EMQ » April–June 2020 » Volume 56 Issue 2
By Robert Blincoe
Littleton, CO: William Carey Library, 2019
270 pages
USD $16.99
Reviewed by Matthew Friedman, professor and program director for intercultural studies, Kingswood University, Sussex, New Brunswick, Canada, and Adjunct Professor at Asbury Theological Seminary.
This present volume is a masterful interweaving of historical and missiological analysis, with an overview of the nineteenth and twentieth century history of mission among Kurdish people. A particular emphasis here is placed on the “Great Experiment” (35–41), in which American and European missionaries sought to reach the Muslim Kurdish and Turkish populations indirectly, by promoting revival among the ancient Neo-Aramaic and Armenian-speaking Christian communities in the region. The attempt was largely unsuccessful, in part due to what Blincoe describes as a “hoarding” of the blessing given to them by the local Christians, and the fierce animosity expressed by the Kurds themselves. Of course, not only were the local Christians reluctant to share their faith with their traditional enemies, but the same Ottoman regulations which prohibited the missionaries from seeking to directly evangelize the Muslim people similarly would have applied to the locals, if they had been inclined to make the attempt.
While the regulations became more varied in the twentieth century following the demise of the Ottoman Empire, in Blincoe’s telling, the inclination of the local Christian people to dedicate their lives to imparting the Gospel to the Kurdish people was not forthcoming. In addition to the aforementioned difficulties themselves, there was also the understandable resentment felt by many of these Christians in response to centuries of mistreatment and oppression by their Muslim neighbors. That they have held onto their faith in the face of such hostility for centuries itself presents an important lesson for us, though this is not the focus here.
This then brings us to one of the most valuable contributions of this book to the broader field of applied history of missions. As implied in the rather McGavran-influenced title of the volume, the often facile manner in which some have suggested that the evangelization of the most unreached peoples in the world should be done “by the nationals” often misses a crucial element highlighted by Blincoe’s research here: We need to be clear in defining what we mean by “nationals” in any given case. This is brought to the fore in the preface by the author’s recounting of his own experience in entering the area in the 1990s (xiii); although there was a Christian population, they were ethnically and linguistically distinct from the Kurds, as well as in a historical and cultural adversarial stance toward them. When we seek to work “through the national church,” sometimes we need to recognize that this may not be the best solution, especially in the initial stages of such a work.
One final word of critique: This is a valuable book and something of a masterpiece of historiography, and as such, its wider availability through William Carey Library is to be welcomed. That noted, however, there is virtually nothing in this book which has been updated in this “second edition,” not even statistics or lists of Bible translations into the Kurdish language. There is nothing about the radical shifts on the ground since the Gulf Wars of the early 2000s, nor of the rise (and hopefully permanent fall) of ISIS in the region, who specifically targeted regional Christians (as well as Yazidis and some dissenting Muslims) for rape, enslavement, and death. There is nothing concerning more recent breakthroughs which have taken place among Kurdish people in some places. It is thus my own hope that a future edition of this valuable book might include these crucial updates, not only for the sake of statistics and history, but in deepening our understanding of what will necessarily be involved in seeing Gospel witness established among all peoples of this region.
For Further Reading:
Hoskins, Daniel Gene. 2017. Conversion Narratives in Context: Muslims Turning to Christ in
post-Soviet Central Asia. Portland, OR: EMS.
Knapp, Andreas. 2017. The Last Christians: Stories of Persecution, Flight, and Resilience in the Middle East. Walden, NY: Plough.
