One of most discouraging books I ever read is The Lost History of Christianity by Philip Jenkins. I found the book discouraging because it tells the sad story of the Christian church in places where the church started and thrived. The book’s subtitle says it all, “The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa and Asia—and how it died.”
I don’t know about you, but I don’t like to think about the church dying. Our American mindset tends to be one of victory and dominion, not failure. Yet, we need to think about the reality that in the very places where the Christian church started and thrived the church is now mostly non-existent. In fact, Jenkins says, people in those places, in our day see Christianity as something being sneakily and dangerously imported from the West!
Why did Christianity die in the places where it was born and thrived for a millenium? In Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria, and many other places in the wider Middle East, Islam systematically decimated Christianity. That is a generalization, of course, and there are other factors at play, which Jenkins does an excellent job of describing. Largely, though, Islam wiped out Christianity in the Middle East.
When you think about that you might wonder, as I do, why God allowed that to happen. Was it the Christians’ fault? Like Israel in the Old Testament, did the Christians rebel against God and thus God allowed them to face the consequences, very similarly to how he allowed Babylon to invade and decimate Israel? We can’t answer that question. We’ll never know until that day in eternity when we can ask Jesus. What we can conclude, however, is that God doesn’t promise us worldly success, at least as “success” is so often defined in our American culture. The lack of a promise of success can be hard for us to swallow.
Instead, I find it much more helpful to attempt to answer the question, “What is success in God’s eyes?” We’re going to try to answer that question next week on the blog. Jesus, in John 15:1-10, teaches his disciples a powerful parable that gets at the heart of success and how to achieve godly success. Over the years, as I’ve studied Jesus’ many teachings, this one, in my opinion, is a top five most important. I look forward to talking about it with you starting Monday.
Engaging Scripture 