Religions and mission in the Arab world
SEPTEMBER 2008: Vivienne Stacey

This issue of our magazine is fully focused on Ms Vivienne Stacey, a lifelong missionary in the Muslim World. You will find her major writings in this issue on our frontpage. If you click the button Vivienne Stacey you find many other articles by her hand; we will continue to upload new articles there, so keep coming back!

This week we received the news that our sister Shirley Madany has passed away; her husband, Rev. Bassam Madany, regularly contributes to our magazine. We wish him comfort of God in the certainty that his beloved wife is now with our Lord. Let us pray for Bassam.

We have also made dozens of articles by Bassam and Shirley Madany available in the past weeks. Under the button Madany's you find them.

Please let us know how we can improve St Francis Magazine so that it serves your needs in mission in the Arab World!

Rev Dr John Stringer
 

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Re-Thinking Missions Today: Neo-Evangelical Missiology and the Christian Mission to Islam
This paper was read at a Caucus on Missions in July 1985, which dealt with the topic of Contextualization.   It has not list its relevance, as even more than in the 1980s, contextualization plays a role in the missiological debate.  During the last two decades, some severe criticisms have been levelled at the missionary work which has been undertaken since the days of William Carey.  We are told by these critics, for example, that missions among Muslims have been a failure. Most of the missionaries of the past, so the critics say, were not good at "cross-cultural communication." This happened because missionaries failed to "contextualize" the Christian message.

The Rev. Bassam M Madany:

In this paper, I refer to evangelical missionary theorists who have espoused and propagated this way of looking at the modern missionary enterprise as the neo-evangelical missiologists. I would like to examine their thesis about the alleged failure of missions among Muslims from three inter-related perspectives: the historical, the theological and the Biblical perspectives.

I - The Historical Perspective
In attempting to work out a new methodology of missions, several neo-evangelical missiologists base their endeavors on their own interpretation of the history of missions in the last 200 years. This is specially the case when they are re-thinking the Christian mission to Muslims. They seem to be oblivious of the fact that the Christian-Muslim encounter began almost fourteen centuries ago! The difficulties we face as we seek to reach Muslims with the gospel are embedded in history long before the rise of the Protestant missionary enterprise.

To put all the blame on the messengers of the gospel during the last 200 years does not only ignore history, but it dishonors the testimony of countless Christians who lived under Islam and who were not ashamed of their Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

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