If theological academia could be compared to climate, the subject of church history owns a pretty arid reputation. The age of social media has led most in the West to regard any history – church or otherwise – as a bone-dry wilderness, so much so that Sarah Irving-Stonebreaker has termed this as the “Ahistoric Age.”
Generally, history’s service to ministry is often reduced to Spanish philosopher George Santayana’s aphorism, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” But I believe that history has more to offer than just cautionary stories, and it took me becoming an overseas church planter to figure that out.
Before I moved overseas, I served in various Southern Baptist ministry roles (including twenty years in Texas churches), and that meant my cultural engagement was monochromatic – confined to people who looked like me, talked like me, and “churched” like me. Church history could have (and should have) been a useful ministry tool for me, but I could not see it because there was no historical contrast. The colors of my theological convictions blended in with the theological hues surrounding me.
But that all changed when I began working among Muslims in Central Asia, where church history helped me in three ways:
Defining Your Terms
Each year, my organization requires a statistical update, which is meant to be a celebration of what Father God is doing in my sphere of ministry. So annually, I provide stats on evangelism, discipleship, and church planting related to my work. But that last category is tough to quantify, because when does a gathered group become a church plant? Do I have five churches here, or two churches and three small groups? Or one church and four small groups? Or no churches at all? How do I accurately count something I can’t define?
That’s where church history introduced me to Pastor Guido.
Guido de Bres (1522–1567) was a Protestant preacher who served churches in modern-day Belgium during a time when the Roman Catholic Church was purging their kingdom of Protestants. Stripped of the institutional elements of a congregation (priests, sacraments, the Mass, the Eucharist), Pastor Guido had to distill the marks of a local church to its barest minimum, and he settled on these three characteristics: the preaching of the Bible, the administration of the ordinances, and church discipline. Since many Central Asian countries face similar conditions as Pastor Guido, these three marks seemed to fit nicely as a starting point for defining and quantifying a local church body. With Pastor Guido’s definition in mind, I was equipped to both describe to new believers what we were building and count how many we’d built.
Refining Your Answers
Another way church history comes to my aid is in communicating theological subjects, and there are few more challenging than the Trinitarian God of the Bible. No one struggles more with this than Muslims. Even Muslims who place their faith in Jesus continue to grapple with the biblical truth that God has a Son. How can God the Son talk to God the Father if they are one? If God cannot die, then how can God the Son die on the cross? If Jesus was God’s Son, then what does that make Mary?
Church history once again offered a gentle reminder that Muslims are not the first to ask these questions, and then introduced me to some old friends from modern-day Turkey: the Cappadocian Fathers (4th century). These guys not only offered answers to the questions my Muslim friends were asking, but they also shaped the vocabulary we use to talk about the Trinity today.
For example, Gregory of Nyssa wrote a letter to his friend, Ablabius, facing accusations that the Christian God is actually just three gods. Gregory begins the letter with an exhortation to not shrink away from these theological discourses, for each generation must learn how to defend this truth. He confesses that the doctrine is an intellectual challenge, but the biblical witness provides enough to keep him “firm and unmoved.” He then proceeds with his argument that there is a difference between the property of something and its identity. My dad and I share the property – we are both human, but we are not the same individual. I am his son and I am not my dad, and I have a separate identity. Gregory’s treatise gives me vocabulary to have healthy conversation about the Trinity while avoiding heretical examples like the egg or the shamrock.
This was driven home to me at a conference I attended where a Central Asian believer spoke of his experiences in evangelism among his Muslim countrymen. To help them grapple with the Trinity, he reported that his analogy of choice was an egg. While I applaud his efforts to make the Trinity more accessible, ultimately he does a greater disservice by teaching that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are parts of one god. Christianity teaches that Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit are each fully God. It could have been a great service to this Central Asian brother if someone had used Gregory’s work to explain how this is so.
And Finding Your Place
Which is a nice bridge into the third benefit of church history: connecting the story of Central Asian Christians into the story of the universal church. For instance, just like Muslims are not the first folk to struggle with questions about the Trinity, they are not the first to suffer for their faith. Church history presents a long list of men and women who were beaten, burned, and beheaded for the gospel message. Somehow, suffering is more bearable when you know that you are not alone and that your pain has an overarching purpose. You get a hint of this idea in Revelation 6, after the breaking of the 5th seal. The exemplars for suffering represent those throughout the ages who have endured hostility for their gospel commitments. “How long, O Lord?” they cry out. And Heaven responds:
“So they were each given a white robe, and they were told to rest a little while longer until the number would be completed of their fellow servants and their brothers and sisters, who were going to be killed just as they had been” (Rev. 6:11, CSB).
Christians in Afghanistan and Iran can find some measure of hope that their story is recorded in heaven and will be included in a final retribution.
Additionally, church history has layers of individual stories that I find useful when teaching Central Asians about the Christian faith.
The heart of Islam is what a friend of mine affectionately terms “PBA,” Performance-Based Acceptance. If you want God to do stuff for you, then you better get out there and make Him happy. It is the antithesis of imputed righteousness, and no one knew that better than Martin Luther.
I love to tell Muslim background believers how Luther, too, had a debilitating case of PBA, and how he found the cure in the book of Romans. Luther’s convictions about the authority of Scripture, his determination to make the Bible available to Germans in their own language, and his persecution at the hands of the Roman Catholic Church are not only relatable, but compelling, full of pathos, action, and drama. It’s a great story to tell and a wonderful instrument of discipleship, as are the stories of Augustine’s conversion and Athanasius’ ferocity.
Towards that end, an excellent resource my Southwestern history professor gave us for his class was Justo Gonzalez’s The Story of Christianity (volumes one and two). No book title could be more relevant for workers among Muslims. I vividly remember reaching down to the bottom of my bookshelf, where it was patiently waiting to help me tell old stories in new ways.
The last verse in the book of Acts alerts us to the future of the church: the people of God “proclaiming the kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness and without hindrance.”
We should not be surprised to find the next 2,000 years filled with stories of faithfulness from God’s people that will benefit each generation thereafter. As a church planter, you are but the latest paragraph in the ancient story of God’s kingdom. So as you begin, take some time to get to know the sort of tale you’ve fallen into.
The author’s name has been changed for security reasons.
