A Theology of Church Extinction

Here is an interesting interview from CT with Philip Jenkins. Dr. Jenkins is the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Humanities at Penn State University.

I found the final three questions to be the most interesting.

You argue that we are lacking a theology of church extinction. Why do we need one?

I sometimes ask audiences how many people have ever read a book on the growth or establishment of a church, and many people raise their hands. Then I ask how many people have ever read a book on the death or extinction of a church, and virtually nobody does. But in history, church death is a very common phenomenon. Christianity moves from one area to another, but it also dies in areas where it has been strong. That fact violates a lot of what we expect about Christian growth. We have a theology of mission, not a theology of retreat. So do we explain these episodes as the churches doing something horribly wrong? Do we regard them as a natural part of historical development? Do we think that if Muslims replaced Christians in a country like Iraq, the expansion of Islam must be within God's plan? How Christians actually deal with things like the destruction of the church in Iraq is by not talking about it. We pay no attention to it because we don't know about it.

So our ignorance is both a product of our own historical situation and maybe a willful turning of our eyes from the carnage?

It's something of that. But I don't want to criticize Americans who, for example, are very conscious of the suffering church. And they try to alleviate that suffering and intervene politically. But suppose churches do vanish. Across much of the Middle East, the last century since 1915 has been catastrophic in terms of the destruction or annihilation of churches. I really don't know people who are writing about that or trying to address that theologically.

How do you relate that need to the obvious spread of Christianity around the world?

I suppose coincidence is not a word that should be used by anyone who has any sense of Providence, but 1915 marks the beginning of the end of Christians in the Middle East, and the beginning of mass Christianity in Africa. It's almost as if one door closes and another one opens elsewhere. I would not say God closed one eye and opened another, but when Christianity is at its weakest in one area, amazing new opportunities open elsewhere. My concern is that when we write Christian history, so often it's a matter of, "Let's look at this expansion, and let's look at this growth and new opportunity." We're not really seeing the doors that are closing—which would have been a great title for the book.

Read the whole thing.

Philip Jenkins is the author of The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia — and How It Died (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2008).

Other books by Dr. Jenkins.