The Anti-Manichaeist

I was visiting Michael Kaspar’s travelblog when I found a link to the website of Operation World. Operation World has webpages that are full of information on different countries and are meant to be prayer guides for those countries. Today’s country is New Zealand. New Zealand’s description reminds me some of Sweden in terms of the problems they face with growing secularism and declining church attendance and how issues like homosexuality are causing serious divisions within the church. It also reminds me of Sweden in terms of the praises for the commitment of evangelical Christians to sending out missionaries.

I was also checking out their prayer pages for Iran and Israel. Iran seems like a country that would have a lot of potential for change if the religious leaders were to lose some power, but I suppose that would require a curtailment of their oil revenue. In general, the years of religious rule have made things worse than they were under the Shah and so Islam seems to have lost some of its luster in many people’s eyes. In Israel, there likewise is a need to find a way to undermine the disproportionate political influence exerted by the ultraorthodox Jews who censor the rights of reform/conservative/messianic Jews to reach out to the largely secular/humanistic Jewish population of Israel. I think that if there is a way the UN could pressure Israel into changing its voting system into a hybrid between its current proportonal system(like what Britain has) and the US’s majority-rules system that this would reduce the political sway of ultra-orthodox Judaism, which would help the peace process and open up Israel more for the sharing of the gospel. The more I read about ultra-orthodox Judaism, the less I like it. I think it would definitely improve Christian witness to other Jewish groups if we helped to trim their collective political influence as a group.

In my recent studies, I’ve often seen how political change (or the lack of needed changes) has seriously helped or hurt the spread of Christianity. The Swedish Baptists initially were much aligned with the Swedish Unionist movement. It probably was necessary to support political and economic change to clear the way for religious change and freedom in Sweden. This is because the state church was an arm of the state. Universal membership in the church was considered the basis for nat’l unity and identical with citizenship. However, at one point the Swedish Baptists stopped getting involved with politics altogether and the Swedish Unionist movement went on to become the ruling aggressively secular Social Democrat party. Now the Baptists are a small minority in Sweden. They are seriously confronted by the pervasive secularism and paganism in their country. One can only ponder how history might have turned out differently if they had remained involved in politics.

Anyways, I’m thankful that there are young Christians like Michael who has committed to assisting and learning from George Verwer of Operation Mobilization. I met Verwer and Kaspar when I was in Sweden and reviewed a dvd/speech by Verwer on the Seven Global Scourges. I was impressed by Verwer’s willingness to learn and adapt in his ministry, including caring about human rights along with more traditional forms of ministry in the 2/3rds world. He didn’t have to speak of authentic or inauthentic teloses with complicated reformed political theology like James K.A. Smith does. He bases his concern and willingness to deal with supporting some political reforms on the simple need for Christians to love their neighbors as described by Jesus in his parable of the good Samaritan.

dlw