Reverse Evangelism

Dear Sir,

Reference the report -  ” Indian missionaries swamping the West” – (TNIE – 30 Jan)

The reason for this is not far to see !!

As far back as 1964, Bates M. Searle and PAUL K Wilhelm in their -  “CHRISTIANITY IN EUROPE : THE PROSPECTS OF CHRISTIANITY THROUGHOUT THE WORLD” wrote about the decline of Christianity in Europe. As examples, they highlighted the state of Christianity in the following countries:

(A) – “Great Britain.  Unless new factors do enter the situation, the institutional decline of the Churches in those older neighbourhoods of Britain which are themselves declining will continue.” – – – . “Statistics of Church attendances show that not more than 10% of the population is likely to be in Church on any given Sunday.”

(B) – “Scandinavian Countries. The situation in the Scandinavian countries is not unlike that in Britain, though alienation from the Church seems to have gone further – – -  a strange deep regard for the Christian tradition; and at the same time empty Churches.”

(C) – “Switzerland.  Switzerland presents many of the same features of Scandinavia. Even in the city of John Calvin, not more than 5% of the Protestant population will be found in Church on a Sunday morning.”

(D) -  “Netherlands. The Netherlands is a land of paradoxes. A great proportion of the population than in any other European country declares itself in the census returns to belong to no religious community at all.”

(E) -  “Germany. No strong prophetic voices are to be heard from the Churches.”

Continuing, the authors wrote about Europe : “ There are no signs of a great revival of spiritual life, nowhere have the Church broken through a broad front into the newly paganised world. There is much perplexity as to how the Gospel should be preached, indeed as to whether the Church had a message at all for the man of today.”

As regards the ‘Land of Liberty’, the well known commentator, Fareed Zakaria, in his – ” THE FUTURE OF FREEDOM”, wrote,
about the desperate attempts by the ‘Bible Belt’ evangelists to keep the ‘Flock together’ ; ” In the process of expanding, Falwell and others like him discovered that the easiest way to attract a mass audience was to mimic mainstream culture and values, giving people what they want, which is less religiously demanding and more warm and service oriented Christianity. – – – . Evangelical Churches are now designed to blend in perfectly with ‘modern consumerist America”. AGAIN. “Faith as
hedonism was a sublimal message of the Pentacostal evangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Baker.- – – .To practice what they preached the Baker’s built a 2300 acre THEME PARK,- HERITAGE U.S.A.- proudly called a ‘Christian Disneyland.’ Replete with  shopping malls etc “. In short- religion reduced to a commercial venture!!

Staying with the ‘Land of Liberty’, Lisa Miller in a ‘wonderful’ treatise published in the daily – ‘The Daily Beast’ – on 14 Aug 2009, and entitled : ” We Are All Hindus Now ” , wrote:

” The Rig Veda, the most ancient Hindu scripture, says this: “Truth is One, but the sages speak of it by many names.” A Hindu believes there are many paths to God. Jesus is one way, the Qur’an is another, yoga practice is a third. None is better than any other; all are equal. The most traditional, conservative Christians have not been taught to think like this. They learn in Sunday school that their religion is true, and others are false. Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth,
and the life. No one comes to the father except through me.”

Again. ” Americans are no longer buying it. According to a 2008 Pew Forum survey, 65 percent of us believe that “many religions can lead to eternal life”—including 37 percent of white evangelicals, the group most likely to believe that salvation is theirs alone. Also, the number of people who seek spiritual truth outside church is growing. Thirty percent of Americans call themselves “spiritual, not religious,” according to a 2009 NEWSWEEK Poll, up from 24 percent in 2005″.

In his ” PSYCHOLOGY OF PROPHETISM AND A SECULAR LOOK AT THE BIBLE.” (1993),  Dr. Koenraad Elst, the noted Begian historian  wrote :

“ Anyone who cares to look, can see that Christianity is in steep decline. This is especially the case in Europe, where Church attendance levels in many countries have fallen below 10% or even 5%. In most Christian countries (ie, with the exception of some frontline areas of the mission), the trend is the same, even if less dramatic. Even more ominous for the survival of Christianity, is the decline in priestly vocations. Many parishes that used to have two or three priests
now HAVE NONE, so that Sunday services have to be conducted by a visiting priest, who has an even fuller agenda as his colleagues keep dying, retiring, or abandoning priesthood without being replaced. The average age of Catholic priests in the world is 55. In the Netherlands it is even 62, and increasing- — . The fact is modern people just are’nt very interested anymore in practicing Christianity.”

AGAIN. “- — – but the fundamental reason for the decline is intrinsic to the Christian faith.- – -. The central defining
element in Christianity that cannot possibly be saved, is the composite doctrine of prophetic monotheism. The notion that
there is a SINGLE GOD, CREATOR of the Universe, who is interfering with His Creation, by sending messages to privileged spokespersons called ‘prophets’, flies in the face of rationality. People will accept that reason isn’t everything, but not that your central belief system is so militantly opposed to reason.”

Dr. Elst gives the example of Dr. Herman H. Somers. a Jesuit priest. He wrote:

” He studied in Leuven and Rome, and is an M.A. in Philosophy, Ph.D. in Classical Philology (i.e. Latin and Greek), Ph.D. in Theology, and Ph.D. in Psychology.  For forty years he was in the Jesuit order.  He had worked as a schoolteacher, journalist for the Jesuit-led paper De Linie, lecturer in Classical Philology and in Psychology, practising psychopathologist in a mental asylum, before he went on to devote 25 years to scientific research.  He has been active in a variety of research projects, from noise ecology and experimental psychology to pioneering work in computer-aided mathematical text analysis of the Bible.

As he studied the Bible more closely, he developed doubts about its divine character.  In the face of unexpected findings inconvenient to the faith, he refused to renounce scientific standards, and drew his conclusions. In what he describes as a painful process, he grew away from the Christian faith, and left the Jesuit order.  Pro-Jesuit sources claim that it is only because of his unwillingness to comply with his vow of poverty (concretely: renouncing the family property in favour
of the order after his mother died) that he has left the order.

In 1986, he published the book: Jezus de Messias: was het Christendom een Vergissing? (“Jesus the Messiah: was Christianity
a Mistake?”).1 Written in Dutch, it is an abridged version of a more technical study in French, which he sent to a number of experts and interested parties, among them the Vatican.  It is a ground-breaking exploration of the psychopathological syndromes accurately described in the New Testament, especially of Jesus’ mental condition.

In June 1990, he published a more voluminous sequel, this time also dealing with the Old Testament prophets.  It is called: Toen God sliep, schreef de mens de Bijbel.  De Bilbet belicht door een psycholoog (Dutch: “When God slept, man wrote the Bible.  The Bible explained by a psychologist”). We hope that it will soon be translated into all major languages, and meanwhile we will offer a summary of the book’s most striking points.

Since then, Dr. Somers has also written a history of the Jesuit order, a psychological study of Mohammed, and a study of the Jehovah’s Witnesses “.

And, the Indian ‘Harvesting’ scene is best captured by Sir Mark Tully, the former BBC Station Chief in New Delhi, in his
most readable – ” No Full Stops in India “. He wrote : ” The bulk of their converts came from the untouchable community and thetribes. One Roman Catholic friend of mine still refers to Harijan converts as ‘POWDER MILK CHRISTIANS’, and there is no doubt that these people- the poorest of the poor were attracted by the MISSIONARIES’ PROMISES TO FEED THEIR BODIES, RATHER THAN THE PROSPECT OF SPIRITUAL NOURISHMENT.”

It is against the foregoing canvas, should one view the message of the Pope John Paul II’s statement during the Papal High Mass on November 8′ 1999 in New Delhi, which also happened to be Deepavali – ” The first millennium saw the cross planted in
the soil of Europe, and the second in America and Africa. May the Third Christian Millennium witness a great harvest of
faith on this vast and vital continent”.

This, on a State visit, at the invitation of the then ‘COMMUNAL’ NDA Govt. !!

VANDE MATARAM

Warm Regards

H.Balakrishnan

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