What does is mean for our faith to acknowledge that vast territories of Christian presence are gone? The Iraqi Church, for instance, 5% of the population a half century ago, is now around 0.5%—and dropping quickly.

Most of this decline has come from persecution. It’s too early to tell in Iraq, but there are other places, Libya, for instance, where the original Christian church is dead. Does it mean that God has grown weary of those believers?

Philip Jenkins, one of my favorite thinkers on the global church, has given a great interview to Christianity Today on the subject of his new book, The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia--and How It Died.

From the perspective of missions, here’s the key exchange with CT editor Stan Guthrie:

Why does persecution sometimes strengthen a church and other times wipe it out?

The difference is how far the church establishes itself among the mass of people and doesn't just become the church of a particular segment, a class or ethnic group. In North Africa, it's basically the church of Romans and Latin-speakers, as opposed to the church of peasants, with whom the Romans don't have much connection. When the Romans go, Christianity goes with them.

But Christianity establishes itself very early as a religion of the ordinary, everyday people in Egypt as things get translated into Coptic. As a result, after almost 1,400 years under Muslim rule, there is still a thriving Coptic church that represents [perhaps] 10 percent of the Egyptian people—which I would personally put forward as the greatest example of Christian survival in history.

In other words, missions plays an extremely important role in anchoring the faith. Jenkins is thinking deeply here, and asks us to develop a theology of Church death, to balance our progressive vision of the church’s forever global growth. The point is: churches can die, and a lot has to do with how we love our neighbors, or how deeply we've reached our cultures.

On a side note, the Global Urban Trek's Cairo-Mokattam project works among the Coptic Christians in Egyptian slums. Here's Scott Bessenecker's story My Encounter with Osama.