George F. Sabra, professor of Systematic Theology at the Near East School of Theology, wrote an article entitled “Christian Mission in the Wake of the Arab Spring” for the summer edition of the International Bulletin for World Mission. His basic premises are that evangelical Protestant missions must support and cooperate with the traditional Christian churches of the region, that their mission to the Middle East today should seek to “have a say in the future of Islam”, and that “so called liberal or cultural Protestantism actually helped transfer many Muslims to become open-minded, tolerant, and other-accepting persons who could co-exist with Christians peacefully.”
The record of nearly 2 centuries of evangelical missions seeking to cooperate with the ancient churches of the region has—to put it mildly—not bore much fruit in terms of seeing Muslims come to faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour. So why continue with a partnership which has proved to be both divisive and non-fruitful? Would it not make more sense for evangelicals to minister directly to Muslims if the goal is the formation of a church of Muslim background believers?
And has liberal/cultural Protestantism really made “many” Muslims become open-minded, tolerant and other-accepting? How does one quantify and measure that? What does “many” mean? Where are the fruits of all this supposed open-mindedness, tolerance and other-acceptingness? Isn’t the truth of the matter that the Muslim Middle East has entered a religious dark age? In fact Turkey’s Islamist former president Abdullah Gul warned the members of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation at a meeting in Mecca last August that the Muslim world today ran the risk of going through what Europe experienced during the the Middle Ages! (Hurriyet Daily News, Sept. 9, 2014).
And how is Protestantism supposed to have a say in the future of Islam when many Muslims are questioning their own religion in light of the brutality they experience from their co-religionists? Would it not be sounder missiological praxis for the church to live, in Hauerwas and Willimon’s memorable phrase, as “resident aliens” whose “otherness” is of such a nature that those looking on can see that God is at work among and through them?
PP