REFLECTIONS FROM THE EDITOR KRISTYN KOMARNICKI
Obedient to the Point of Death When planning this issue of PRISM, I initially set out to look at the persecuted church in Asia.What do Christians in the East face when they gather to worship and study God’s word or simply live out their day-to-day lives? What is it like carrying the cross in their various cultures and political systems? What obstacles do they face? What courage and faith is required of them? As I expected, stories of hardship abound. From Turkey (Europe’s doorway to the East) to China, Christians are in the minority and in many places suffer discrimination at best and genocide at worst. In China and India, pastors are jailed and churches destroyed. Christian women in Burma tell of giving birth in government hospitals, where attendants would cut but not tie the umbilical cord, then place the newborn just out of its helpless mother’s reach until it died. And we can only scratch the surface of the problem here; many Asian countries not even mentioned in this issue—like Indonesia and North Korea—maintain egregious human rights reputations, particularly in the area of religious freedom, and these oppressive governments must be held accountable. But in exploring the persecuted church, other questions soon arose. Research on the church in Asia inevitably brings up the matter of missions. What about when Christians are offensive? Who is spreading the good news of Christ’s salvation in these places and by what methods? While the suffering church needs and deserves our prayers and advocacy, the church itself—whether foreign-missions-driven or thoroughly indigenous—also needs to be held accountable for how it functions and
grows. In some cases, Christians are using less than scrupulous methods to preach the gospel, a self-defeating proposition if ever there was one. When Christians exploit poverty by offering food or other aid as a lure for potential converts rather than as a gift of love and service in Christ’s name; when they take a head count at a prayer meeting in a remote rural area and then claim each as a new convert for Christ, yet leave the fledgling “new believers” with no oversight or ongoing support; when one denomination claims an exclusive version of Christian truth and denigrates or even works against believers of other denominations; when Christian faith is preached as inextricably linked to Western culture and its proponents require adopting outside expressions of faith rather than seeking to employ indigenous expressions—these all constitute abuses of the Great Commission. No matter how good the intentions, an ends-justify-the-means approach to evangelism only ends up hindering the cause of Christ and hurting untold numbers of God’s children. And this discussion raises yet a third issue: While demanding religious freedom (and the respect that implies) for Christians, how prepared are we— whether as the corporate body of Christ or as individual believers—to offer freedom and respect to people of other faiths? It’s easy to say that religious freedom is a universal human right, but what does that delicate balance between evangelism and respecting another person’s faith look like in practice? As we pray for the liberation of our brothers and sisters around the world who suffer for their faith in Christ, let us also pray that God will reveal to us how he wants us to treat our brothers and sisters of other faiths, not just those abroad but more specifically (and perhaps most poignantly and importantly) those who live next door to us. We want respect, but do we know how to respect those we minister to, whether at home or abroad? PRISM 2008
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I suspect that the secret to doing this well begins by recognizing God’s call on us to two unpopular things: humility and obedience. Fortunately for us, humility was clearly modeled by Jesus in the incarnation. As Paul wrote to the Philippians,“Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness” (Phil. 2:5-7). What does evangelism that humbles and empties and puts us in the shoes of another look like? Second, obedience—not results— is what we need to focus on. Moving people’s hearts and minds is God’s job, not ours. In Acts 8-10 we see three dramatic conversions to faith, each requiring God’s people to obey seemingly outrageous instructions.The Ethiopian official, Saul the terrorist, and Cornelius the Roman cop: God prepared each unbeliever and presented them ripe for salvation—all the Christians had to do was show up—to chase down a foreign chariot, to go to a sworn enemy’s house, to travel to Caesarea and meet a member of the oppressive regime.What instructions are you and I being called to heed? Having humbled ourselves, what does evangelism that is “obedient to the point of death” (Phil. 2:8) look like? As usual, I’m offering you more questions than answers! You’ll find plenty to wrestle with in this issue—persecution, missions, evangelism, religious freedom.Please write (kristyn@esa-online. org) and share your thoughts and experiences on these topics.And let us remind each other that through our salvation, our humility, and our obedience, we await the day when “every knee shall bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Phil.2:10-11). What a day that will be! ■