discovering missions - Southern Nazarene University

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Christian Mission 43
returned to Mecca with a military force, conquering it and making it his base.
After his death in 632, Muhammad’s followers continued military campaigns
across the Middle East and North Africa. In fairly quick succession they conquered
Damascus, Antioch, Jerusalem, Caesarea, and Alexandria. Not much
later, in 650, the Persian Empire fell to them. Muslim armies swept across
North Africa, taking Carthage in 697. By 715, Islamic military forces had
crossed the straits of Gibraltar and occupied most of Spain. Only when they attempted
to cross the Pyrenees into France in 732 were they finally stopped.
While Christians were not evicted from countries taken over by Muslim
armies, religious conversion was a one-way street. Jews or Christians could become
Muslim, but Muslims were not allowed to become Christians. A Law of
Apostasy even permitted the killing of Muslims who converted to Christianity.
As can be imagined, this death threat based on the Hadith (a work containing
eyewitness accounts of Muhammad’s life and quotes attributed to him) greatly
hindered evangelism in Muslim-dominated areas. Thus, by 950, though Christianity
was moving northward into Viking Scandinavia, no longer was it the
dominant religion in its former heartland of the Middle East and North Africa.
The church-sponsored Crusades of the 12th and 13th centuries in which
Christian armies attempted to retake areas of the Middle East were a dark blot
of misconceived mission rooted in a geographic, terrestrial understanding of
the kingdom of God. It was a dark period not only in terms of losses but also
in terms of attempts to militarily reevangelize areas that had been Christian before
the appearance of Islam. The result was that by 1500 the Western church
had not only lost great geographic areas but had also besmirched its reputation
for centuries to come.
Missionary Orders
Even with considerable unchristian activity going on in Christ’s name,
there was a “remnant” of believers (in the words of Jeremiah 23) whose reflection
of God’s missionary character and purpose caused a resurgence of the
faith. One example was Francis of Assisi. When Francis went to Egypt preaching
the gospel, the Sultan reportedly said, “If I would meet more Christians
like you, I would be tempted to become one.” 7 Francis turned his followers into
a missionary organization: the Order of the Little Brothers. Not long after
Francis’s death, the Franciscans, as they came to be called, were in China
preaching the gospel.
In the late 1200s, a well-to-do Spaniard named Ramon Llull spent time,
energy, and family fortune establishing a missionary training center on the west
Mediterranean island of Majorca. Its purpose was to prepare missionaries for
Muslim North Africa. Llull himself made evangelistic forays into Tunisia and
some reports say he died there.