What can Christians today learn from the successes and failures of Christians in the first fifteen centuries of the breaking out of the Good News of Jesus the Christ? This article by historian Woodrow Walton is an Epilogue to The Gospel In History series.

With apologies to the Gregorian Calendar, A.D. 28 is selected as the date of the Resurrection of our Lord. Fifty days after the Resurrection, at the time of the festival of First Fruits, also known as Pentecost, the power of the Holy Spirit fell upon Jesus’ disciples. They were now His apostles and Peter became the lead spokesman. When Peter proclaimed Jesus as both “Lord and Christ,” there were among his audience visitors from countries bordering the Persian Gulf, lands approximate to the Caucasian and Kurdistan mountains, westward to Libya in northern Africa, and from what is now Turkey onward along the northern Mediterranean coast to Rome and beyond.

This article is part of The Gospel in History series by Woodrow Walton.
Image: The Books of Kells by way of Wikimedia Commons.

The Gospel spread quickly into the Mesopotamian-Tigris plains, northward beyond Antioch, and crossed the Aegean Sea into the Balkans and on to the Italian peninsula. It went westward across the whole extent of the North African coast fronting the Mediterranean. Acts 2:9-11 enumerated thirteen different geographical locales from Elam, bordering Iran, to Cyrene close to present day Benghazi, Libya.

This expansive geography from the Persian Gulf to the western edges of Africa indicates the eventual spread of the gospel from western Asia to the western edges of the Roman empire. The early Christians spread across this expanse within a matter of seventy-two years. The flourishing of individual Christian communities from east to west within a relatively short time occurred without benefit of motorized conveyances. The initial thrust was from Jerusalem to Damascus in western Syria and then along the Tigris-Euphrates valley. The martyrdom of Stephen initiated a spread northward. The ministry of Philip the deacon spearheaded the thrust into the upper reaches of the Nile Valley, Egypt. Out of Libya and Cyprus were the initiators of the church in Antioch, and out of Antioch into what is now Turkey. Who are these travelers who speak of Jesus who is said to be “Lord and Savior?”

That the Christians presented a gospel, not a religion, was a novelty and went against the grain of the dominant cultural mentality who adhered to a belief in gods and different philosophies of life. Who is this Jesus?

The fact that the Christian communities or groupings did not frequent the public baths and other major public arenas of activity raised suspicions as to who they are and what they represented. To use a phrase coined by the late John Stott, these Christians were counter-cultural and represented another way of life by their exclusiveness from the rest of society.

We are now in France and Spain for ministry where we have been for two weeks. Last week we had our Revival Europe Training Conference with about 700 Chinese from the whole of Europe and many from China. Among the speakers was Pastor Niko of Bethany Indonesia, who has 250,000 in his churches in Jakarta alone. He came with a team 35 people. Also, Lawrence Khong of Faith Community Baptist Church (10,000 strong) in Singapore, and of course, Brother Yun (Heavenly Man) and many others, including my son-in-law Samuel Law, daughter Sharon and myself. It was in conjunction with the 500^th anniversary of the Reformation beginning 31 October, and all the Chinese churches in Paris, about 29 in total, joined together and we had a united choir that sang “A Mighty Fortress is our God”, a Reformation song.

Next year the Revival Conference will be in Frankfort, Germany, and Heidi Baker has already promised to come. We might have up to 1,000 if we find a suitable meeting hall, which they are looking for now. We are also hoping to invite David Pawson, the renowned Spirit-filled Bible scholar from England. Chinese around the world know about him and his powerful teaching has helped so many people. But he is very old, 87, and not in good health. But since Germany is very close to England, we hope he can come.

I was in Spain where 300,000 Chinese live, and work with a ministry that produces many Bibles in many languages, and has provided us hundreds of thousands of Chinese Bibles. It is called Bibles par Internet, as they provide free Bibles in many languages when people contact them on the internet. It is under the direction of Alex Lukasik, a Swiss brother. They have a good website at http://www.bibles.ch/, but there is no English. They are French speaking people.

Also, I met with Gilbert Lindsay and team, who have a huge modern printing press in Belarus, Russia. They have, over the many decades, provided many millions of Bibles in many languages and recently have printed thousands of copies of the Abundant Life Study Bible (also known as the Fire Bible). His father and mother, Gordon and Freda Lindsay, were famous faith healing evangelists in the 20^th century and started Christ for the Nations Institute in Dallas.

On my trip to Spain, I met with a Chinese pastor whom I have known for a couple years, Pastor Xuan. He works primary among refugees, orphans, and handicapped people in Spain and is very active in ministry in Morocco. They must be very low-key, but by using social outreach they are able to bring the Gospel to many Muslims there.

You might be surprised to learn that there are 8,000 Chinese visitors to Morocco every month, and Pastor Xuan is developing a ministry to share the Gospel with them. It is difficult and even dangerous to bring Bibles or Christian literature in Arabic or French to Morocco, but absolutely no restrictions on Chinese Bibles and Chinese tracts.

I just shared the above for there is a lot happening here in Europe that you in the USA are most likely not aware of. It is both a great mission field in which most of the people in Europe and the Middle East don’t know the Lord, but also it is a base to bless Europe and other nations with the Word of God, and there are many people now involved in mission work here.

Thanks for all you have done to make the church worldwide aware of the working of the Holy Spirit.

God bless you,

Dennis Balcombe
包德寧牧師
November 11, 2017

Charlemagne’s palace chapel was completed in 805 CE and later incorporated into the Aachen Cathedral, the oldest cathedral in northern Europe.
Image: Tobias Helfrich / Wikimedia Commons

Conundrum is a strange adjective, yet it is appropriate when one considers the state of the Christian message from AD 385/400 to 1452. The Edict of Milan (AD 313) ended the persecution of Christians and brought an era of peace for the Church. A tenuous relationship between the Christians and the ruling empire emerged. From AD 350 until 378, the year of the Battle of Adrianople, an increasing flood of invaders from Eurasia and from north of the Danube poured into the Mediterranean world. Some of the newer peoples integrated with existing populations and served in both the Roman and Byzantine armies. Some did not.

Increasingly, the Roman system destabilized and the only stability that existed was furnished by the diocesan system of the Christian Church. By the time of Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo, Germanic peoples had crossed both the Danube and a frozen Rhine river. Those who crossed the Danube went southward into the Balkans and eastern Italy. Those crossing the Rhine swept westward into Gaul, the Iberian peninsula, and south into northwestern Italy all the way to Rome. Vandals and Alans crossed over the straits of Gibraltar into Northern Africa and moved westward to capture Carthage. The unsettled conditions, in large part, prompted Augustine to compose his masterful Civitate Dei (The City of God).

Further muddying the waters of Christianity was the rise of Islam from the teachings of Mohammed in the seventh century. Islam armies swarmed out of the Arabian deserts, invading Persia to the northeast, Syria to the north, Byzantine areas northwest, and west across North Africa from the Sinai to what is now Morocco, and north into southern Spain. The armies devastated churches and massacred whole populations. The massacres prompted Christian leaders in Europe to strike back against the invaders who were sweeping into the Iberian peninsula and thrusting northward into the land of the Franks. This defensive movement, since known as the Crusades, had the purpose of driving the marauding Islamic forces out of southern France, out of the western Mediterranean, and out of the Holy Land. Among the supporters was Bernard of Clairvaux, an eminent Christian monastic scholar. It was a long, drawn out effort that lasted from the eighth century into the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The Crusades were, by no means, an offensive action as some scholars have interpreted them from John Julian Norwich to the present. Only recently, under the pains-taking scholarship of Rodney Stark, have the Crusades come to be seen as a defensive reaction.