Should Christians Convert Muslims?
A new flock of missionaries has launched a campaign to take the Gospel to Islamic countries. But will they inspire more backlash than belief?
By DAVID VAN BIEMA - TIME MAGAZINE
She wasn't a Muslim, but she would do for now. Last March, at just about the time American troops were massing outside Baghdad, she shuffled, dressed in a dark burqa, into a cramped schoolroom in the New York City borough of Queens. The class she was addressing was organized by the U.S. Center for World Mission and packed with eager evangelical Christian students wanting to learn how to be missionaries in a foreign country. The black-clad "Shafira" was gamely trying to explain her faith.
"It is not in the heart of all the Muslims to have violence," she said in broken English, alluding immediately to Sept. 11. "So sorry that people having dying. I'm wanting peace for my children. I'm thinking you wanting peace. It's the same." She listed Islam's five pillars of faith and reminded her audience that holy war is not among them. "We have a lot in common," she said, but she did wonder about the Trinity: "God Father plus God Mary equals God Son?"
A student, thrilled at the opportunity to explain, jumped in. After listening patiently, Shafira peeled back her garments and admitted that "I am not a true Muslim." Hardly. In fact, she was a longtime Christian missionary in Muslim lands. She had been hired to explain at several of 150 annual "Perspectives" classes how such evangelism should be done. She gave her real name. (Throughout this article, for the safety of missionaries working in potentially hostile environments or returning to them, pseudonyms are used. They will be indicated on first usage by quotation marks. Many locations will also be omitted.)
Over the next three hours, "Barbara," minus her burqa, dispensed lists of comparisons between Jesus and Muhammad ("Jesus arose from the dead and is alive. Muhammad is dead.") and of dos and don'ts of ministering to Muslims. (Do listen to their story. Don't argue about Israel.) She projected a statement by U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft on a screen: "Islam is a religion in which God requires you to send your son to die for him. Christianity is a faith in which God sends his son to die for you." After his comment was publicized in late 2001, Ashcroft said it referred to terrorists and not to mainstream Muslims, but the point seemed lost on her. "Islam is the terrorist," Barbara asserted. "Muslims are the victim." The class ended in prayer. "We mourn the loss of life" in Iraq, someone said. Added Barbara: "We pray that the weapon of mass destruction, Islam, be torn down. Lord, we declare that your blood is enough to forgive every single Muslim. It is enough."
For 21 months now, Americans have been engaged in a crash course on Islam, its geography and its followers. It is not a subject we were previously interested in, but 9/11 left no choice, and the U.S. military in two countries continues its on-the-job training in sheiks and ayatullahs, Sunni customs and Shi'ite factionalism. Yet there is one group that has been thinking?passionately?about Muslims for more than a decade. Its army is weaponless, its soldiers often unpaid, its boot camps places like the Queens classroom. It has no actual connection with the U.S. government (except possibly to unintentionally muddy America's image). But in the past few months, its advance forces have been entering the still-smoldering battlefield of Iraq, as intent on molding its people's future as the conventional American troops already in place.
Not for a century has the idea of evangelizing Islam awakened such fervor in conservative Christians. Touched by Muslims' material and (supposed) spiritual needs, convinced that they are one of the great "unreached megapeoples" who must hear the Gospel before Christ's eventual return, Evangelicals have been rushing to what has become the latest hot missions field. Figures from the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Massachusetts, suggest that the number of missionaries to Islamic countries nearly doubled between 1982 and 2001?from more than 15,000 to somewhere in excess of 27,000.
Approximately 1 out of every 2 is American, and 1 out of every 3 is Evangelical. Says George Braswell Jr., a missions professor at the Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary: "We're having more now than probably ever before go out to people like Muslims." Sept. 11 appears only to have fueled the impulse.
Yet this boom has coincided with mounting restrictions on missionary efforts by the regimes of Islamic-majority countries and with swelling anti-Western militancy. The resulting tensions have sometimes erupted tragically: the past two years have seen the arrest and imprisonment of two American missionaries in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan and the apparently religiously motivated murders of four more in Yemen and Lebanon. The botched bombing last month of a Dutch-German missionary family in Tripoli, Lebanon, suggests the danger is not abating. Says Stan Guthrie, author of the book Missions in the Third Millennium: "People are beginning to count the costs. If you're in the wrong place at the wrong time, you could be killed. Missionaries have always considered the possibility, but now it's a lot more real."
Such fears, plus the recent entry of evangelical missionaries into Afghanistan and Iraq on the heels of American troops, have raised other questions. The new arrivals mean well: in addition to the Christian Gospel, which they consider their most precious gift, they have channeled millions of dollars in aid and put in countless hours of charitable work. But some fieldworkers for more liberal Christian organizations claim that some of the more aggressive evangelical tactics can put all religious charities at risk, as when the Taliban, angered by missionary activities two years ago, shut down every Christian aid group in Kabul. Muslim critics accuse missionaries of lying about their identities and their faith to achieve their goals. And as the tensions between Islam and the West continue to boil, some familiar with the Middle East have begun asking whether the missionaries, who love Muslims but despise Islam, are the sort of nonappointed goodwill ambassadors the U.S. really needs in a region dense with the rhetoric of holy war. Says Charles Kimball, a Baptist minister who was director of the National Council of Churches' Middle East office in the 1980s: "Sincerity isn't the issue, or commitment to one's faith. It is just that the region is at a pivotal and volatile juncture, and it is arguably not the time for groups coming in, like someone with a lighted match into a room full of explosives, wearing Jesus on their sleeves."
Just how large a proportion of Christian religious workers fit that profile? One reason it is difficult to know is that zeal is often tempered after some time spent in-country. Two centuries ago, in a similar burst of enthusiasm, such mainline denominations as the Presbyterians and the Methodists sent thousands of missionaries to the Middle East. Like the current crop, they started eager for conversions. But over time they settled for a more modest agenda that obeyed local antiproselytizing laws and focused on building educational and charitable institutions and providing humanitarian aid. Such groups still constitute the major visible missionary presence in the area, and they enjoy fruitful and respectful, if circumscribed, relationships with local regimes and populations. Even within the current evangelical wave, there is a broad range of methods and attitudes. Some missionaries, while maintaining the right to evangelize, primarily uphold the mainline tradition of funneling money and time to the Muslim needy. Others, from a distance, flood whole populations with Christian TV and radio, tracts by the tens of thousands and offers of correspondence courses, hoping that a few seeds will take root. In the dozens of Muslim countries that deny "religious worker" visas, ever more Evangelicals take secular jobs to enter less obtrusively. Many show exquisite sensitivity, sharing their Lord only with people whose intimate friendships they have earned.
But there remains a troubling contingent of indeterminate size that combines religious arrogance with political ignorance. Its activities would not necessarily raise eyebrows on the average American street corner: handing out cassettes or tracts, inviting passersby to a movie about Jesus' life, talking about Christ to children while distributing toys. But in societies in which state and mosque are closely intertwined, in which defamation of Islam is a crime and conversion out of it can invite vigilante violence, the more audacious missionaries are engaged, intentionally or not, in provocation, and their actions are debated even within the evangelical community. Some experts see their clumsiness as the product of nondenominational churches lacking the resources for proper training programs. Others suggest that the culprits are "short termers" who don't stay in the region long enough to witness the cycles of retribution their confrontational styles can touch off. Says Robert Seiple, the State Department's Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom until 2000 and himself an Evangelical: "There is a lot more good than bad. The major denominations get it right more than wrong. But what I discovered is that well-intended people have in many, many cases eroded the message they were trying to communicate through inappropriate methodologies. Persecution results, and there are times you wish they had stayed home." "Josh" is a new missionary, but not a foolish one. "I would never do anything stupid like blatant preaching on the street or going up to someone I don't know and handing out literature," he says. But at age 24 and after only eight months on the job, he occasionally gets antsy. "I'm impatient by nature," he says, "so maybe expectations are a problem." The son of missions workers with the Pentecostal Assemblies of God denomination, he grew up abroad, but a palm-bedecked Arab capital is his first solo long-term posting. He strolls its working-class neighborhoods on errands for his day job as a youth worker with its small Christian community and wonders whom he will talk to today. He enjoys sharing Christ with cabbies, in part because their English is better than his beginner's Arabic. He points out three young men in a carpentry shop as part of his target audience: "They're my age," he says. "The younger generation is influenced much more by the West, and they're searching." Josh has his up moments, as when a neighborhood boy complimented him, saying, "You're a good Muslim ... I mean Christian." And there are times when he feels "overwhelmed. I'm just one person?what can I do to help?" But each morning he is reminded of why he is here. The muezzin's first call to prayer rings out at 4 a.m. And pray Josh does. "I pray for the people responding," he says. "I pray that as they go to mosque, Jesus would somehow be revealed to them. I pray against that call?that it would not affect their souls." He prays he may help lift "this totally oppressive spiritual atmosphere."
In the broadest theological sense, Josh and other emissaries of Christ are answering Jesus' call in the Gospel According to Matthew, known as the Great Commission: "Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you." Since the Middle Ages, missionaries?revered by some, reviled by others?have been among history's great cross-cultural pollinators.
In the past century, as mainline Protestants and the Roman Catholic Church in the U.S. adopted a social gospel that stressed aiding the poor over preaching to the unenlightened, evangelizing at its purest fell to Evangelicals. Rare is the conservative Protestant church that doesn't send its teens off on short-term mission trips or play host to a stream of missionaries on home leave, their stories full of exotic places and changed hearts. Although they would never admit it, the returnees are Evangelicalism's paragons, making its philosophy of relentless outreach their lives' work. Says Beth Streeter, a Moraga, Calif., health-care consultant who left on a short mission trip to Egypt with her husband and two young children shortly after Sept. 11: "When you believe at your core that the love of Jesus Christ really is the best gift to humankind, you want to find ways and places for people to hear that for themselves. Sometimes it drives us places that can be awkward and uncomfortable."
Through the 1970s, the great missions fields were Latin America, where conservative Protestantism competed with Catholicism for the hearts of the poor, and (for the more daring) Africa and the Iron Curtain countries. Gradually, however, the focus shifted. A missions strategist named Ralph Winter suggested in 1974 that Christians turn their attention from areas already exposed to Christ to "unreached people groups" who had never heard the Gospel. The plan held special allure for those who read literally another verse in Matthew suggesting that when every nation is reached, the long-awaited end times can commence. In 1989 Argentine-born evangelist Luis Bush pointed out that 97% of the unevangelized lived in a "window" between the 10th and 40th latitudes. This immense global slice, he explained, was disproportionately poor; the majority of its inhabitants "enslaved" by Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism and, ultimately, by Satan.
In a later paper, Bush urged Christians, "Put on the full armor of God and fight with the weapons of spiritual warfare." (He has emphasized to Time that he did not mean military action.) Of Islam specifically, he wrote, "From its center in the 10/40 Window, Islam is reaching out energetically to all parts of the globe; in a similar strategy, we must penetrate (its) heart with the liberating truth of the gospel." Many mustered themselves to the Window.
Only to find it closing. Of the three Abrahamic faiths, Islam is the most ferociously opposed to the straying of its flock. Shari'a law calls for the death penalty for those who convert to other religions, and although the penalty is not binding in most Muslim-majority states, persecution is common. This alone would not retard missions work. Most evangelists accept it as a cost of sharing faith. What did slow their efforts was a more prosaic measure: the gradual elimination by most Muslim countries of professional "religious worker" visas. Established organizations built around salaried missionary lifers found themselves hamstrung.
So they were supplemented with something more maneuverable. The approach was called tentmaking, after the Apostle Paul, who supported himself at that trade while spreading word of the risen Christ through the Mediterranean. Like Paul, the new missionaries did not hang up an evangelist's shingle. They took day jobs?often in aid and development or other areas in which the host country lacked expertise?and preached unofficially. The possibilities are endless?evangelical websites feature references to mechanical engineering in "a large Arab city," computer sales in "an Islamic country" and business teaching in Kyrgyzstan?and missionary-recruitment seminars can sound like job bazaars. At a small Tennessee Bible church, a mission facilitator assured his listeners that "if you're a native speaker and can fog up a mirror, you can teach" English abroad. He projected a cartoon on a screen to show the advantages of being unofficial: a man wearing a turban and dagger halts a standard-issue, briefcase-toting missionary at a striped barrier while another Westerner carrying a toolbox strolls blithely through, toward a mosque in the middle distance.
"Henry" and "Sarah" practice a kind of evangelism that might satisfy the staunchest agnostic. In the early 1980s they arrived in the North African country where they serve as missionary-team leaders. "We didn't want to run through, do our thing and preach," says Sarah. "We wanted to live." They founded an adventure-travel business and made friends. They talked sports and taxes and children with their neighbors, went camping with them and gathered with them on Muslim feast days. They didn't hide their faith, but they didn't press it on others, so when a friend's friend who had taken a Christian correspondence course approached them on behalf of his family, they shared Christ on his terms. "They pursued us," Henry insists. The two clans grew close and still are; eventually several of the Muslims embraced Christ. To tentmaking theorists, this is "relationship evangelism." Henry prefers to speak of the difference in connotation between two Arabic words, tansir and tabshir. "Tansir means to coerce people to change their religion," he explains. "Tabshir means to share, to be a witness."
END OF PART ONE |
