Four threats and a promise

                                                        

Will a new Cold War begin over the hot war in Ukraine? Will the European Union crumble, sparking another global recession? Will Iran go nuclear? Will the tottering Arab world collapse?

Tyranny is cruel, but anarchy may be worse. Ask anyone living in one of the increasing number of failed (or failing) states around the world as 2015 stumbles toward … what?   

“Our age is insistently, at times almost desperately, in pursuit of a concept of world order,” writes Henry Kissinger, chief architect of U.S. foreign policy for Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, in his recent book World Order. During tumultuous times, Kissinger engineered Nixon’s historic 1972 opening to China. He also helped craft détente — the easing of decades of nuclear-armed tensions with the Soviet Union.

Today, however, order and agreement are becoming hard to find.

“Chaos threatens side by side with … the spread of weapons of mass destruction, the disintegration of states, the impact of environmental depredation, the persistence of genocidal practices, and the spread of new technologies threatening to drive conflict beyond human control or comprehension,” Kissinger warns. “Are we facing a period in which forces beyond the restraints of any order determine the future?”

If Kissinger can’t answer that question regarding world affairs, I certainly won’t try. But here are four key threats to monitor this year, according to risk assessments from the Eurasia Group, the World Economic Forum, Stratfor Global Intelligence and other globe watchers:

1.      Russia and Ukraine — As conflict in eastern Ukraine intensifies between government forces and Russian-backed rebels, peace prospects seem to be fading. Western economic sanctions (and lower oil prices) have crippled the Russian economy, and the United States is now considering sending arms to Ukraine. Russian President Vladimir Putin frames the struggle as a new assault by the West generally, and the United States specifically, on Russia and its essential interests — and threatens a return to Cold War footing. But will Putin stay in power long enough to act on his warnings? He’s popular at home, for now. But the longer the Ukraine crisis goes on, some observers say, the more likely it is that Putin’s regime will eventually collapse under the weight of economic trouble. “And if Russia destabilizes, it is the destabilization of a nation with massive nuclear capability,” reminds Stratfor chief George Friedman.

2.      Europe on the edge — National economies in Europe continue to stall or decline. Unemployment continues to rise, threatening the still-fragile global recovery from the Great Recession. Fear of social and political chaos grows as angry populist movements on the left and the right blame the continent’s ills on the European Union, economic austerity measures, immigrants, Muslims — and Europe’s age-old target, Jews. Ugly anti-Semitism is on the rise in the continent that has promised “never again” since World War II.

3.      State collapse — ISIS isn’t the only “non-state actor” with the potential to overwhelm whole governments. Rebels, terrorists and international criminal cartels have been able to do that for a long time. But this bloodthirsty band of Islamists has morphed from one faction in the Syrian civil war into an army that aims to conquer multiple countries. And they’re not alone. Kissinger: “In the Middle East, jihadists on both sides of the Sunni-Shia divide tear at societies and dismantle states in quest of visions of global revolution based on the fundamentalist version of their religion. The state itself — as well as the regional system based on it — is in jeopardy, assaulted by ideologies rejecting its constraints as illegitimate and by terrorist militias that, in several countries, are stronger than the armed forces of the government.”

4.      Iran versus Saudi Arabia — These two states, though challenged from multiple sides, will continue to struggle for effective control of the Middle East, influencing regional conflicts, the Sunni-Shia feud, the security of Israel, the price of oil and other flashpoints. If Iran develops nuclear weapons, the competition could escalate beyond control.

As followers of Christ, what are we to do in chaotic times? Fear not (the most frequent command in Scripture). Trust God. Pray hard. Act in obedience. And keep going to the nations.

Major gospel advances almost always come during periods of struggle and change.

“Cease striving and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth,” the Lord declares (Psalm 46:10, NASB).

That is a promise, a guarantee — regardless of the historical moment. The church has flourished in harder times than these.  

The rise and fall of walls

                                                          

                                 
                 

Walls of the mind and heart are harder to tear down than walls of brick and stone.

The fall of the Berlin Wall 25 years ago brought great hopes of a new birth of spiritual and political freedom, not only in the communist orbit but around the world. In many ways, those hopes were realized. Old tyrannies began to crumble. The Cold War ended after more than a generation of East-West conflict. Churches and believers long imprisoned by persecution and fear were released into the sunlight of liberty.

The collapse of the Soviet Union followed the glorious opening in Berlin. Waves of Christian workers from the West flooded into Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics to assist their brothers and sisters in the faith. An exciting era of evangelism and church planting began.

That era continues, despite the turmoil that has followed Soviet communism’s demise.

“The wall was an outward symbol of an inward reality,” Mark Edworthy, IMB strategy leader for Europe, told IMB writer Nicole Lee. “Communism had erected a spiritual barrier with its incessant denial of God’s existence and its cycle of cruelty. Spiritually, we eagerly took up a hammer and chisel to work against that greater barrier.” A quarter-century later, “we can see greater trophies than stone and mortar as the Lord has continued to build His church throughout the former Soviet sphere.”

But believers are working with urgency in Eastern Europe, Lee reported, “because no one knows how long the door to some of these countries will remain open. The ongoing war in Ukraine highlights the fact that, although the Cold War is over, communism and other secular philosophies are still at work.”  

The social and economic chaos of the immediate post-Soviet years led to yearning — in Russia, at least — for a “strong hand” at the helm, which has resulted in new tensions with the West in recent years. Those tensions are pushing the world to the “brink of a new Cold War,” warned former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev at a Nov. 8 event in Berlin marking the Wall’s fall. Gorbachev, whose reforms helped hasten the end of the Soviet empire, criticized global powers for failing to work together to end conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, the Middle East and Ukraine.

For now, open ministry continues.

“We really don’t see any comprehensive political pressure that hinders the advance of the gospel. Materialism and consumerism have replaced communism,” said one Christian worker based in Russia. Still, he added, “Our time might be short. Have we planted an apostolic burden among Russian church leaders? There are some who [are passionate about reaching the lost], but we need many more.”

The message is one that has been repeated again and again throughout history: There are no guarantees — except for the presence and sovereignty of the Lord. Walls may fall, while others rise. In the political realm, the Tiananmen Square crackdown in Beijing occurred in 1989, the same year the Berlin Wall came down. Yet the Chinese church, which suffered one of its darkest hours during the savage persecution of the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, continues to grow in size, vitality and passion for global mission.

“God may seem silent on occasion. At other times, people simply don’t trouble to hear his voice,” writes Philip Jenkins, distinguished professor of history at Baylor University, in Christianity Today. “As an example, we might look at the experience of China, which over the past two millennia has remained the world’s most populous nation. The story of Chinese Christianity is a recurrent cycle of mighty boom years followed by what seemed like total annihilation at the time, an obliteration so absolute that on each occasion, it was quite clear that the church could never rise again. That cycle has occurred five times to date since the ninth century. On each occasion, the Chinese church has reemerged far more powerful than at its previous peak. Each successive ‘nevermore’ proved to be strictly temporary.”

Today, the very existence of the church in the Middle East, the cradle of the Christian faith, seems threatened by the advance of Islamic extremists. But God will not leave Himself without a witness. 

“Even when institutional churches vanish, believers persist in many different forms,” Jenkins writes. “As Anatoly Lunacharsky, the frustrated Soviet minister of education, complained in 1928, ‘Religion is like a nail: The harder you hit it, the deeper it goes into the wood.’ Sometimes it goes in so deep, you can’t even see it.”

One day that nail reappears, stronger than ever.

Bad news, Good News

 

The cascade of grim global headlines overwhelmed a friend of mine recently. He announced that he couldn’t take it anymore — at least until tomorrow.

“I don’t know why I care,” he wrote. “I don’t know why I bother. I check the news. Bad. All bad. Unless the news is horrible, it’s bad. Why care? Why bother? Why not just play ‘Angry Birds’ and pretend it doesn’t affect me? It sounds easier.”

Perhaps you can relate. I know I do. Violence and hatred rage everywhere. Wars, skirmishes and suffering flare up where we don’t expect them, and where we do. Ukraine and Russia. Syria. Iraq. Israel and Gaza. West Africa. Death and disease abound. Innocents are infected, blown out of the sky, kidnapped, driven from their homes, shot in the crossfire. In some places, the bad guys seem to be winning — if we can even figure out who the bad guys are. It’s too complicated, too confusing, too depressing. It’s tempting to tune it out.

Most people do.

Not my friend, however. Despite his frustration and discouragement, I know he won’t stop reading, watching, caring and praying. He’s an intelligent and compassionate young man, for one thing. He’s concerned about world affairs. He makes a point of keeping up with what’s happening and tries to understand it, unlike many others.

Most important, as a child of God, he’s in touch with the mind and heart of God, who so loved the world that He gave His only Son to redeem it. If He loved even those who hated Him, we must do likewise.

“The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love,” the Apostle John teaches. “By this the love of God was manifested in us, that God has sent His only begotten Son into the world so that we might live through Him. In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has seen God at any time; if we love one another, God abides in us, and His love is perfected in us. By this we know that we abide in Him and He in us, because He has given us of His Spirit. We have seen and testify that the Father has sent the Son to be the Savior of the world” (1 John 4:8-14, NASB).

It’s only His love, through His Spirit, that changes a broken world. By His grace, He chooses to use us, if we submit to Him. His love is more than enough to make up for our lack of it.

Another young person I know returned recently from a youth mission trip to Amsterdam, the Dutch capital. She and the group arrived there the same week in July that Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur was shot down over Ukraine, killing all 283 passengers and 15 crew. Two-thirds of the passengers were Dutch. People on the streets of Amsterdam were just beginning to experience the shock of the tragedy as the youth team walked through the city and distributed more than 6,000 copies of the Gospel of John.

Some people they encountered rejected the small gifts of truth. Like many Europeans, the Dutch consider themselves secular and post-Christian. But many accepted it— many more than the Amsterdam-based Christian worker helping the young people expected — and they began reading it. Perhaps they were looking for something to hold onto, something to hope in.

While interacting with them, my young acquaintance learned some things about herself. She realized she wasn’t as tolerant, as patient or as loving as she thought she was.

“But through learning all these ‘I am nots,’ I learned who God is,” she said. Distributing the Gospel, “even if they were going to reject it a second later, is so much more important than my comfort. … I learned to really care for and love the Dutch people.”

So it is with all who seek to follow Him. It’s not who we are; it’s who He is. And He has overcome the world.

(Explore ways to follow Him into the world at http://going.imb.org/ )

World weary

                                        

Listen to an audio version of this post at http://media1.imbresources.org/files/195/19559/19559-107657.mp3

Did you see the picture of Marwan, the 4-year-old Syrian boy recently found wandering in the desert near the Syria-Jordan border?

A news photo of the refugee child went viral on social media. It attracted far more attention than the hundreds of Syrian refugees who cross the same border every day and night to escape the murderous war in their country. Turns out Marwan wasn’t alone; he had temporarily fallen behind his family members, who were among about 1,000 Syrians making the chaotic border crossing that particular day. Relief workers reunited the child with his parents about 10 minutes after the photo was taken.

People around the world responded to the photo because it depicted a lost child, dragging a plastic bag with his few belongings, seemingly alone in the world. Who wouldn’t feel compassion for this little boy? His personal, heartbreaking plight is easier to understand than the struggle of millions of refugees experiencing the same thing.

 “A single death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.” That statement is attributed to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, who knew something about engineering death on a mass scale. He understood that most people can’t fully comprehend events affecting great multitudes — especially if those events are happening far away.

Media have radically changed the global landscape since Stalin’s time, however. News travels instantaneously. Digital devices bring us images of tragedies, wars and disasters 24/7, if we choose to watch. But that poses a new problem. The constant onslaught of events and information dulls our senses. We have our own daily problems. We turn away. Americans in particular, living far from many of the world’s conflict zones, tend to turn inward.

“It’s not that Americans are disinterested in foreign affairs, it’s that their interest is finely calibrated,” observes geopolitical analyst George Friedman. “The issues must matter to Americans, so most issues must carry with them a potential threat. The outcome must be uncertain, and the issues must have a sufficient degree of clarity so that they can be understood and dealt with.”

There aren’t that many global crises that neatly fit such criteria in these confusing times. The outcome of the war in Syria is uncertain, but its multiple causes and combatants are anything but clear to us. Does its eventual outcome, regardless of who wins, threaten us directly? Hard to say. One could say the same of the current troubles in Ukraine, Venezuela, Egypt, Thailand, South Sudan, the Central African Republic and other places. Trouble is always brewing somewhere. Let them sort it out, we say. We’re tired of being the world’s policeman. 

“Whether this sentiment is good or bad is debatable,” says Friedman. “I would argue that it is a luxury, albeit a temporary one, conferred on Americans by geography.”

Weary of years of war and overseas entanglements, many Americans are ready to withdraw behind our spacious borders — physically or psychologically — until something so big happens that we can’t ignore it.

That’s a national choice. But God calls His followers to greater things. If we serve Him, we are citizens of the world, no matter how chaotic the world may seem. In my last column, I asked how we can continue to go into the world and make disciples as a new age of upheaval dawns. Withdrawal is not an option for world-hearted Christians, because it implies one of two things: fear or indifference.

God is not indifferent about the world. He is passionately concerned about every people, every culture. The more suffering and turmoil a nation is experiencing, the more intensively He is working to bring His grace and mercy.

“This past month we have seen an amazing outpouring of God's Spirit,” said IMB worker Brady Sample,* who lives in violence-torn Kiev, Ukraine, a nation on the edge of cracking apart. “God is moving. This event is causing people to pray, and while they are praying for peace in the land, God is trying to bring peace into people’s hearts.”

No matter how difficult the destination or the situation, He will go with us. In fact, He’s already there, waiting for us to meet Him.

Don’t miss the appointment.

*(Name changed)