I’ve a lot of time for Alive magazine. But I note the phrase “Bible believing Christians”. By their own admission, not everyone who calls themselves Christian is included. And this is valid, Jesus said that not everyone who calls themselves a Christian really acknowledges Him, and therefore will not be acknowledged by Him when it matters. But there’s a problem here. Who is to judge in the meantime, and how?

And I’ve also a lot of time for OM and WEC, and in particular for the brillaint publication “Operation World” with which they both have a connection, and which quotes similar figures about the state of Christianity in the world. These figures are interesting and useful, but they need to be kept in context.

In the 1980s I spent about four months total in Europe, three of them in France. While there I attended as many churches as I could, where my French was (generally) just adequate to follow the services (which were often in very funny dialects and did my spoken French no good at all… but I had already passed the oral component back in Australia fortunately, which is another story).

Some time after return to Australia I bought my first copy of Operation World. What I found there was completely different to what I had seen for myself. It told no lies, but it did not for example count any the Roman Catholics of France as Christians (Allan’s point again). It was quite open about this, but phrased in such a way as to give a very different perspective to what I got by actually being there.

The Evangelical churches were in crisis all right. In one I attended I was at 32 less than half the age of the second youngest person there, and none of them seemed to have much vision or future. But parts of the Roman Catholic church were thriving.

At Sacre Coeur in Paris I struck up a conversation with a monk handing out tracts in French, English and Japanese. When he found that I was a Christian he excused himself as he was the only brother there that day who spoke any Japanese, and I was already in his view “saved” but the Japanese tourists were not.

I asked him for some French tracts which he offered a little reluctantly, but then I asked could I have just two identical because I wanted to have a copy to keep in case the person I gave the first to rang or wrote to me (“un pour moi, un pour donner”, I remember that). As soon as he realised that I was an active evangelist and that the tract was for me to use not just to keep as a linguistic sample, he enthusiastically began deciding which were the best for me to use with my still very limited French and insisted I take several, which I did later find very helpful. There was nothing in them that posed any problem to me as a protestant. I felt we parted mutually encouraged. (But I was painfully aware that it was mainly his English that had crossed the cultural barrier and not my French!)

At Bourges there was a glass case in the cathedral with a poster that read “Savez-vous qu’il y a des Chretiens Vivant a Bourges” and gave some phone numbers and times for prayer and cell group meetings. That literally means “Do you know that there are Christians living in Bourges” but there are two very French jeux des mots in it that are the key to its real meaning. A better translation might be “It’s very important for you to know that there are real Christians in Bourges”. Neither translation is at all adequate, it’s a brilliant heading that combines both meanings and is very culturally apt.

And for that poster to be in the glass case in the cathedral, the bishop was one of them, with a vision for community and for evangelism. And so it proved.

In short, there was a lot going on in France in 1984 that Operation World did not acknowledge. And I expect there still is. And there is a lot of history behind all of this. Some of my own ancestors were French huguenots.

Food for thought: If we find it this hard to assess and understand what’s happening in our own religion, and in countries that are culturally and linguistically very similar to our own, is it any wonder if we sometimes misinterpret what’s happening in Islam?

I love the American evangelicals, whose influence is obvious in the various NIV Study Bibles, in Operation World, and in the Australian “Alive” magazine. But beware of their world view. That’s not to say beware as in “reject”, just beware as in “be aware”. It’s a bit blinkered at times. Assess the assessor.

Jesus said that the world would judge us by how we love each other, and that he’d himself judge us by how we act towards the helpless. Faith is behind these actions. The idea of us judging each other, by theology or otherwise, is a lot less clear. That, in a nutshell, is my own theology. It’s based on my reading the Bible and accepting its authority. Is it evangelical? I don’t know, nor frankly care.

I do hope and believe it is Christian. Nothing more nor less.

A netfriend