THUS SPAKETH THE "TRUMPET OF DOOM" (Guess Who)::

That's the point. They are doing just fine without us. They in fact are doing far better than we are. Europe is now pagan and moving toward empire. The United States, culturally speaking, is mostly pagan, with just enough Baptist influence on the fringes to keep the illusion alive of "America, the Christian nation." The recent Supreme Court decision abolishing prayer at public high school football games is the essence of it. Baptist religion in the South is manifested at high school football games. Southern Baptists send their children to public high schools because Christian schools charge tuition and do not offer NFL preparatory level football. "73 - 27 - 34 - Darwin - hike!"

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July, 2000

Dear ICE Subscriber:

I have been doing a lot of reading on foreign missions in Asia. I read two biographies of J. Hudson Taylor, the founder of the China Inland Mission (CIM) in 1865. I read Elisabeth Elliot's biography of Amy Carmichael, who in 1905 established an orphanage primarily for children who had been trapped inside India's system of temple prostitution. I read Tony Lambert's 1999 book, CHINA'S CHRISTIAN MILLIONS, published by OMF International, the successor organization to CIM.

In the early 1950's, Western missionaries left Red China. The Chinese government put pressure on the churches, which in turn asked the missionaries to leave. China's churches went through a decade of persecution. Then came the Red Guard movement and the cultural revolution, 1966-76. This almost completely destroyed every trace of Christianity in China.

Today, the biggest revival in Christian history is taking place in China. Lambert estimates that there are 30 million Christians in China now, almost all of them fundamentalist Protestant. The house church movement is the main force for evangelism.

I spoke with a Chinese member of my local church two weeks ago. He had just returned from Beijing. He said the Chinese government has published an estimate of 100 million Christians. Yet just 25 years ago, there was almost no trace of Christianity.

There is no hierarchy over the house churches. They have no formal structure. They have no seminaries. They have almost no Christian literature and precious few Chinese language Bibles. They are cut off from Western Christianity. They are flourishing.

That's the point. They are doing just fine without us. They in fact are doing far better than we are. Europe is now pagan and moving toward empire. The United States, culturally speaking, is mostly pagan, with just enough Baptist influence on the fringes to keep the illusion alive of "America, the Christian nation." The recent Supreme Court decision abolishing prayer at public high school football games is the essence of it. Baptist religion in the South is manifested at high school football games. Southern Baptists send their children to public high schools because Christian schools charge tuition and do not offer NFL preparatory level football. "73 - 27 - 34 - Darwin - hike!"

A Chinese Christian would not know what to make of American Christianity. Taylor and the CIM adopted Chinese dress. They did not attempt to import Western culture into China. There were 6 Protestants in China in 1842. Today, there are tens of millions.

Taylor was never formally ordained. His was a layman's movement. The same is true today of Youth With a Mission, which has over 7,000 missionaries in the field, worldwide. As to how ordination functions in today's house churches, no one can say. But the spectacular growth of house churches has been matched by some form of leadership. We just don't know what it is or how it works.

GOSPEL PLUS

Meanwhile, in the West, the rule is "gospel, plus." Denominations define themselves in terms of traditional practices that are either not emphasized in the Bible or not discussed at all. For Presbyterians, it's gospel, plus seminary. For Episcopalians, it's gospel, plus seminary and liturgy. For Baptists, it's gospel, plus teetotalism. For Lutherans, it's gospel, plus seminary and beer. For Pentecostals, it's gospel, plus raised hands. Each group looks at its defining practice and says, "It's better that the masses go to hell than for us to change."

This has favored the Baptists because their ministers need not attend seminary. It used to favor Methodists, too. There were about 500 Baptist congregations in America in 1780, about the same as Presbyterians. By 1820, there were 20,000, and another 20,000 Methodist congregations. By 1900, it was over 50,000 for each group. Presbyterians had 15,000, but thousands of congregations had no full-time minister. The difference was circuit-riding, 1800 to 1840. Methodist ministers were barely paid, and Baptists supported themselves by tentmaking. Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Episcopalians did not go West. After four years of college and three years of seminary, reading Latin textbooks, they were not going to work out West for free. They stayed east of the mountains. They surrendered the West to the fundamentalists. Gospel, plus.

It's the same today. Conservative Presbyterian churches bottom-fish on disenchanted Baptists who finally figure out that there is more to Christianity than Sunday church and Friday night football. Presbyterian bottom- fishing has been going on for two centuries. The Baptists get the gospel to the masses, and the Presbyterians get the leftovers. This will always be true. As you go up the spiritual food chain, you get more and more formal education requirements for pastors, and slower church growth. The Presbyterians know this, but they never discuss it in public.

As for Eastern Orthodoxy, their view is gospel, plus 1500-year-old liturgy. That was Roman Catholicism's view, too, until Vatican II. The debate was over which dead language God had mandated: Ancient Greek or Latin. When the American Catholic Church abandoned the old liturgy in the mid-1960's, it had 50,000 seminarians. Today, there are 5,000, and a third of these are training for one of the orders, not for service in a local church. Catholics abandoned their liturgy, much of their theology, and their uniqueness. The result is the decimation of their leadership. Now they have gospel, plus ministerial celibacy and a vow of poverty -- not popular ideas any more.

Eventually, the "plus" erodes the gospel inside a church and cripples its missionary efforts. This is what we have seen for half a millennium. The Germans' worship of certification through higher education, which began in the Catholic Church and which Luther followed, has led to the liberalization of the state church and most of the others. A highly educated German Christian I know wanted to start a mission church in Germany. He got the promise of financial support from a tiny Scottish splinter denomination. But there was a catch: psalms only. He told them, "You will not win the hearts of Germans, who have been raised on the hymns of Luther." Then too bad for the Germans. "Sing only psalms or you can all go to hell" was the implied answer. He eventually got support from a tiny Episcopalian splinter denomination.

The accent is on "tiny."

TURNING THINGS AROUND

Do things ever get turned around? Spain turned around the Islamic invasion, but it took from 732 to 1492. This effort made the Spaniards the toughest soldiers in the West. They subdued Latin America.

What about turning things around by a revival? America's two Great Awakenings, 1730-50, and 1800-40, did turn around the Western sections of the U.S. But the revivalists could not hold their ground. Culturally, the Unitarians won in the Northeast -- where the money and political power were -- and the Baptists won in the Southwest. They shared their victory with representatives of the national culture (humanistic) and Freemasons. Today, Mexican immigration being what it is, and Mexican- American birth rates being what they are, in a century, all this will be different. The Supreme Court will have to ban bi-lingual prayers at high school soccer matches.

Things rarely get turned around in life. They do get changed. Something new replaces something old. Occasionally, this is something better. The spiritual reform movement that Luther began became Protestantism. It did not directly reform Catholicism. It did not turn around Catholicism.

We cannot go back again. The world we have lost is lost forever. Ozzie and Harriet will not grace our TV screens again. Mr. Ed has nothing new to say. Mary Tyler Moore has ceased bubbling. So has Marlo Thomas.

Whatever is going on in China is not an extension of the West, with its competing versions of gospel, plus. Chinese Christianity will no doubt have its own gospel, plus. But at least it will be something new. There will be an opportunity to see how other patterns of Christianity work. Chinese churches have a doctrine of "on toward Jerusalem." They want to pioneer the evangelism of Asia. More power to them. Most unreached people are in the path of China.

Asian Christianity will develop its own insights. It will bring its own recipes to the table of the Lord. The gospel will have an Asian accent culturally. Chinese Christians are American Christians with chopsticks. Indian Christians are not English Christians with curry.

I believe in foreign missions. There are about five billion souls or more in need of the gospel -- not the gospel, plus; just the gospel. The population explosion is real in the Third World. These people need God's healing grace. We must pray for this.

It took over two centuries for Protestants to get foreign missions operational. The first Protestant foreign missionaries were Count Zinzendorf's Moravians in the mid- eighteenth century. They initially went out to the slaves in the English islands in the Caribbean. English Baptist William Carey went to India at the end of the century. Taylor went to China two generations later. It took time.

China's churches are getting ready to pioneer the next wave. They have bootstrapped themselves; now they are ready to show other Asians how to do this under conditions of persecution.

What has all this got to do with developing Christian economic theory? Not much. I am doing my best to discover biblical principles of economics. But I am filtering this through the Western academic discipline known as economic science -- the first systematically agnostic social science. I think Christian economics will someday be applied worldwide. But in the first stages of evangelism, Christian economics is not central. Its relevance will come later, when churches begin to challenge the culture around them.

This is a long-term investment. I thank all of you who have supported ICE's work. It has kept my efforts alive.

The latest book on ICE's Web site is SACRIFICE AND DOMINION: AN ECONOMIC COMMENTARY ON ACTS. You will be happy to learn that it is short: only nine chapters.

I have moved on to the Pauline epistles. I have written three chapters on Romans. This will take a while.

Gary North

-- Anon (anon@anon.anon), July 12, 2000

Answers

uh, Gary, not all Baptists who get a clue theologically become Presbyterians, many of them become Reformed Baptists.

-- Scar Gary is now scared of Baptists (gimme@a.break), July 12, 2000.

GOD KNOW,S ,HOW TO DELIVER=his children from=FALSE-CHRISTIANITY!! HIS-SHEEP, KNOW=THE GOOD SHEPHERD,S VOICE!! the SIMPLE GOSPEL=SAVES!--RELIGION-KILL,S!

-- al-d. (dogs@zianet.com), July 12, 2000.

B-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-R-R-R-R-I-N-G !

GARY IS ENTITLED TO LIVE HIS LIFE AS HE WISHES CREEPER, WHY MUST YOU SEEK TO DESTROY OTHERS? ARE YOU SATAN, OR THE ANTICHRIST?

-- (BIG@TEXT.MAN), July 13, 2000.