Messianics Rising - Barry Yeoman

in Jerusalem and schlepping it seven hours to
Eilat.”
“Was that evangelism? It might be,” he says.
“We did talk about our love for the Lord as we
did it.”
Back in the United States, as the movement
has boomed, so have its educational institutions.
Some of the nation’s leading evangelical
schools, including Criswell College in Dallas
and Western Seminary in San Jose, Calif., offer
accredited programs in Jewish studies or Messianic
Judaism.
Chosen People Ministries has teamed up
with California’s Biola University to create
a three-year master’s program in Messianic
Jewish studies. The Union of Messianic Jewish
Congregations has an institute — linked informally
to an evangelical seminary in Florida —
to ordain Christ-centered “rabbis.”
Myriad publications on how to win over
Jews are readily available, including theological
journals and a four-volume set titled “Answering
Jewish Objections to Jesus.” An international
umbrella group, the Lausanne Consultation on
Jewish Evangelism, brainstormed about strategies
this summer in Hungary.
Groups such as Jews for Jesus partner with
large evangelical congregations, such as the
McLean Bible Church in Vienna, Va., to train
members in reaching Jewish neighbors and coworkers.
“This is becoming front-page news in evangelical
churches,” says Lon Solomon, McLean’s
pastor.
Only rarely does the issue attract mainstream
attention, as when conservative pundit
Ann Coulter told CNBC talk-show host Donnie
Deutsch earlier this month, “We just want Jews
to be perfected.”
Jewish leaders are far from unified about
how much damage these efforts inflict.
“I am not convinced that this is a major
crisis,” says Rabbi Gary Greenebaum, U.S. director
of interreligious affairs for the American
Jewish Committee, explaining that the number
of actual conversions appears low.
Greenebaum worries, though, that when
churches fund Jewish-directed missionary
work, it creates an obstacle to interfaith dialogue.
Others express more alarm.
“Is it an existential threat to the future of
the Jewish community? No,” says Rabbi Craig
Miller, education director of the anti-missionary
task force at the Jewish Community Relations
Council of New York. “Is it hurting Jewish
individuals? Yes. The loss of any Jewish person
is a tragedy for family and friends, and it’s also
a loss of that person’s creativity and input to the
Jewish community as a whole.”
D
U nder the clankety-clank of an elevated
train, the vertical banners lining Brooklyn’s
Brighton Beach Avenue welcome visitors
to “Little Russia by the Sea.” Once vibrant with
working-class Jews, then suffering a period of
decline, the Brighton Beach neighborhood was
enlivened in the 1980s by a new wave of immigrants,
many of them Jewish and from the
former Soviet Union. Now pedestrians stroll
past furriers, a Russian ballet school and grocery
stores offering sausage, knishes and
smoked herring.
Through a doorway marked with a Star of
David and up a staircase is the Russian Community
Life Center, a modest cluster of rooms that
has become one of Brooklyn’s missionary hot
spots. On a Saturday morning, 60 immigrants
in black plastic folding chairs watch as center
director Leslie McMillan dons a head scarf and
lights a pair of Shabbat candles. She recites the
traditional Hebrew blessing, but with an addition:
“B’shem Yeshua,” which translates as “in
the name of Jesus.”
The Shabbat candles, a worship leader explains
in Russian, “is like a symbol of the light
of Jesus Christ, our Savior.”
Evangelists have identified Russian Jews
as particularly ripe for their message. They
lived under a government that for decades sup-