Is Christianity a Steady March Forward? — Lucas Hilty

And this was something when we were again, when we were having lunch a couple days ago, we were talking about this, um, and you said, I'm trying to remember, um, this whole idea that that we have about Christianity's steady march forward idea. Uh, but do you want to talk about that a little bit? Uh, explain what you mean by that phrase.

Well, a lot of our historical consciousness, I'm speaking as a Western, as an Anabaptist, and as a young person, um, we we don't have a very rich historical, uh, background to our thinking about missions. And so for us, sometimes we think of of missions as being born with William Carey, Hudson Taylor, you know, wonderful, uh, figures of the faith, by the way.

But, uh, and so we see it advancing first to China, first to India, then to China and throughout Africa. And it's a steady march forward in which the gospel gradually overcomes all obstacles. And at the end, you know, every tribe and nation has been evangelized.

The reality is that in some of these places, such as China, the gospel was there a long time ago. And so we do tend to forget the contributions of the churches of the past. We also tend to forget that faith can be lost. Churches can decline and come to a point where they're no longer vibrant and no longer effective.

And this is part of our story, too. And so when I look at the decline of the churches in the Middle East and elsewhere in the world, you know, it wouldn't be appropriate for me to assign blame or to analyze that, except to realize maybe that sometimes we do tend to measure success in rather earthly terms, even as a church. You know, we have Christian, well, we're as Americans, we look at our, you know, Christian founding principles and so on, and we feel that our nation has been friendly to Christianity and so on. The fact is that maybe identifying too closely with the with the external markers of success, we have so many churches, so many people, and so on.

Maybe that's a mistake. Maybe we shouldn't even make counting noses and counting churches our goal. Maybe we should make it our goal to be faithful to Christ.

It matters how many people come to know him. That matters. But faithfulness and remembering not to get caught up in the allure of the powers of this world. I do really find in this story a sort of warning for me, not that I know exactly what went down and how they why things happened the way they did. But for me, I want I take it as a warning not to embrace an identity with an earthly kingdom or even an ethnic identity too closely. The gospel is is beyond all that. And probably probably we'll come back to Bidas if we if we wave the American flag as Christians too much and identify too much with with an earthly force.

Because the thing about earthly kingdoms is they win and then they lose. And they're certainly not a safe place to trust in. That's a really great point because you can imagine that some of these churches in the East, you know, way back in the day, say, feeling very established, like we've been here for a very long time. This is incredible. It's growing. It's, you know, getting well established. And now we look at those places. You mentioned Afghanistan earlier, you know, as a place where there was a lot of, I guess, a lot it depends on how you define all this. But there was a thriving church. I don't know. Yeah, there was a church there, right?

You know, so who knows how how many sure all of that. But we cannot say that today. That is definitely not the case, um, in the same way, at least, you know, in that particular country of China, some of these other regions, Turkmenistan, um, where really this is one of the things we don't like to talk about maybe as much. Instead of the steady march forward, that was a slow falling, like a decline, you know, in the church, you know, in these places. And that's really sad, you know, and I'm not entirely sure what to do with that. That's kind of painful.

At the risk of of trying to do an end round around that issue, you mentioned China. Of course, there's a thriving church in China today. That's not directly related to the efforts of those early, um, of the Eastern Church, the Syriac-speaking missionaries that came there. So there are there are resurgences. There's hope, um, some of which we haven't seen yet, um, in some of these regions.

But certainly, isn't it isn't it appropriate with some of these stories to weep with those who weep? Just acknowledge that. I was just reading one of the Syriac authors this morning, and he was talking about how we should live together as as though our concerns are one and saying, you know, if somebody sins, we should we should work together. We should consider our own problem. You know, if if a brother in the church gets angry, um, that that's my problem. And we should consider it. And so I even historically, can we look at it that way? Like the Church of the East, the Syrian Orthodox Church, we should weep with them for their losses. And if if some of it has if they haven't perfectly followed Christ at times, that's we're not denouncing them.

We're we're we're considering them in a sense our brothers and we weep with them. That's that's that's not a resolution, but it's something I think about.