Is the European Church Committing Spiritual Suicide?

When I was a kid (decades ago), there was a movie entitled, “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.”  It is a funny film.  But today’s world is truly mad!  I mean, really mad!  And it’s not funny!

At a time when Christians in the Middle East are being tortured, beheaded and crucified … rather than denying Jesus … there are so-called Christians in Europe who are renouncing the Great Commission and removing the cross (literally) to make peace with Muslims.  This is nothing short of madness!

Last month, the Bishop of Stockholm (Sweden) “proposed a church in her diocese remove all signs of the cross and put down markings showing the direction to Mecca for the benefit of Muslim worshippers.”  As reported on Breitbart.com, “Calling Muslim guests to the church ‘angels,’ the Bishop later took to her official blog to explain that removing Christian symbols from the church and preparing the building for Muslim prayer doesn’t make a priest any less a defender of the faith.  Rather, to do any less would make one ‘stingy towards people of other faiths.’ ”

For many, this comes as no surprise.  This so-called Christian leader, Eva Brunne, made news in 2009 when she was installed as the Church of Sweden’s first openly lesbian bishop.

With good reason, the American activist and commentator, Pamela Geller, known for her anti-Shariah writings exclaimed, “Sweden has surrendered without so much as firing a shot.  They’ve lost it.  Sweden is sacrificing its own heritage to accommodate immigrants who will not be as accommodating to native non-Muslim Swedes.  The bishop is paving the way for the Islamization of Sweden.”

But this was not an isolated incident.  In Germany , an “evangelical priest has offered his parish church up to become migrant housing, but will be stripping out most of the fittings to ensure their comfort — including all symbols of Christianity.”  Obviously, this church had already removed real Christianity from its soul, as noted on the church website, “Refugees welcome ... we are all citizens with the saints and members of the household of God.”  So Muslims chanting Allahu Akbar and militantly denying that Jesus is the Son of God belong to the same spiritual family as Christians proclaiming Jesus as Lord and celebrating His death and resurrection.

This is absolute theological nonsense that makes a complete mockery of the cross.

But it gets worse.  As reported on the Religion News Service, “One of Germany’s largest Protestant regional churches has come under fire from other Christians for speaking out against efforts to convert Muslims just as tens of thousands of refugees from the Islamic world are streaming into the country.”

Has the time come for throwing out the Great Commission?  This appears to be a carefully thought out strategy as reflected in a new position paper in which “the Evangelical Church in the Rhineland says the passage in the Gospel of Matthew known as the Great Commission — ‘Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit’ — does not mean Christians must try to convert others to their faith.”

Do these people not realize that, if Christianity is not a missionary faith, then it is no faith at all; and that just as Jesus came into the world “to seek and save the lost” so He sends us to seek and save the lost?  As Scottish medical missionary Dr. David Livingstone once said, “God had an only Son and He made Him a missionary.”

Yet this blasphemous position paper, entitled “Pilgrim Fellowship and Witness in Dialogue with Muslims,” argues that, “A strategic mission to Islam or meeting Muslims to convert them threatens social peace and contradicts the spirit and mandate of Jesus Christ and is therefore to be firmly rejected.”

This not only makes a mockery of the blood that Jesus shed on the cross, but it also makes a mockery of the blood that our brothers and sisters have shed in the Muslim world as they lay down their lives to reach them with the good news.

Canadian pastor/author/missions advocate Dr. Oswald Smith famously said that the church that does not evangelize will fossilize.  The reality is that these churches already gave up the Great Commission years ago … becoming nothing more than fossils of the faith.  Their blasphemous actions today simply reflect the previous death of their spirit.  They have no more right to be called churched than ISIS has the right to be called compassionate.

My earnest prayer is that God will raise up a powerful, witnessing church in Europe before it is too late; and that He will strengthen those who are still standing strong in the midst of the current apostasy.

Rev. Dr. Kenneth L. Beale, Jr.

Chaplain (Colonel-Ret), U.S. Army

Pastor, Ft. Snelling Memorial Chapel