It was night in Central Africa, and night in Africa is always dark. I
turned back around to see the dirt road ahead of us and the occasional
fl ash of animal eyes disappearing into the bush.

“Just wait until we get to the village,” Bob told me. “You’ll never see
anything like it again. Funerals really bring out the heathen in them.”
Bob was my dorm father at the boarding school. He was a seasoned
missionary, but his comment puzzled me, since this man --- this dead man
we were transporting back to the village of his birth --- had been a pastor.
I braced myself for what I could only imagine would be a chilling
scene. What would death in an African village look like? I conjured up
scenes of women wailing as they beat their breasts and threw themselves
on the ground. I could already hear the hypnotic pounding of drums and
see the eerie flickering of the fires.

I turned around to look one more time into the frozen, leathery face
of a man in his forties. Why, I wondered, was Bob preparing me for what
we’d see in the village? This man had been a Christian who worshiped
Jesus. He had turned his back on the gods of his ancestors, gods of stones
and sticks.

“We’re here,” Bob said as the dirt road turned into a clearing of
thatched-roof huts. There was a large fire burning, just as I’d expected. But
as we came to a stop and got out of the truck, I heard singing. The villagers
were singing hymns --- in the rhythms and chanted intonations of tribal
music. But they were Christian hymns nonetheless. Here in the “heart of
darkness” (as Joseph Conrad called it) was the light of the gospel. This light,
I came to learn, shines no matter how dark the culture may be. This light,
the “light of the glorious gospel,” as Paul called it (2 Corinthians 4:4, KJV),
still shines brightly after two thousand years because it’s not the product
or exclusive monopoly of any culture, including my own.

This would become a benchmark experience for me, one I’d think
back on years later when struggling over how to be a Christian in an
increasingly secularized America. In particular, I remember that night in
Africa whenever I hear someone say that Christianity is on the decline.
As the millennium approached, American theologian and Jesus Seminar
publicist Burton Mack declared, “It’s over. We’ve had enough apocalypses.
We’ve had enough martyrs. Christianity has had a two thousand–year
run, and it’s over.” But Burton Mack never heard hymns in an African
village. He didn’t know Mananga, the old pastor with white hair. When
Mananga smiled, which was often, you could see the incisors that had
been sharpened to a point many decades before when he was a young
man in a tribe of cannibals. The American missionaries I grew up among
may have been tone deaf to the nuances of cross-cultural dialogue, but
they earnestly believed that the gospel can change lives, families, even
entire villages, for the better.

The great error that scholars like Burton Mack make is to tie
Christianity to the institutions, culture, and history of the Western world.
Certainly, it would come as a great surprise to those in the villages of
Africa, Asia, and Latin America that “it’s over” for the church. We can
learn much from the non-Western church about living with faith in the
midst of an unbelieving world.

Christianity is not a product of the Western world, the way Burton
Mack arrogantly assumes. Cloistered in the ivory towers of theology
departments, scholars like Mack fail to recognize the vibrancy of Christian
faith in Kenya or India or Guatemala. Nor do they see the vitality of evangelical
faith in neighborhood churches all across America. All they see
are the dead skeletal remains of a bankrupt social gospel. Mack doesn’t
speak for Christianity, and he’s certainly not authorized to write its obituary.
But what makes Mack interesting is how he embodies a certain type
of secularism that has overtaken the West --- and is gradually overtaking
America as well. Mack thinks he’s dancing on the grave of Christianity,
but it’s only a cultural Christianity, not the real thing.

We’ve lost the cultural battle. We’ve lost the “Christian” America we
thought we had but never really did. Everywhere we see the forces of
secularism advancing against the revealed truths of God. But this should
not alarm us. Christ is triumphant. The spiritual war has been won at the
Cross. That’s the message I learned many years ago as the fires flickered in
an African village. Along the way, I forgot the message, I lost touch with
its power, and I had to learn it all over again.

And that’s the story of this book.

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