Review of Miraculous Movements by Jerry Trousdale

 This is a story that more Christians need to know.  Even though the church has always interacted with Islam since the 7^th century, our interactions have rarely resulted in anything even remotely resembling a Jesus movement within that group.  But today, this is beginning to change in a small but not insignificant way.

  Despite the atrocities of a few, the chaos in the Middle-East, the “sabre rattling” rhetoric of unbalanced leaders, and the retrogressive policies of the Taliban, God’s Son Jesus Christ is reaching out to Muslims and drawing them in to a relationship with Himself.  So reports Jerry Trousdale, a pastor and Christian disciple-maker, in his book Miraculous Movements.  Admittedly, the majority of the stories in this book occur in sub-Saharan Africa as opposed to the heartlands of Islamic culture in the Middle East, but there is a significant movement happening in the world today where Muslims are being touched by Jesus and are leaving Islam to form their own communities of Christian faith.  This book outlines the experiences of many different missionaries (usually African) who have been called to reach out to Muslims.  Though the stories are diverse, they often start with key people in the Muslim community encountering Jesus in a dream and receiving instructions from Him to study more closely the Qu’ran’s passages about who He is, or sometimes a direct command to listen to a Christian teacher’s message.  Other stories feature a “power encounter” where the Gospel is preached and then confirmed with a undeniable miracle which opens the heart of the community to learn more about the Gospel.

The stories of this book are quite riveting and the claim is made that over 500,000 Muslim background believers have come to faith in this movement of God.  That might seem like an exaggerated claim, but in comparison to the world total of Muslims, this is a calling forth of holy remnant more than religious conquest.  Beyond the testimonies, I greatly appreciate the style of mission work that is being advocated in this work.  Instead of Gospel messages and a call to immediate conversion, missioners go out and tell stories to their listeners over a period of time that include the entire scope of the Bible from Creation to Christ.  The Bible is studied and discussed with an eye to the principle that “if this is a book from God, how should I respond and live by what I am learning?”  It is a longer, more holistic approach, but it results in disciples as opposed to merely converts.  While I’m not certain such an approach would work as well in our fast-paced, media saturated, and secularized culture, it seems to be well suited and bearing fruit in the regions it is being practiced in.  The author does advocate that Christians in the west not indulge in hatred of Muslims (even though the specter of terrorism is real) but rather devote themselves to intercessory prayer that this movement would increase and the Lord would call out more laborers into the harvest.  An exciting and informative read and truly an invitation to pray that is compelling.

God’s Continent: Christianity, Islam, and Europe’s Religious Crisis by Philip Jenkins

It is the year 2074. Silver Jubilee celebrations are planned for the month of Ramadan to the delight of the citizens in Londonistan. In Paris-al-Alwah, the Sharia law courts continue their long docket of cases against homosexuals, while Christians gather in front of the mosque of Notre Dame to pray and silently protest the loss of their church. Meanwhile, Rome continues to stand as an empty ruin as the city was rendered uninhabitable by a powerful dirty bomb that was set off in the Vatican several years ago. These, and other dire ‘what-if?’ scenarios often crowd the pages and talking points of people concerned about Europe’s future in the 21^st century. But then Philip Jenkins has to come along with another one of his well-researched and thoughtful books and ruin the apocalyptic party. In God’s Continent: Christianity, Islam, and Europe’s Religious Crisis, Jenkins doesn’t say any of this couldn’t happen or even that it shouldn’t. In point of fact, Europe is wealthy, increasingly secular, and so hedonistic, that it is committing suicide by demography. On top of this, the nations of Europe identify more racially than nationally which means for the most part they are adrift as far as having any core values or things they would fight and die for as a people. Given these factors, should we be surprised that the large and vocal Muslim immigrant population of Europe is slowly and inexorably moving in to take over in the coming decades? And if Europe is so culturally sick, wouldn’t it be best that she live by her own value system and be euthanized? But this is only part of the story of God’s Continent. According to Jenkins there are some other factors that need to be considered. First, Muslim immigration is relatively new (since the 1950’s). Families most likely to immigrate are younger and more energetic, and are likely to have children that fill local schools which makes people feel like they are being overrun. In reality, immigrant communities generally have a dropping birthrate the longer they live in a host culture especially if the cost of living is extremely expensive. Another factor ignored by many is that Europe has a lot of other immigrants also coming in from Asia and Africa and these are not Muslim but vibrant Christian believers. The empty state-run Churches of Europe belie the fact that immigrant churches are growing by leaps and bounds and are evangelizing and revitalizing the ancient faith that came to them from European missionaries in the 19^th century. Quite apart from this are spontaneous revival movements occurring within the more traditional Anglican, Protestant, and Catholic denominations. Certainly another dimension to this is Muslim demands are making European leaders and people wake up to the reality that if they are doing cartwheels to accommodate this one group, why aren’t they doing more to protect the future of their majority population? The irony of all this is that Europe for decades has been almost prideful of her secularism and toleration of amorality, and yet despite their best efforts to remove God from the continent, their most consuming problem in the coming decades will be religious. Apparently Europe may be done with God but God is certainly not done with Europe.

The Lost History of Christianity : The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia----and How It Died

Philip Jenkins has been writing about World Christianity for some time now and his message is both grim and encouraging. The Western “heartland” of Christianity (Europe and North America) is fading and dying while at the same time the faith of Jesus Christ is exploding in the Southern Hemisphere and East Asia. In his newest offering Jenkins chronicles the forgotten history of Christianity in what we call today the Middle-East. The History of Eastern Christianity is not so much forgotten as it has just been neglected in favor of the Western spiritual history which was built on the ruins of the Roman Empire and transformed a bunch of barbarian tribes into the Christendom which became the nations of Europe. But concurrent with the Western story is the equally interesting story of how Christianity flourished in places like Persia, Iraq, Armenia, Georgia, Syria, Turkey, Arabia, Egypt and North Africa. These groups sent missionaries to places like China and India, long before the Jesuits and other western missionaries arrived. In terms of Bible translation and monasteries, the East was far ahead of Europe by every metric. It was a golden age of the Church where Christianity flourished in terms of numbers, influence, and architecture. Which begs the question, if things were so good, why has Christianity all but vanished in the Middle East in favor of Islam? There were a multitude of factors all related to the rise of Islam, but equally so there were demographic and political factors that also played into the long decline of the Christian community. In the case of North Africa, Christianity largely disappeared because it was the religion of expatriot Romans who fled when the region came under Muslim control. In many cases people converted to Islam not by force, but because they saw it as a new revelation from God and in its early years Muslim doctrine had a greater kinship to Judeo-Christian thought. I think the most sobering lesson Jenkins brings out in the book is that the Church of the East relied too heavily on its political alliances and married its liturgical forms to a prosperous economy that fell out underneath them. As most of us know friends and money can disappear in a night, but the mistake the Eastern church made was not acknowledging this and adjusting to the new reality they found themselves in. This is something we in the Western church of today would be wise to consider. Our reality has changed but to change with it seems to be a task we may be putting off for a day when it is too late.