It’s hard for me to wrap my mind around how my educated friends and educated church leaders can’t see that differences between Islam and Christianity are profoundly greater than differences between various Christian groups. Have they not read the history of Islamic conquest? Can they not observe the differences in today’s world between countries dominated by Islam and Western countries founded on Christian and Enlightenment values? Are they not aware of the widespread problems with migrants assaulting women in Germany, one of the latest victims being the daughter of a European official, who was raped and drowned? Have they not heard about the sharia law courts Muslim immigrants have created in England and the schools where Muslim children are taught barbaric practices?
Last year, I joined a class at my church sponsored by the Crescent Project, a Christian ministry founded to share the gospel with Muslims globally. In some respects, it’s an organization I’m happy to support. Their efforts seem sincere and helpful in prodding Christians with little previous intercultural experience to step outside their comfort zones. Yet it’s also one of those programs that leads to some Christians becoming so filled with zeal, they develop tunnel vision.
One woman in my class said she used to be afraid when she saw a Muslim at the grocery store, but now, thanks to the class, believes it’s God’s will for Muslims to come to the United States so we can witness to them. I’ve heard this idea expressed elsewhere as well, sometimes with great enthusiasm. God is blessing us, the thinking goes, by bringing Muslims here so we don’t have to travel abroad to reach them.
However, this turns previous concepts of missionary work on their heads. Missions used to be primarily about assuming risks for yourself and perhaps your family as you ventured into unsafe terrain. By endorsing growing rates of Muslim immigration into the United States, Christians are insisting that their neighbors here assume the risks too, all for the convenience of their evangelism programs.
Such rosy pictures can likely be traced partly to the fact that even in many conservative churches today, pastors shy away from discussing evil and the reality that there are people in this world seeking to deceive and destroy. We’ve been marinating in a theology that focuses excessively on grace and inner peace to the exclusion of other parts of the Bible that tell us evil is always on the march.
https://thefederalist.com/2017/01/06/christians-need-stop-naive-muslim-immigration/
Last year, I joined a class at my church sponsored by the Crescent Project, a Christian ministry founded to share the gospel with Muslims globally. In some respects, it’s an organization I’m happy to support. Their efforts seem sincere and helpful in prodding Christians with little previous intercultural experience to step outside their comfort zones. Yet it’s also one of those programs that leads to some Christians becoming so filled with zeal, they develop tunnel vision.
One woman in my class said she used to be afraid when she saw a Muslim at the grocery store, but now, thanks to the class, believes it’s God’s will for Muslims to come to the United States so we can witness to them. I’ve heard this idea expressed elsewhere as well, sometimes with great enthusiasm. God is blessing us, the thinking goes, by bringing Muslims here so we don’t have to travel abroad to reach them.
However, this turns previous concepts of missionary work on their heads. Missions used to be primarily about assuming risks for yourself and perhaps your family as you ventured into unsafe terrain. By endorsing growing rates of Muslim immigration into the United States, Christians are insisting that their neighbors here assume the risks too, all for the convenience of their evangelism programs.
Such rosy pictures can likely be traced partly to the fact that even in many conservative churches today, pastors shy away from discussing evil and the reality that there are people in this world seeking to deceive and destroy. We’ve been marinating in a theology that focuses excessively on grace and inner peace to the exclusion of other parts of the Bible that tell us evil is always on the march.
https://thefederalist.com/2017/01/06/christians-need-stop-naive-muslim-immigration/