Urbana.org All Things New Blog - mission and missions

Starting Churches in Iran is Easy

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 02:01:00 -0600

I've just read a remarkable article on the Iranian Church from Mission Frontiers Magazine. It's available on pdf, but the links are a little funny, so you have to download the entire issue, but it's worth it.

As the Iranian Islamic Revolution struggles to hold on early in its fourth decade of life, many Iranians are risking trouble by exploring other religions. Meanwhile, the Armenian minority group, starting in the sixties and continuing today, has developed a missionary mindset toward the Persian majority, including taking the incredible step of beginning to hold Church services in Farsi (the Persian language).

As any minority group or immigrant group can testify, the Armenians are doing this at the risk of their particular identity; this is a tremendous sacrifice. To hold services in the language of their at-times antagonists includes doing away with all your songs; these Armenian Christians have penned hundreds of Farsi-Language hymns.

The result: Christianity is losing its Armenian-identification in the eyes of their Muslim neighbors. In the last ten years, the pseudonymous author says,

A new term has become widespread throughout Iran, which can be literally translated “Persian-Christian,” or as they would conceptually translate it “Muslim-Christian” (farsimasihi).

For centuries, it was assumed that if you were a Christian, you were Armenian. If someone saw you wearing a cross they might ask, “Are you Armenian?” or “Have you become Armenian?” But today the question has changed. This new identity is highly significant, testifying to the presence of a truly indigenous, self-reproducing movement.

And this giving-up of the self is having a very big impact, if the author's uncited surveys can be trusted.

Recent nationwide surveys reveal that over 70% of the population is watching Christian satellite programs. These same surveys indicate that at least one million have already become believers, and many millions more are on the verge.

This growth has happened so fast, the underground church can hardly keep apace. In one example, a house church that began with two people several years ago has now multiplied into over twenty groups. The leader of this network remarked,

“Starting churches in Iran is easy! Everywhere you go to evangelize, people are ready to receive the gospel, or they have already become believers through satellite broadcasts.”

Training leaders is also easy, remarks another leader. The government has left young people with nothing to do. So believers spend time with one another everyday. They are constantly gathering for prayer, Bible study and evangelism. When a group reaches 25 people, they divide in half and begin again. Within two years, a new believer is expected to become a leader of a new house-fellowship and a discipler of new leaders.

So even if these national surveys overstate conversions by as much as a factor of ten, this is a trend in Persian Christianity not seen since the 600s of the Christian era.

What if Local Christians are Wrong?

Wed, 29 Jul 2009 14:26:00 -0600

A brilliant lecture I heard recently by Brian Stanley of the University of Edinburgh's Centre for the Study of World Christianity detailed evolving missionary thought from the Victorian period to the Modernist period: during this time a shift in emphasis emerged from Christian universalism, with its attendant focus on the “brotherhood of man” to a multi-ethnic focus on cultural diversity.

In the first case, the motive of mission was to embrace those outside the faith with the blessings of Christian community, which was usually and unfortunately understood as coterminous with contemporary European culture, including modes of dress and etiquette.

In the second case, a Christian was assigned a “cultural mandate” to diversify. Theorists started putting a lot of weight on verses such as those of Revelation 21:24-26 where, speaking of the New Jerusalem, it reads:

24The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their splendor into it. 25On no day will its gates ever be shut, for there will be no night there. 26The glory and honor of the nations will be brought into it.

Both emphases are faithful to the bible and point to an inherent tension in the Christian faith—that of a scattering localism on the one hand, and of a center-focused universalism on the other. While it’s hard to live without either force, because extremism rapidly emerges—whether fascism and racism on the one hand, or insistent conformity on the other—the two forces are in constant tension in our minds. It’s a fact of life.

Stanley’s point was this: that at first glance the Victorian civilizing missionary is greatly embarrassing to today's sensitivities, and yet: we today need to listen to them, because they had thought long and hard about creating a global family. We needn’t follow them to the conclusion of conformity to Western cultural standards, but neither should we reject their universalism out of hand.

Today’s insistent multi-culturalism, Stanley concludes, uses nearly the same compassionate language as the civilizing mission of the 1880s, and needs to be brought back into the tension of local vs. global. If local is the only acceptable incarnation of faith, correction from the global community becomes less likely, and locally-birthed bad ideas and practices can blossom unchecked.

As one example, we need only consider the religious justifications for slavery in antebellum America (south and north alike). As Mark Noll demonstrates in God and Race in American Politics, so important a book that I’ll need to write about it separately, the sheer volume of pro-slavery sermons can only point to a widespread fear that slavery was somehow unchristian.

In the end, Noll suggests, the white church of the American south convinced itself that faithfulness to scripture demanded a political separation from the north; the civil war can thus be partially conceived as the last great Western religious war.

hich leads to the question Brian Stanley was asking: what if local faith is wrong? What if, in the interest of creating a grass-roots Christianity we also make a Christianity deaf to correction from the outside?

This is a really disturbing question to me, who have dedicated a lot of thought to the multi-ethnic aspects of my faith.

Ralph Winter on Unreached People Groups

Tue, 26 May 2009 10:53:00 -0600

Ralph Winter has died. The missionary leader, strategist and thinker has left a wide-ranging impact.

One of his most important ideas is that of “Unreached People Groups,” which he publicly discussed thirty-five years ago, and which is now part of the everyday missionary lexicon. He explains the term here, from a month ago:

How to Guarantee Failure

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 02:01:00 -0600

I had coffee with Urbana director Jim Tebbe the other day, and had a great time as usual.

Jim is one of the best storytellers around, and may at any time switch into verse—possibly a reflection of his origins as an American MK in the nascent country of Pakistan. I’ve often thought Jim ought to have been born a few centuries ago, into a horse-trading family in Uzbekistan: you’ll always get more than you bargained for, but you might get there in a roundabout fashion, because the journey is the best part of the destination.

One of Jim’s specialties is embedding great insights into outrageous stories, like “the time I was trying to escape Afghanistan by bus” or “the time my kids started prank calling random Cypriots” or “the time we stole the Purdue marching band drumstick”.

But I digress.

Speaking of the need for a Biblically sound theology to underlie all Christian work, he said:

Having a missiology won’t guarantee you won’t make terrible mistakes, but not having one will guarantee you will.

I guess a lot of us—especially the action-minded ones—are so eager to go save the world from certain destruction, that we fail to consider our actions, and we end up hurting a lot of people.

Not an excuse for inaction, of course, but a plea for thoughtfulness.

Church Death and Church Depth

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 14:10:00 -0600

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.