Islam's Example and the Regrets of a Former Missions Major

So, I'm now reading a book that is making a useful comparrison/contrast between Christianity and Islam. It's mostly Christian authors, but they are definitely on the ecumenical side, so they are not concerned with proving Christianity right; they are simply offering up important distinctions and misconceptions that each religion tends to make toward the other. The guy presenting the Muslim viewpoint doesn't give any biographical info on himself, but sounds to me like he is more secular than anything else, which in light of the respect he still shows to both religions is refreshing.

Anyway he says some very interesting things in his concluding remarks.

It seems to me that Islam's weakness lies just where its strength lies: in its success. . . 'The Church beneath the Cross' is barely conceivable in Muslim categories. . . . [as] the first Islamic community met with success, [this] became part of the basic model. The more reality diverges from this, the more believers turn back toward this model.

Christian don't typically like to acknowledge the success Islam enjoyed in its early years. Within a hundred years of its conception, Islam's growth had superseded Christianity and any of the great empires of the past. Only once Christianity invaded North and South America did it return to being the world's predominate religion. Also, in a different form of success, we can point that long before the European Enlightenment, the Islamic world was paving the way for science, math (they invented algebra after all), naval exploration, commerce, and philosophy. A book I finished not to long ago pointed out that Europeans were truly the intellectual inferiors to the Muslim world until a guy named Thomas Aquinas came on to the scene and offered up works which set the trajectory that led to the Reformation and in many ways the Enlightenment as well. Oh . . . and, his works can be said plainly to have been offered in response to the 'intellectual threat' of Islam.

Within two hundred years of conception, Islam spread from Morraco and Spain, across North Africa, the whole of the Middle East, all of Arabia, and the whole of Central Asia, down to the plains of India, where it skipped into the Indonesian archipeligo. It's success is nothing short of phenomenal, and as a Christian I must admit, it is hard not to agree it was God-ordained. The same author offered one reason for Islam's success was its practicallity, and its "missionaries".

[Islam's] missionaries were the merchants . . . The merchant, or modern businessman, makes particularly effective use of his social prestige; he is richer than most people, and he represents a higher level of culture. And a businessman never demands the impossible. Islam is spread by lay apostles, which most likely gives it an advantage over Christianity, which has a hard time explaining the discrepancy between the message presented by its missionaries and the behavior of its lay people - not to mention the enormous burden of colonialism.

I definitely would say it is nothing short of amazing that a religion could spread such a staggering stretch of geography with no professional missionaries. With little time given for inculturation and contextualization. With little help from governments, Muslims managed to spread their faith across the world in less than two-hundred years. One obvious reason the author gave was that it amounted to a simple, practical orthopraxy for the lay-believers life. Christians can say all they want to about law, but to a first-generation believer, law is a good thing. In the process of turning from paganism to monotheism their has to be some structure to follow, or syncretism becomes the inevitable fact. In turning to Allah, the convert had only to recite the shahada, and remember the five pillars, and he was thereby in submission to Allah.

Contrast that with the convoluted mess of Christian doctrine concerning the Trinity, attonement, sin, grace, faith, works and righteousness. Contrast it with the confusing, vague ideas of Christian morality, and the historical nature of European missionaries, which it seems more often than not, simply projected the sins they were most ashamed of onto the indigenous population and called them to repent.

The other advantage of Islam was the lack of professionalism: spread instead by merchant apostles. Typically the natives receiving a Christian missionary had to observe one example portrayed by the pious missionaries, who for all their holiness, were still the laziest people to ever walk the earth. If a native converted, he still had to discern his own example of living by faith, since if he followed the missionary's example of jobless preaching and scripture reading, he had little choice but starve. Then throw into the mix the contrast of lay Christians as they came onto the scene, who aside from their weekly hour of reverence were often of the lowest moral character present on the planet. . . . but they did work . . . at least they had that going for them. On the opposite end, Islam was the practical religion of wealthy traders who, at least with greater continuity than Christians, lived out their religion. They offered piety and technology. Their religion was not absent in commerce, but applied there also. This could partially be why, inspite of all the colonial attempts impel Christianity over Islam, we still have no record of a Muslim country (no matter how nominal) ever converting. They were driven out of Spain and Sicily, but not converted to Christianity.

Ultimately, I think this has big implications for Christian missions. If we are going to continue on in our professional pattern of mission work, why do we think we are going to be successful in countries where there is no category for "career spiritual person"? The only place where I assume that pattern could work would be in places like India, Africa, or some Buddhist countries where people who do little but "be spiritual" all day are accepted . . . but the fair warning is that if one decides to take that path he should be prepared to live up to and even exceed that cultures level of spirituality.

But, for other countries, and I find this to apply across the board, why do we think we can spread faith in Christ by being a career spiritual person, when few countries in the Modern/Postmodern world have a category for this. I think it ridiculous now to assume going as a "full-time" missionary to Europe is worth any European's time. There's plenty of clergy in Europe they could follow the example of, if they wanted to listen to someone who reads the Bible and prays in a church all day. If that is what we do, then they can't exactly follow our example can they; nor does our spirituality seem very relevant to their busy schedule, seeing as we have all the time in the world to be that way.

If we want to increase God's Kingdom anywhere we cannot assume that people in that place will be willing to acknowlege distinctions between what we preach, who we are, and what we do. Our message may be great, but if we do nothing, it is dismissed because its messanger is not a practical example.

So, if you're mission-minded and don't want to get a job, go to Africa . . . but I guess chances are you already were, so, proceed on with your plans. . .
Otherwise, if you're mission-minded, incarnation is not optional, please don't steal church money for the sake of being professionally spiritual.