The Real Enemy--within Our Own Hearts?
I am old enough to remember when many inside and outside the church railed against communism as "the" threat to Christianity, fearing that spreading Soviet-style domination would bring on the Apocalypse. As we have seen, the Berlin Wall tumbled and the Church had managed to grow even under the most severe Maoist oppression in China.
Meanwhile, in our "Christian" West, many congregations became lax in their attention to the sins of their own people, looking the other way at growing divorce and cohabitation trends, often ignoring social and economic injustice right in their own communities.
The world in 2010 is far different from even 1989, but are we just replacing one straw man with another? With all the controversy around the possibility of a mosque in the heart of New York City, are we losing our focus? Are we too prone to make radical Islam "the" source of all that is evil in our world? Will we forget that Muslims, just like Russian and Chinese and Cuban Communists before them, are also made in God's image? Have we forgotten that God calls us to reach out to members of these groups as individuals in need of his salvation rather than demonizing them as an amorphous group?
Don't get me wrong. I think that Islam is a faith that needs to be countered by the Gospel. However, I also have good friends who have given their lives to reaching out to Muslims in a country from which they were recently ejected. Islam has had a far more terrible effect on their lives than for any of us, yet they love these people with whom they have worked and are still praying for Muslims and continue to work among them in a European country, in a majority Islamic community.
Two articles this morning have brought some of these issues into clearer focus. One points out the need to look at Islam as a religion that might be almost as divided as Protestantism. By trying to gain a better understanding of these differences, we may better be able to reach out, one by one, to those caught in the thrall of this false faith and bring them to the real Gospel. That link is at
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08...inion/17dalrymple.html
The other article is just one more example of the way our "Christian" culture has moved to separate our children from any real understanding of God's real intent for our lives. Most people in this country are still far removed from any direct influence of Islamic teachings in their lives, yet the pornified, materialistic impact of advertising, television and films, and celebrity culture in general assault our kids (and their parents) everywhere from the grocery store check out lanes to the selection of back to school provocative clothes available to pre-teens. This link showed up on my Facebook page today as mothers shared their concerns over the difficulties they were having in finding appropriate clothes for their little daughters to wear at school:
http://gothamist.com/2008/08/1...ing_now_popular_fo.php
One of the first Muslims I got to know several years ago was just as worried as these mothers about the clothing available for her family. Are we not more likely to be able to build bridges to the Muslims in our neighborhoods by showing them that Christians really intent on living out a Biblical worldview are just as concerned with these cultural trends as they are?
Or ARE we as concerned as our Islamic neighbors, or do we tend to just blend in with the rest of our culture on matters of dress, spending choices or viewing patterns?
In the Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn famously noted that, "gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts."
I am not naive enough to think that there is no Islamic threat in this world. However, if we allow ourselves to focus on this one religion--that is, after all, only man-made--do we not give the Adversary great joy by missing the real source of evil?
Meanwhile, in our "Christian" West, many congregations became lax in their attention to the sins of their own people, looking the other way at growing divorce and cohabitation trends, often ignoring social and economic injustice right in their own communities.
The world in 2010 is far different from even 1989, but are we just replacing one straw man with another? With all the controversy around the possibility of a mosque in the heart of New York City, are we losing our focus? Are we too prone to make radical Islam "the" source of all that is evil in our world? Will we forget that Muslims, just like Russian and Chinese and Cuban Communists before them, are also made in God's image? Have we forgotten that God calls us to reach out to members of these groups as individuals in need of his salvation rather than demonizing them as an amorphous group?
Don't get me wrong. I think that Islam is a faith that needs to be countered by the Gospel. However, I also have good friends who have given their lives to reaching out to Muslims in a country from which they were recently ejected. Islam has had a far more terrible effect on their lives than for any of us, yet they love these people with whom they have worked and are still praying for Muslims and continue to work among them in a European country, in a majority Islamic community.
Two articles this morning have brought some of these issues into clearer focus. One points out the need to look at Islam as a religion that might be almost as divided as Protestantism. By trying to gain a better understanding of these differences, we may better be able to reach out, one by one, to those caught in the thrall of this false faith and bring them to the real Gospel. That link is at
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08...inion/17dalrymple.html
The other article is just one more example of the way our "Christian" culture has moved to separate our children from any real understanding of God's real intent for our lives. Most people in this country are still far removed from any direct influence of Islamic teachings in their lives, yet the pornified, materialistic impact of advertising, television and films, and celebrity culture in general assault our kids (and their parents) everywhere from the grocery store check out lanes to the selection of back to school provocative clothes available to pre-teens. This link showed up on my Facebook page today as mothers shared their concerns over the difficulties they were having in finding appropriate clothes for their little daughters to wear at school:
http://gothamist.com/2008/08/1...ing_now_popular_fo.php
One of the first Muslims I got to know several years ago was just as worried as these mothers about the clothing available for her family. Are we not more likely to be able to build bridges to the Muslims in our neighborhoods by showing them that Christians really intent on living out a Biblical worldview are just as concerned with these cultural trends as they are?
Or ARE we as concerned as our Islamic neighbors, or do we tend to just blend in with the rest of our culture on matters of dress, spending choices or viewing patterns?
In the Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn famously noted that, "gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts."
I am not naive enough to think that there is no Islamic threat in this world. However, if we allow ourselves to focus on this one religion--that is, after all, only man-made--do we not give the Adversary great joy by missing the real source of evil?
posted by hl at
6:50 AM
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