How should Christians who have a passion for evangelization relate to Islam? For North Americans, the question took on new urgency in the wake of September 11. But Christians in Muslim-majority societies have dealt with the question far longer.
I have never understood why some people look at dialogue and mission in either-or terms. In my experience, these words belong so much to each other that they should never be divorced. Evangelical Christians (whose theology I share) have shown an unwarranted suspicion of dialogue, simply because some have used it as a substitute for mission. Not only are the two words compatible, but they must shape each other.more here.
In conclusion: Has my perception of dialogue changed? Yes and no. The questions I raised prior to my first experience of dialogue in 2003 are still relevant and must be revisited each time I engage in dialogue. My commitment to Jesus Christ and the gospel has not changed. But dialogue is a constant reminder of the human face of mission: It helps us encounter Muslims as equal interlocutors worthy of being listened to and with whom we should respectfully share our beliefs.How then does this dialogue translate to realpolitik?
Dr Ng Kam Weng, director of Kairos Research Centre in Kuala Lumpur shares about the situation in Malaysia "to explain the ambivalence of Christian minority groups toward Christian-Muslim dialogue" as a response in Building a Common Society.
Dialogue beneath the Gothic arches of Western universities should be welcomed, but surely genuine dialogue would gain more credence if it took place at the ground level, especially in countries where Islamic authorities do not feel the need to modulate their power so as to present an acceptable face, as they would when dealing with their Western counterparts. If indeed dialogue takes place, the Islamic authorities typically set the terms of engagement, reducing it to social rituals to confirm the dominance of Islam rather than to promote mutual understanding and respect. Naturally, local Christians lose enthusiasm for "dialogue."
It is not often so cut and dry about inter-faith dialogue in Muslim-majority countries as has been pointed out by Dr Ng. Read more here.
Nigeria is another country where is there had been violence between Muslims and Christians. Sunday Agang who is dean of the School of Theology and Ethics, JETS Theological Seminary in Jos, Nigeria comments on The Audacity of Dialogue.
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 |  | The Missionary Who Wouldn't Retire Lesslie Newbigin, born 100 years ago today, launched a new career at age 66 by calling Western churches to act like they were in the mission field. |
read moreWhen I speak with students around the world, I find them confident in their ability to present the gospel. They tell me that God loves me, that I have sinned, that Christ died for me, and that I need to believe in Jesus to get to heaven. Their confidence is reassuring, but their content is worrying. Doctoral students and seminarians often seem to have no deeper grasp of the gospel than do Sunday school children. The gospel they present has been reduced to a personalized product that offers the ultimate bargain—exchanging spiritual poverty for eternal riches. The problem with much of our evangelism is not what we include but what we omit: the Holy Spirit, the church, persecution, obedience, mission, reconciliation, resurrection, and new creation.
The gospel according to Newbigin challenges this thinking in two distinct ways. First, he calls us back to a gospel that brings personal reconciliation with God, but also a gospel that connects us with God's reconciling purposes in conscience, culture, church, creation, and cosmos. Second, he calls us back to a gospel that is more than a series of bullet points, a story that centers on the flesh-and-blood character of the divine Christ.
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Spiritual formation is, by its very nature, missional. As we are formed into the likeness of Christ, we increasingly share God’s infinitely tender love for others. We deepen in our compassion for the poor, the broken, and the lost. We ache and pray and labor for others in a new way, a selfless way, a joy‐filled way. Our hearts are enlarged toward all people and toward all of creation.
"Expect great things; attempt great things."
At a meeting of Baptist leaders in the late 1700s, a newly ordained minister stood to argue for the value of overseas missions. He was abruptly interrupted by an older minister who said, "Young man, sit down! You are an enthusiast. When God pleases to convert the heathen, he'll do it without consulting you or me."
That such an attitude is inconceivable today is largely due to the subsequent efforts of that young man, William Carey.
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 | | Does Global Christianity Equal American Christianity? Historian Mark Noll talks about how U.S. missionaries have—and have not—shaped the faith in other nations. |
The strong points of Reformed Theology are at the same time her weaknesses. In order to become fit for the 21st century in the common house of ecumenical theology and in the universal house of humankind and the earth, it seems necessary to reformulate the strength of the Reformed Tradition. This cannot mean adapting our tradition to the others or integrating our originality into what is common to all, but to find our own profile in new communities of Christianity and humankind. “If two are saying the same, one is superfluous,” says an old Russian proverb. It is not the intention of ecumenical community and interreligious dialogue to make each other superfluous. The difference is interesting.
Since John Calvin and Theodore of Beza, the founder of the reformed orthodoxy in the 17th century, “Calvinism” is famous on the one hand and notoriously accused on the other hand for the doctrine of double predestination: Humanity is divided into the elected here and the rejected there. God is totally free to choose whomever he wants and to reject whomever he doesn’t want. Both serve the glorification of his majesty, and who can argue with the sublimity of the infinite God?
The belief in divine election was and is indeed the strength of Reformed faith. It gave believers an invincible certainty in their faith to know that one is not only loved by God, and not only justified by the grace of Christ and sanctified by the inspiration of the holy Spirit of God, but also elected by the will of God. From this belief in the divine election follows the trust in the divine perseverance through the ups and downs of personal life until the final redemption: I shall not fall and nobody and nothing can tear me out of the hands of God. God is faithful to his election, Christ has prayed for me “that my faith shall not fail" (Luke 22:32), the divine seed of the Holy Spirit in my heart will not die. This belief was the power of resistance in persecutions, i.e. of the Huguenots in France and Reformed Christians in the Netherlands. Marie Durand was incarcerated in the Tour de la Constance in Aigues-Mortes in Southern France for thirty-eight years, sustaining and exhorting her companions in captivity for the sake of their faith, and here she made her famous inscription in the stone “Register.”
But does this strength of belief in one's divine election mean that the rest of humankind is lost and damned to eternity as the crowd of corruption, the massa perditionis as Augustine called them? Must we tell the rest of the world: “According to the Bible and our belief those who do not believe in Christ will perish?” as the president of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches Choan-Seng Sonq from Taiwan asked? There are always two different explanations of the simple fact that one and the same Gospel provokes belief in one, and disbelief in others. It is either due to the will of God or of human beings. Because believers confess that they owe their faith to the grace of God, they see in unbelief the disgrace of God. Since they feel in their faith “elected,” they can see in unbelievers only “rejected” people. The other explanation refers to the free choice of human will: Those who decided for Christ see heaven as their eternal future, and for those who decide against Christ they see only hell as their future—or more recently “total nonbeing.” The result of the view believers have of unbelievers is the same, whether one follows Augustine and Calvin in their doctrine of double predestination, or Pelagius and Erasmus in their doctrine of the double end of human free choice.
I think it is not characteristic of the Christian Gospel to confront people with the statement, “You belong to the crowd of the condemned and your future is hell.” It was terrible to see in the movie “Breaking the Waves” a Calvinistic pastor burying a person having lost faith with the words, “We now hand you over to hell.” It is certainly not in the Spirit of God the creator of everything to condemn 95 percent of the people he has created in his image, and it is not in accordance with Christ to limit salvation to 144,000 elected only, for whom he died. We need no theological explanation for the existence of unbelievers or people of another faith. Our only answer to the rejection of the Gospel is preaching and explaining the Gospel to unbelievers and people of other faiths.
Faith is not only human trust in God, but also and in the first place God's faithfulness. It is in this sense that I take every unbeliever as a person in whom God is trusting, in whom God is present and for whom God is waiting. God believes in every human person. This can be called “objective faith” (Christoph Blumhardt).
It was Karl Barth who—following Blumhardt—gave us an ingenious christological reformulation of the Reformed doctrine of double predestination (Church Dogmatics II/2). The sequence of his argument is this: 1. Before God elects or rejects anybody, God determines himself to be the God of the people: “I shall be your God and you shall be my people,” is the covenant-formula of Israel. This can be called the self-election of God. 2. In the passion and Crucifixion of Christ, God has put his righteous condemnation of sin, evil and death on his own Son. Between Gethsemene and Golgatha Jesus suffered hell and eternal death for all of us, when he cried out: “My God, why have you forsaken me?” 3. With Jesus Christ's resurrection from the dead, hell and eternal death are therefore overcome. The election of grace is revealed: “Hell, where is your victory!” (1 Cor. 15:55). Grace flowing out of the resurrected Christ is pure grace and as such unconditional and also universal, all-embracing and excluding no one. This is the content of the Gospel and there is no terror in the doctrine of double predestination anymore.
“The doctrine of election is the sum of the Gospel because of all words that can be said or heard it is the best: that God elects man; that God is for man too the One who loves in freedom,” said Karl Barth in § 32 of his Church Dogmatics (trans. is from Bromiley ed.). Why is this so? Because “God took upon himself the condemnation of sinful men with all consequences, and elected man to participate in his eternal glory (§ 33).” Is Barth teaching “double predestination?” Yes! But in a new dialectical form: God took the condemnation upon himself in order to embrace all in his election of grace. This is the new dialectical form of the old doctrine of “double predestination.”
Of course, this new formulation is not an explanation of the fact that some believe in the Gospel and others not. But do we really need a theological explanation of this fact, or can we best answer the fact that there are unbelievers with a new and better witness to the Gospel that God loves them with grace and is carrying all their sins and sufferings for them? Another question is whether universalism is the result of this reformulation. The answer is “No,” because we are witnesses of the Gospel not judges in the final judgment of God. Whether God will in the end embrace all with his transforming grace is His sake, ours is the witness of the Gospel to everybody. But if somebody dies in unbelief, is he then out, or is there hope also for him? The answer is: Our means of preaching and praying come to an end with death, but not Christ's power, because he was resurrected and has his possibilities with the dead, preaching the Gospel in the world of the dead. There is, therefore, no reason and no right for us to condemn and exclude anyone, living or dead. We are not the judges of faith, but the servants of joy.
PUBLISHED IN THE BULLETIN OF THE INSTITUTE FOR REFORMED THEOLOGY, SPRING/SUMMER 2001, VOL. 2, #2.
 | The Unexpected Adventure: Taking Everyday Risks to Talk with People about Jesus |
Lee Strobel has written many books—The Case for Faith, The Case for Christ, and The Case for the Real Jesus among them—that provide intellectual reasons, wrapped in stories, for the Christian faith. Stan Guthrie, Christianity Today managing editor for special projects, interviewed Strobel, a former pastor at Willow Creek Community Church, at the Christian Book Expo in Dallas about his latest title, written with Mark Mittelberg: The Unexpected Adventure: Taking Everyday Risks to Talk with People about Jesus (Zondervan).
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His vision for world evangelization was "breathtaking" and his influence "globally seismic."
Veteran missiologist Ralph D. Winter passed away last Wednesday, May 20. (Hat tips to @jhgrantjr and @edstetzer for alerting us via Twitter.)
According to the US Center for World Mission website, Winter died peacefully at home in Pasadena, California, "surrounded by three of his four daughters, his wife Barb, and a few friends."
Winter had been battling cancer and had been weakened by radiation treatments. He was 84.
In 2005, Winter was named by Time magazine as one of America's 25 most influential evangelicals. His speech at the 1974 Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization is credited with focusing evangelical mission activity on "unreached people groups."
Time commented:
Even at 80, Winter generates new strategies from his California-based Frontier Mission Fellowship.
Trained as a civil engineer, linguist, cultural anthropologist and Presbyterian minister, he describes himself as a "Christian social engineer." Working through the William Carey International University and the U.S. Center for World Mission, which he founded, he is producing a new generation of Christian message carriers, some native, ready to venture out to places with such ready-to-be-ministered flocks as Muslim converts to Christianity and African Christians with heretical beliefs. Says Winter: "It's this movement, not the formal Christian church, that's growing. That's our frontier."
An abundance of information is available at ralphwinter.org, including a timeline of "milestone events" and an extensive autobiographical account of his engagement with modern missions and missiology.
Also worth reading: Pastor John Piper's personal tribute to Winter. "His vision of the advance of the gospel was breathtaking," writes Piper, calling Winter's emphasis on unreached peoples "globally seismic in the transformation of missions."
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His vision for world evangelization was "breathtaking" and his influence "globally seismic."
Veteran missiologist Ralph D. Winter passed away last Wednesday, May 20. (Hat tips to @jhgrantjr and @edstetzer for alerting us via Twitter.)
According to the US Center for World Mission website, Winter died peacefully at home in Pasadena, California, "surrounded by three of his four daughters, his wife Barb, and a few friends."
Winter had been battling cancer and had been weakened by radiation treatments. He was 84.
In 2005, Winter was named by Time magazine as one of America's 25 most influential evangelicals. His speech at the 1974 Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization is credited with focusing evangelical mission activity on "unreached people groups."
Time commented:
Even at 80, Winter generates new strategies from his California-based Frontier Mission Fellowship.
Trained as a civil engineer, linguist, cultural anthropologist and Presbyterian minister, he describes himself as a "Christian social engineer." Working through the William Carey International University and the U.S. Center for World Mission, which he founded, he is producing a new generation of Christian message carriers, some native, ready to venture out to places with such ready-to-be-ministered flocks as Muslim converts to Christianity and African Christians with heretical beliefs. Says Winter: "It's this movement, not the formal Christian church, that's growing. That's our frontier."
An abundance of information is available at ralphwinter.org, including a timeline of "milestone events" and an extensive autobiographical account of his engagement with modern missions and missiology.
Also worth reading: Pastor John Piper's personal tribute to Winter. "His vision of the advance of the gospel was breathtaking," writes Piper, calling Winter's emphasis on unreached peoples "globally seismic in the transformation of missions."
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This interesting documentary is part of the Day of Discovery television series produced by the RBC Ministries.This interesting documentary is part of the Day of Discovery television series produced by the RBC Ministries.
