EMQ

In a March morning last year, colorful flags streamed down the center aisle of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church carried by delegates celebrating the establishment of Evangelism Explosion International (EE) ministries in all 211 nations of the world.

When Mustafa Kemal Ata-turk founded Turkey’s modern republic 74 years ago, the jury was out on whether a secular democracy could long survive in a predominantly Muslim nation. It still is.

Roland Allen, in Missionary Methods: St. Paul’s or Ours? looks over the panorama of churches established by Paul with wonder and incredulity: wonder that so many growing indigenous churches over such a broad territory could be established in just 10 years; and incredulity that so many in missions today consider the feat impossible to repeat.

By intelligently transcending cultural barriers rather than being shut out by them, Christian health care workers can introduce basic changes in non-Christian belief systems and practices.

Many mission agencies, including my own (CBInternational), want to send more missionaries to the frontiers. But relatively few American missionaries are doing evangelistic, church-planting work among the world’s 3.8 billion non-Christians, followers of non-Christian religions, living in non-Christian lands.

In a sense, the apostle Paul played and planned like Michael Jordan.

This is a side bar to the article “Is Planting Churches in the Muslim World ‘Mission Impossible?'” in the April, 1997 issue of EMQ.

Visit Beijing’s Tiananmen Square and you’ll see an enormous digital clock. It proclaims to the world how many days, hours, minutes, and seconds are left until Hong Kong reverts to Chinese sovereignty on July 1, 1997. While there is no corresponding clock in the prosperous, freewheeling British colony of 6.3 million people, alarm bells have been ringing for some time.