cannot keep their shape for long. Structures and organisations become networks for 4

example. In order to facilitate necessary changes in liquid modernity,

A swift and thorough forgetting of out-dated information and fast ageing habits can be more important for the next success than the memorisation of past moves and the building of strategies on a foundation laid by previous learning.

In the exploding new world of rapid change, the first things to throw overboard are traditional loyalties, custom and obligations. In order to be truly free, we have to be free of fences and barriers. This includes institutional, organized religion. Mainline churches 5

were in massive decline throughout most of the Twentieth century. What filled the void was a new evangelicalism that both repudiated the isolation and perceived backwardness of fundamentalism; and looked forward to a happy engagement with the modern world. The new evangelicals rebuilt the face of Christianity in the West. Impatient with the stifling and reactionary thinking they found in denominational Christianity, influencers started and colonised new parachurch organisations, capable of mobilising people and initiating mission faster than they could in any other venue.

As a consequence of its growing liquid identity, post-Second World War Western Christianity saw the creation of alternate Christian power structures that did not eliminate churches, but they did take the creative initiative away from them. Fuller Theological Seminary, its Centre of World Mission and other new organizations not controlled by any denominations served as fountains of new ideas, a new identity and

Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Times: Living in An Age of Uncertainty (Cambridge: Polity, 2007) 1ff. 4

Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 2000) 3-14.5

�6

even a worldwide spirituality. Where the church once unified monasteries and parishes under one ecclesial government, Western evangelicals developed independent and competing institutions that fragmented Christianity. Let me cite an example.

George Marsden, in his Reforming Fundamentalism noted that:

Fuller Seminary was not, like Old Princeton, one department of a church that supported other ministries. Rather, it was in many respects a church itself: it was the headquarters for a spiritual movement. So, for instance, local churches of different denominations pastored by Fuller graduates of similar vintage might well have more in common with each other than with many churches of their own denominations.6

Fuller succeeded in altering the power structure within evangelicalism because the emphasis shifted from the theological, the domain of church, to the practical, the domain of the training centre. People at once turned to the pragmatic and lost the ability to discern major shifts in theological direction.

American evangelicals had always been oriented toward the practical. Important segments of American academia as a whole, including much of the social sciences, had long made practical applications the test of all theory. At Fuller, the School of World Mission was built around this principle. Similar outlooks appealed to practical business people who might support Fuller and to many of its students. Such tendencies were amplified by the spirit of the times. 7

Can you understand the central point here? Even as young, Muslim background Christians are planting churches, despite the threats, in imitation of their martyr ancestors, they are confronted increasingly by Western missionaries reflecting the often corrosive influence of the Enlightenment and liquid modernism. These newer generations of missionaries often exemplify beliefs and values that directly clash with the older, and, in my opinion, more biblically faithful ecclesiocentric orientation of Christians in the global South. These differences continue to expand, threatening any

George M. Marsden, Reforming Fundamentalism: Fuller Seminary and the New 6

Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987) 275.

Marsden 275.7

�7

sort of coherent, global missions response as Western missionaries, representatives of liquid modern mission agencies clash with growing Muslim background Christian denominations.

These emerging Southern Christian churches begin to develop a consensus with regard theology and ecclesiology. Most have profoundly conservative views on the Bible, Jesus, the Trinity, the nature of the church, ethics etc. Missionary laboratories, on the other hand, such as schools or departments of missiology in the West, continue to develop approaches that move diametrically away from the direction of growth seen in the global South. Even as New Muslim background Christians emerge to warn the West of the Satanic threat posed by Islam, for example, spokesmen such as Mark Siljander and Miroslav Volf attempt to bridge the divide. Think of the alarm raised among Muslim background Christians when they hear of new Chrislam churches springing up in America that combine Muslim and Christian worship.

The importance of theology

In the early days of the new, post-war evangelicalism, the vast majority of evangelical leadership, the trendsetters, maintained a close watch on core doctrinal commitments.

But, the engagement with the wide world outside the church doors cut both ways. It allowed believers to really engage the world on its own terms. On the other hand, it also created a bridge to thinking in the outside world that would threaten its original core commitments. He who builds a bridge cannot always determine the direction of the traffic; or the selection of the drivers. A gap began to grow between different wings within evangelicalism. You could see it coming in the late 60s and 70s with movements such as the Jesus People: Christians fiercely mono-generational, experiential and anti-historical. You can still see the gap today on the mission field. We have conservative missionaries interacting with national Christians. They tend to share similar views with regard to the exclusivity of salvation through Christ within his visible church for example. For them, extra ecclesiam nulla salus, “there is no salvation outside of the church” still rings true. They understand it as the Reformers understood it however, that the church was the context within which the gospel is proclaimed and into which people enter as part of a new covenantal family. It was not the institution that saved. Nor was it a denomination. It was Christ, the head of his church. When I came to faith in the early 1970s through a parachurch ministry however, church was already an afterthought. It mattered that I was individually disciple, but being placed into a historical, corporate body was seen as anything from a possibly helpful idea to even a negative. It was always intimated that being a “church person” might lead to legalism and the loss of intimate personal relationship with Christ. In this way, I was being introduced to gnostic, individualistic Christianity. I never dreamed that this was in any way different either from the biblical witness or the historical church.

�8

Emergent Evangelicals: Pre-history

We must be clear about this. The evangelical church, on two key occasions, utterly rejected the gnostic option in favour of the visible, organised church. In the second century, the authority of individuals with “secret knowledge” was rejected in favour of the early church’s self-identity as the covenantal assembly of God’s people, in continuity with Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, David, the prophets, down to Christ. In other words, the visible church itself had authority insofar as they were faithful keepers of the Word. Second, in the Protestant Reformation, the visible church, purified of its syncretistic compromise with culture, was upheld as keepers of biblical truth over and against the radicals who included non-Trinitarians, Roman Catholic “insiders” known as Nicodemites, Unitarians, modalists and others. It does seem to me that what we have today is reassertion of these anti-church alternatives.

The Gnostics and Reformation-era radicals all cried, “The Bible alone,” but the church had a ready answer. It was far better to read the Bible and apply it, as had always been done, from within the assembly of God’s people. It was the wolves, the false brethren, the false teachers who did not submit to the brethren that had to be rejected. In today’s world, we have the confluence of evangelical Pietism and modern consumerism that creates a radical kind of spiritual autonomy. It also does no good, to contradict the supporters of insider movements, to take issue by stating that you are all about the local believing community, some part of the kingdom that is not part of the church proper. In this “new think” that actually finds its roots in the Radical Reformation, the kingdom was pitted against the church. In liquid missions, the kingdom includes a redeemed or redeemable Islam. The same cannot be said for the church. There has never been a time in our history as the body of Christ when local communities were seen as an entirely sufficient judge of biblical fidelity. Even radical congregationalists in the Reformation era understood that their own confession of Christ was identical to that of other believers in the world, making them part of one visible family, however dysfunctional. They always knew that they were simply one part of a far greater community. Authentic believers were connected people, not just within their cultural context, but vitally and visible to everyone with whom they shared the covenant. Every Jew in the world knew that and every early Christian did too.

This combines with the fact that for many, biblical inspiration means that the authors are inspired, not necessarily the words.

�9

Theology and Religions

Fuzzy logic or fuzzing thinking?: Bounded and centred beliefs

One of the most profound changes and sources of tension to the global church is Western Christianity’s changes with regard to how it views other religions.

Contemporary missiology often promotes the preference for “centred” rather than “bounded” theology and identity. These categories were the invention of anthropologist Paul G. Hiebert, who applied mathematical set theory to human relations. How do you 8

distinguish between different ideas or beliefs? Do you focus on the details that make each unique or do you concentrate on the commonalities? Of course, we all try to manage both, but, practically speaking, one or the other dominates our approaches. Bounded sets focused on essential characteristics of a category and the boundaries separating the things inside from outside the category. Some of these include a recognisable set of beliefs and a recognisable standard of behaviour. Traditional 9

Christianity, stated in terms of orthodoxy, is often equated with bounded sets. Centred sets, on the other hand, emphasised a common centre. Boundaries however are unclear, making the relationships between sets also somewhat ambiguous. 10

If a believing community, such as those that are part of the Emergent Church in the West, espouses centred sets; they often associate the centre, typically, with the confession, “Jesus is Lord” with little if anything serving as solid boundaries to distinguish what is included or excluded from association with the set. In other words, things like doctrine, broad confessional statements, creeds, and even definitions are seen as of secondary importance.

The practical importance of these sorts of categories is enormous. Christian communities embracing a bounded identity promote evangelism and rigorous

Paul G. Hiebert, “Conversion, Culture and Cognitive Categories” Gospel in Context 4 (1978) 8

24-29. Insiders and others often misapply Hiebert’s construct. Or examination deals more with their application than with Hiebert’s intentions.

Jonathan Bonk, “Salvation, Other Religions, and Asian Mission: Reflections on the Legacy of 9

Christendom and Asian Understanding of Salvation” Asian Missiology 2.1 (2008) 112.

Roger Chapman, “Cognitive Categories and Our Mission Approach” Journal of Applied 10

Missiology 6.2 (October 1995) www.bible.acu.edu.

�10

discipleship that includes a strong emphasis on theology and doctrine. They are 11

passionate about individuals and groups coming to faith and then being integrated into the church. Centred sets spend most of their energy affirming the centre, leaving less attention for addressing what takes place on the periphery of their identity. Hiebert claimed, however, that the church would always maintain a clear distinction between Christians and non-Christians. This has, in practice, proved not to be the case. 12

Initiatives such as Jesus in the Qur’an for example are working hard to prove that Islam and Christianity worship the same God and that theological distinctives between them are more imagined than real. So, in the case of centred sets, it is important to acknowledge “Jesus as Lord”, but for some, one can do that regardless of what their community is, what they confess as their identity openly or what they think of doctrine.

Centred set Christianity has proven to be an exceptional vehicle for the evangelical adoption of inclusivism. How are we to view other religions? Is Christianity the one true faith? Are all religions partly true and partly false? Do all religions contain redeemable elements that are redeemed in Christ? The growing reliance on centred set Christianity works with great changes in evangelical Western perceptions of non-Christian religion. The import of this, for our purposes, is that the blurring of the differences between religions, has eroded or distorted the missions impulse, once crystal clear to missionaries and indigenous believers alike. Let me give you an example. Jonathan Bonk, the editor of a prestigious missions journal, asks the question: “Can the faith of someone from another religion be credited to them as righteousness? Is it possible for someone who has never heard of Jesus…to be saved? I believe the answer must be yes.” Even the Trinity, the heart of Christian identity, is harnessed in the cause of 13

promoting pluralism. Christian scholars such as Amos Yong, Mark Helm, Jacques 14

Dupuis and Raimundo Panikkar all, in their own ways see the Trinity as the ground of religious pluralism. None, however, do so by taking a close reading of the Bible. They simply identify principles and values around which they construct their theology. Even a superficial understanding of the narrative of the Bible, particularly the Old Testament, contradicts this sort of generalisation. Over and again, the biblical writers carefully distinguish between their faith system and those of the nations. They recognised, even as we forgot, that both God and the Devil are in the details. Insider/emergent thinking may be politically correct, given the times in which we Westerners live, but it never

Pace Chapman. The author believes that bounded sets downplay discipleship in favour of 11

evangelism and vice versa with regard to centred sets. Since discipleship, as he understands it, involves a comprehensive “conversion” based on a deep transformation of believers in concert with the Word; this implies a deeper and more comprehensive engagement of scripture. By definition, learning such as this drives the disciple towards the edges and away from the centre.

Chapman.12

Bonk 112.13

See Keith E. Johnson, Rethinking the Trinity & Religious Pluralism (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 14

2011).

�11

approaches the irreducible exclusiveness of the Bible, an inconvenient truth for pragmatic, anthropological missiologists. Centred set missiology threatens the core identity of biblical Christianity, the key to its mission.

Explaining the present clash of “Christianities”Collision of liquid, post-Christianity with global historical Christianity

In exploring all of these changes to Western views of the church, the exclusivity of Christianity, and the nature of other religions, we are glimpsing just the fringe of a vast clash of theological understanding and religious culture. Western supporters of insider movements, for example, describe the tension between older understanding of the church and the world as a clash between Westernized indigenous Christians and Muslim lovers of Jesus, as one of cultural followers of Christendom resenting God’s genuine incarnational work in and through Islam or Hinduism. The national Muslim background Christians that I know, and I know many, see this as laughable. These people know that Islam is a false religion. It is not redeemable, nor is it simply of cultural significance. The Westernized nationals are, in fact, those who work with insider-supporting missionaries. Some of these men came to Christ through visible churches but took back their original Muslim identities in order to work for Western-financed mission organizations. Some of these men bounce from one Western organization to another as a form of employment. They therefore wear the uniform of the missionaries; in this case the insider uniform.

But sitting in the background, quietly working among their people (quiet to us because they have never had a Western voice that could or would speak for them) are Muslim background Christians, in growing numbers, who came out of the darkness of Islam, not because we taught them anything (we only seem these days to teach them what they already know is wrong), but because they intuitively understand that a servant cannot have two masters; that the land of the living cannot be the domain of the dead; that the cursed place into which Satan was cast is not and never can be the heavenly city of Jerusalem. They knew when they heard the cry of freedom and life that it meant leaving the world that enslaved their souls. Only we, we liquid moderns, we consumerist Westerners could with our riches and our superiority, talk former Muslims into being Muslims again. Only we. Never they.

What we have in this situation is the clash of a highly Westernized compromise with prevailing culture called insider movements with a surging, muscular, raw, basic, confident historically connected, biblically based Christianity. In other words, we have a weakened, compromising Western church being confronted by its own better past. The Bangladeshi Christian brothers in this room are a visible reminder of whom we once were and whom we were all intended to be; faithful, suffering witnesses, oppressed on

�12

every side, but constantly telling the truth even to their own persecutors. This is genuine biblical Christianity. It makes no devil’s bargains; it does not modify its beliefs to suit its persecutors; it does not collude with the religions of the nations; it does not hide. It dies, but it rises again. It sins, it fails, but one glimpse of its saviour remind it of its true self and it gets back into the battle.

This is our gift, this controversy. Western Christianity is in danger. The money, a self-identity as heroic missionary scientists creating new life in a laboratory, a hidden prideful colonialism have all conspired to deceive it. The global church is growing rapidly. It already vastly outnumbers the West and the ratios are getting greater every day. It is beginning to see the West in a different light; not as forerunners that once suffered greatly to take the gospel to the ends of the earth, but now as peddlers of a dhimmi theology that affirms the permanence of Islam even as it turns its back on the visible church. When we see consider the martyr-witnesses of Muslim background Christians, we remember our historical heritage of courage, martyrdom, and confidence. We were and are called to be one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church. The young Muslim background churches of Asia and Africa are calling out to all of us. Welcome home.

Addressing our needed responseRadical servanthood without hidden agendas

Who will we be in this new, larger world? What will serve as the core of our identity as a smaller part of a larger church? Clearly, we need to embrace the legacy of the martyrs as we see it demonstrated in the lives of younger Christians. The heart of this new identity is not in dying for your faith however. The word “martyr”, after all, means “witness”, not “victim.” The point of martyrdom in the Bible and the early church was not in dying for your faith, but, rather, in your unwillingness to abandon your Lord by abandoning your visible, vocal, uncompromising witness. Just as Jesus went to his death for the sake of his people; his followers were unwilling to leave his side, regardless of consequence. Such devotion made the church impossible to intimidate. It could not be stopped and its enemies, even with all of their worldly power, to fear its presence and listen to its words. We need to respond to the growing church by becoming its servants as fellow witnesses. We need to get simple.

We do need to reject the notion, however, that Western Christians are useless to the newer believers. We have a heritage of faithfulness and failure mingled together. More than anything else, we Western Christians have survived. The church still lives even if we often disgrace its name from time to time, and this is one of those times. Learning how to last; how to raise your kids and grandkids; to see them lost and restored to faith

�13

is our legacy. We have much to share and much to give to our younger brothers and they should accept this from us. My point today is that we are running out of time. They have not yet forsaken or bypassed us. It is time for us to discard these sub-biblical approaches, remember who we are, and offer our service without agendas.

Global structures and strategy emanating outside the USA

I believe that twenty-first century global Christianity will flourish with a revived conservative, conciliar ecumenism that is church–centred; where parachurches directly serve and are accountable to the church. This will be particularly true for theologically consistent traditions such as Reformed Christianity. We need to grasp that this would be a direct reversal of the situation as we find it today. This will mean developing understanding and evolving structures that practically bring the parachurch under the mantle of the visible body of Christ. Finally, our future as one body lies in the direction of international missions organizations representing international Christian bodies with international leadership. The older, national, and often largely paternalistic structures will have to give way to a newer global participation that is driven either collaboratively or by the newer churches. Attempting to promote the new global mission cannot be achieved through old wineskins.

In practical terms, what would that look like? I remember a meeting some years ago where the same subject came up. A Muslim background Christian from the Middle East called for the establishment of a network of Muslim background Christians that would develop regional church planting efforts. I was excited by much of this, but several concerns arose. First, he explicitly stated that Westerners were to be completely excluded. Expressing frustration, he described the Westerners as those who saw themselves as missionary scientists, the nations as laboratories and indigenous people as the lab rats. I well understood. I had heard it hundreds of times myself. The second thing I noticed was the vast diversity in the audience, representing everything from Reformed faith to Pentecostalism.

What should we make of this? First, his frustration is, in my mind, justifiable. He not only expressed the opinion of the hundreds of people present with his resentment, but also of their concern that Western missionaries were now inflicting “another gospel” on their communities. On the other hand, I also felt as though an opportunity was being missed. I was left out. I am a Westerner, but I found myself in almost total agreement with my brothers’ opposition to Western missions efforts. The best approach, in my opinion, is not to counter Western missionary adventurism that forces itself on the nations with money and influence by excluding the West completely. While understandable, it produces just as false view of the biblical church as does insider movements. A conciliar approach that locates proportionally more influence in the part of the church with the

�14

greater representation, without completely discarding the West, seems helpful. In time this will allow a healthier non-Western Christianity to renew the faith of their older, Western brothers. The church in the West is under threat somewhat different from those faced by the global south. Daily martyrdom may not be the threat, but a universal amnesia is. Western Christians are in the process of forgetting who they are in Christ and they need your help. Your sacrificial witness in service of the risen Lord is what is need to remind us all of exactly who we were created to be.

We also need to gather the visible parts of the church proper together in order to face the threats posed by insider movements and other aberrant ideas, turning them into opportunities for growing a global church. Taken as a whole, this new, initially informal concilarism, moves fundamentally away from the thinking that produced insider movements. They return us to the very best expressions of the gospel that we saw in the early church and the Reformation. More significantly, they remind us all that our collective identity is found in John 17; Ephesians 2 and Revelation 7; and not in the missiological laboratories of American seminaries. It is time for all of us here: leaders, church members, seminarians and missionaries to repent, that is, turn around and follow Jesus back into the church.

�15