#285 | The Rise and Fall of Christian Influence: Lessons for Today with Dr. Brian Stanley

Today's episode is brought to you by the Danna family. May you be a blessing to the world as much as you have been to me.

Extreme individualism has eroded the idea of Christian community.

Where churches have grown, they've grown because Christian communities have been plausible in embodying the kingdom of God, in embodying gospel values.

The Christian congregation that lives according to the values of the kingdom of God and can be seen to do so is the most effective missional instrument that there has ever been or will ever be.

What if one of the biggest challenge facing your church right now isn't new at all? What if the tension you feel between faith and culture, mission and power, credibility and decline has all happened before?

And what if the church in the Western world actually depends on whether we're willing to learn from the global story of Christianity, not just our own?

Well, I want to welcome you to today's episode of Ministry Deep Dive, where we help pastors and ministry leaders think deeply so that they can live faithfully. I'm your host, Travis Michael Fleming.

And today we're diving into the rise and fall of Christian influence in the west, the global shift of the church to the south, and what it really means to be faithful in a post Christian culture. My guest today is Dr. Brian Stanley, one of the world's leading historians of global Christianity and mission.

And his work sheds light on how the church has navigated empire, cultural power in decline, and what it means for Christian leaders today. Dr. Stanley, I'd like to welcome you to Ministry Deep Dive.

Thank you very much, Travis. Good to be with you.

Are you ready for the Fast five?

Yes, indeed. Let's go.

Okay.

This is going to be a bit of a strange one, probably one you've never received as an academic before, but if you were a section of the grocery store, what section would you be and why?

Wow. Ah. I guess I might be the bakery with lots of tasty pastries and croissants, but also just some ordinary bread that keeps you going from day to day.

So maybe in my work, I try to mix the pastries and the ordinary bread.

All right, well, how about this second one? What's a book besides the Bible that you think every pastor should read today?

Well, I think I would go for Leslie Newbegin's the Gospel in a Pluralist Society, because that's relevant to quite a few of the things we may be talking about later. It's not always easygoing, but it's highly relevant still.

So a lot of our ministry has been influenced by him. So I Am full, wholehearted. I'll give a five star huzzah to that one.

All right, number three, which historical Christian figure do you think would surprise us most if we met them today?

Well, Well, who would I come up with there?

I know for a historian it's hard. You've got so many to choose from.

So many to choose from.

I think I might go for one of the heroes, as we regard them, of struggle against slavery in the West Indies, particularly Baptist missionary called William Nib, who was instructed by his missionary society when he went to Jamaica to. To keep quiet about slavery. Basically that was off limits. You just had to accept the structures.

And he did actually, just about to line until the point when the slave owners began to persecute the Baptist chapels and burn them down. And then it became a basic issue of Christian liberty. And that was really the beginning of the end of the plantation slavery in the Caribbean.

So he's fascinating man.

Are there biographies available today? That's not one of the fast five, but are there biographies available of him today?

He's not so well known as he should be.

Well, maybe our conversation today will help put that, you know, into practice. Let's hope.

Well, we might, might come back to him later. Yeah.

All right, then how about this? This question number four. What's one assumption that people make about church history that's just plain wrong?

I think that too often people see it as a sort of treasure trove of nice stories which can be used to beef up your spiritual appetite, which can happen and maybe should happen. But I think primarily we are there to observe and to listen and to learn and not to take lessons from the past.

For today, as it's often said, the main thing we learn from church history is. Or the main thing we learn from history is that we don't learn from history.

You know, I like that quote that you put in your book. You said you were quoting LP Hentley and he said the past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.

Indeed, we have to recognize that people in the past had their own structures and frameworks of meaning and value which may or may not coincide with ours.

And if we just leap in with condemnation and horror, then we're probably making exactly the same mistake that missionaries did in the past when they visited an alien culture.

Well, let's get into the fifth question. It's become kind of a slower fast five. But let's get to our next one and our last one is this.

When you're not reading or writing, what actually helps you rest?

Oh, walking mainly. I live on the edge of the sea outside Edinburgh.

We have a nice coastal path that goes all the way around the county called Fife, all the way up to St. Andrews and that's a beautiful long distance coast path to walk. So we do quite a lot of that.

Well then, let's transition or walk into your book. We have it just coming out again. Christianity and Empire Revisited. Tell us the reason why this is coming out again revisited.

Oh, well, yeah, the book is out for the first time, but the revisiting is the visiting of the topic, which has attracted enormous amounts of debate and controversy, quite a lot of vitriol in places.

And it's an attempt to see the whole topic through a more nuanced and complex lens because it's not a straightforward topic and too often we assume that simple answers can be produced which send us away feeling self righteous and, you know, we're the ones who've got it right and the people in the past are the ones who've got it wrong. So it's attempting to unpack complexity of a subject and partly because what is an empire is one of the subjects it unpacks.

And how did it differ from a nation? Really there's no very straightforward answer to that because the default setting in history is actually empires.

Nation states are comparatively recent as a form in history and powerful nation states turn into empires, powerful empires turn into nations if they can convince everybody else that that they really are nations. So that's just one aspect of the complexity of talking about it.

So we're talking then about empire and how Christianity has really expanded along those lines where politics has been in some way and not infused but connected both good and bad with the expansion of Christianity as it's gone out within the world. Correct?

Absolutely. Christians in the west have depended on empire in all sorts of ways.

Very often when they wanted to travel to India or the South Seas or China, they would travel on a ship that had an imperial or unsavory trading purpose. So that one of the Great 19th century China missionaries traveled up and down the China coast on Chinese junk that was primarily in the opium trade.

So you get that sort of anomaly in terms of access that at a slightly less controversial level, people only get excited about the part of the world that they know about and or want to know more about and a part of the world that's being debated in current politics in their particular nation, or more generally in the West. So people's interest, Christians interest in one mission field rather than another is often related to political developments.

So that's just a reality you have to come to terms with.

So then why is this such an important topic then for ministry leaders to begin to comprehend?

I know that you're coming at it from an academic position and you're looking at the nuance of the argument, but for those people that are just starting to look in, why is it so important for them to understand the ramifications if they don't challenge their presuppositions of Christianity and this notion of empire?

Well, I think it's partly an apologetic necessity to show that the relationship between Christian expansion and political expansion of a particular European power is not some sort of hand in glove conspiracy.

It's almost always a two way complex relationship in which the two sides are working together inevitably to some extent, but always in tension with each other. Thus the two sets of objectives are quite different.

So very often imperial administrators and so on regarded missionaries as rather embarrassing, awkward guys who had to be tolerated.

So there's an enormous body of opinion in the world today that reacts against the involvement of missionaries from the west in spreading Christianity. And that reaction comes from Christians in the non Western world as well as non Christians.

But the reality is there wouldn't be Christians in the non Western world if these missionary movements hadn't taken place. Now they've been supplanted increasingly by non Western missionary movements.

So it's an ability, it's giving people the ability to engage intelligently and humbly with the complexity of our Christian past and not just to jump on the bandwagons that you may get from listening to the media.

Are you then saying that the media then is trying to create a narrative and is that a negative narrative you're referring to there?

Oh, undoubtedly in Britain and Europe it is. I think it might be a bit more complicated in the States. So I think even there it's probably increasingly a negative narrative.

But you've only got to look at almost any TV documentary about missionaries or to read an article about them in the press or on social media in Britain, and it will subscribe to all these caricatures of the past and accepts a great deal of that as simply unquestioned.

So then they're saying, and I just want to make sure that I'm understanding that how Christianity and empire then have been fused has been negative because it interrupted the empire or it wrecked indigenous cultures as Christianity went forth because it imported kind of this political viewpoint rather than Christianity itself.

Yes, I mean, it's primarily that Christianity is portrayed as the ideological superstructure of a system of imperial oppression.

That is, it lulled people into accepting the white man's rule by giving them the white man's religion which told them to be meek and humble and submissive.

And so it's seen as a vast goodwinking exercise in which people gave up their land and their autonomy as a result of missionaries preaching a pacific sort of gospel and a gospel which came from the white man and therefore was assumed to be baptizing the whole process of imperial oppression.

So then they were instrumentalizing Christianity for political purposes.

Absolutely, that's the standard line. Yeah.

Knowing that in seeing where we're at today, obviously I'm in the States, you're in the uk, we're seeing a lot of the, especially the political use. I mean, even today Pope Leo just had spoken out about those who use religion for nefarious purposes under that guise, which is much more of a civil.

It's become a civil religion. It's not Christianity, it's something altogether different. How do we then go about.

And again, this is a complex question just because the situation's complex, because as we look at empire and history, we see that there were some who were doing it for nefarious purposes and good came out of it. There are others that did it for the right purposes and a mixture of results in our culture today.

How can we learn lessons on how to try to separate as much as we possibly can from empire? Or is that even possible?

Well, I think we have to develop as Christians a kind of critical mind based on the central certainties of the Christian faith.

But to have a critical mind when we see public figures and public intellectuals using Christianity for their own ulterior motives, whatever they may be. So Christians ought to be always interrogating not just a secular discourse, but a discourse which seeks to co opt Christianity for its own purposes.

And one of the advantages of studying history, I think, is it gives you a sense of, of, well, they're at it again. They've done this before.

Christianity has always been in danger of being co opted for purposes that are not ultimately harmonious with the Christian gospel.

I know that your work takes on a slightly different tack as kind of an outsider's view between one of your colleagues, Andrew Walls, who said that Christianity has expanded historically in one of two ways that we're moving it into, and you may disagree with that, between the crusader mode and the missionary mode.

Yep.

And.

And the interaction seems to be in their use and understanding of power, where the missionary mode didn't have the cultural power, had rely on, in essence, a heavenly power.

They, they both talked about demonstrating, talked about the Bible, talked about all these things, but it came down again to that relationship with power. And the missionary didn't have that power, whereas the Crusader did. And they would coerce or compel. Compel. Do you see that at work in your like.

Do you see both of those at work within this understanding of Christianity and empire?

Oh, yes. And Andrew Walls is my mentor in many ways, so I wouldn't disagree at all with his analysis, which is very illuminating.

And you can see in the history of Christian mission how what he calls the Crusader model applied, particularly for example, in Latin America and the Spanish and Portuguese conquests of Latin America and the role that Christianity played there. Most missionaries were extraordinarily powerless. There were very few of them. They had very few resources. They were isolated.

They had to depend on indigenous people for sustenance, for learning the language in all sorts of ways. Missionaries were not powerful.

But that's not the narrative you get from a lot of representations of the past now, which assumes that they were hand in glove with the imperial power. They had to operate very often under imperial umbrellas of one kind or another, but not always.

They were quite happy to go beyond the bonds of empire and did, for example, in the South Seas in the early 19th century, or much of the early expansion in Africa was well before what we call the scramble for Africa at the end of the 19th century. So it's really quite a complex thing.

It is, but it is fascinating.

And I don't think too many pastors and ministry leaders that are so busy they don't have time necessarily to delve into the intricacies of the history and even where to turn.

I think that's it's harder because again, it's hard to develop the proper categories and the criteria to discern what's readable and useful in their everyday ministry. But it actually is, especially as you see the development and how Christianity is shifting around the world that you refer to in the book.

Yeah, yeah.

What does that mean? I mean, interpret that statistic for us and what that means for us right now in our very growing complex West.

Well, I think it certainly turns many of our sort of ingrained assumptions about what is a missionary and where do missionaries come from. On its head, there are still missionaries from the west, but on the whole a declining number.

There are a rapidly growing number of missionaries from all the countries you mentioned, also the countries of a Chinese diaspora from South America, for example, from Brazil to Portuguese Africa.

It's not entirely new because this has been going on since, certainly since the 19th century, but the proportions have changed and we probably have to expand our definition of what is a missionary because they may not necessarily be working as employees of a mission agency, although there are non western mission agencies that do employ missionaries, but many of them may be in what we might call tent making ministries. And so there's a lot of West Africans working in Europe, which they now regard as the Dark continent.

So it's turning the traditional vocabulary on its head.

And particularly Nigerians and Ghanaians, you'll find in every major city in Europe and probably almost all in the United States as well, with their own churches, many of which have the rhetoric that they are seeking to re evangelize the North.

I think the jury is out on whether that is actually happening or not, because in some ways they started where the Europeans started, with settler churches, churches ministering to their own diaspora populations, which is what Europeans did in many cases when they went to Africa. That's not actually mission in the cross cultural sense that we normally understand. So yeah, the whole geography has shifted.

In.

In this era, we are seeing a browning in a shift.

And I know that your mentor Andrew Walls said that there was kind of a place where it would spring up and then it would die down and it would go someplace else.

Do you see that still being worked out or is that what you mean when you say the jury's still out because those groups have moved, but are they actually going to penetrate those other areas that they've come to over time?

Yes, I mean, it's that area of cross cultural penetration I think is the one where the jury is still out. Yes.

Some of the largest churches in Europe are now black churches and there are now more black Christians worshiping in London on an average Sunday than white Christians. Now, some of those churches are gradually becoming multicultural.

I think the majority of them are settler churches, if you like, for those diasporic African populations. And so although the rhetoric is very much one of what's called reverse mission south to north mission, I'm not sure that it's widely happening yet.

That's not to say that it won't happen. We have to wait and see.

And that takes time. Obviously, things are changing.

We've seen so much with the, you know, the global diaspora over the last 16 years with the largest movement of people in world history.

Now, looking at that and going back over the history of missions for a moment, and we're still talking about empire, do you see the greatest danger to the church, in your opinion, that has been the persecution from outside powers or cultural capture within the dominant culture?

Yes, I wouldn't want to be pressed to an either or.

Certainly I don't want to minimize the enormous challenge posed by direct persecution, which is still a reality today in significant parts of the Muslim world and in certainly parts of China, those are realities. But in China, they don't seem to be very successful in stopping the growth of the church. Quite the contrary, more successful in the Muslim world.

So therefore more damaging.

I think within the Western world, we don't have persecution so much as subtle insinuation and erosion of Christian values by the dominant secular or post Christian culture. And that is ultimately more damaging to the church in the west than anything else, I think.

And that's what we have to wake up to, that it's happening and see how we can be properly countercultural without being irrelevant to the surrounding culture.

Do you think that the growth of the global church in those post Christian contexts where you see this influx is an opportunity for the church to develop a countercultural narrative?

I think it can be.

I mean, one example perhaps is the growth of Korean and Chinese churches in most of the west, where they're probably somewhat closer to mainstream white churches, if we can use that term, than many of the black churches are. And you will go to certainly some Chinese churches in Britain. You'll find a number of ordinary Britons going there.

So I think there are opportunities and challenges posed by LA presence in our midst of younger churches, which have endured considerable difficulty in the whole process of leaving their homeland and settling in a strange place, but are doing it with remarkable endurance and success in many cases.

We're talking about, I know slightly on secularization and not necessarily the premise of the book and not necessarily your area of expertise. But knowing what you know historically, that Christianity once had enormous cultural credibility in Britain and across the west.

Yet within a few generations, that credibility has largely disappeared. From your historical perspective, what do you think have been some of the factors that have helped bring about that collapse?

Yes, it's factors in the plural, I think, rather than any one catch all answer. The world wars in the 20th century have had an impact, though in the short term, they actually increased levels of churchgoing.

But the impact of war on the whole idea of Christian civilization, Christendom, has been pretty catastrophic. But actually, I think that's quite a good thing because I'm not a believer in Christendom. I'm a believer in countercultural Christianity.

I think maybe the biggest impact in eroding the plausibility of Christianity has been the growth of extreme individualism. Now, the enlightenment of the 18th century had a very complex relationship to Christianity, and Christianity in some ways benefited from it.

And much of the Enlightenment was Christian.

But in the longer term, I think what the Enlightenment did was to create the principle that each individual is sovereign of their own individual life and that it is for that individual to make their own choices, to determine their own values, to chart their own course in life with relatively little consideration for others who have gone before and who are all around them. And I think that extreme individualism has eroded the idea of Christian community.

Where churches have grown, they've grown because Christian communities have been plausible in embodying the kingdom of God, in embodying gospel values.

But if your culture is constantly eroding the idea of community in favor of individualized choice all the time, I think social media and so on has a lot to do with this. Then it becomes more difficult for the church to resist that individualization.

And I think we see it in Christian worship has become highly individualized. What we sing is highly individualized. For the church to grow effectively in a dialogue with culture, I think it needs to embody the gospel values.

This is what Neubigen meant by talking about the congregation as the hermeneutic of the Gospel.

That the Christian congregation that lives according to the value of the kingdom of God and can be seen to do so is the most effective missional instrument that there has ever been or will ever be.

One of the things that we have created is something that we call missioholism. Missio holism is that idea of basically everybody being a missionary and looking at the first several centuries of Christianity Scripture.

First several centuries of Christianity is expansion in, in the early church and then the mission field over the last, you know, few centuries, taking those principles and then making them into glasses so that we could actually see to have a missionary lens of things. And it messy.

Holism is what we call a way of life and approach to ministry that is gospel centered, mission framed and cares not only for the task that's being accomplished, but who we are becoming in the process. Meaning that the church itself has to become that hermeneutic of the gospel. And we have four main things that we work through.

Gospel kingdom, church culture and within the church piece.

We advocate for what we call the new creation community, that the church should look and exemplify the new creation in that there should be reconciliation, there should be holiness, and there should be a distinction between the church and the world, which anyone who's read the scripture would agree with. But perhaps the one thing that's different is that we also see the expansion of the church globally.

And we say that the church should reflect the community that it's in and all of its diversity as much as it can within one language in cultural form.

But even gospel expressions is what we call them, are somewhat influenced by the people in that community, the place they're located and the personnel that they employ. But it's been really interesting to examine as the world has become more diverse and multicultural. Do you think the church in the future.

And again, I know you're a historian, you're not a futurist and you're not a prophet, but in your best educated projection, do you think the future of the church is multi ethnic and multicultural?

Oh, absolutely. It can't be anything else. And it always has been ever since the Apostle Peter got the message that the Gospel was for gentiles as well as Jews.

The question where there tends to be more argument is should individual congregations be multicultural, multiethnic?

So there you get the tension between the Donald McGaveran churchgrove principle that people like to become Christians without crossing cultural barriers, which leads to monocultural congregations, the tension between that and the eschatological ideal that the church in glory is to be a church of all nations, of all tongues, of all cultures. So there is a tension there. I mean, I would point go back maybe to what we've come to call the Great Commission.

Though it's only fairly late in Christian history that we applied that term to Matthew 28.

He might have been, but it's not widely used until basically, I Think after the Scofield Bible in the early 20th century. So I think the point I'd make is that first of all, the command is given as part of the resurrection appearance of Jesus.

So this is your new creation thing. It's the first command of the new creation. And secondly, that it's given to the disciples as a corporate unit.

It's not primarily a command to each individual. It's a command that says to the church, you are a discipling community, you are being discipled.

Your job is to invite others to be discipled alongside of you in all your diversity. And then maybe the third thing to emphasize it is the command to make disciples, not to make converts.

And much of Protestant mission history, I think, has missed that point and has been too fixated with numbers of converts. Whereas the term convert hardly appears in the New Testament. There's ideas of repentance turning. That was a lot about discipleship.

One of the items that we've noticed looking back historically, referencing Andrew Walls, referencing David Bevington, referencing Mark Noll and Joel Carpenter, other George Marsden has also been a guest on the show.

Yeah.

And what we've seen, especially with the McGaveran, the homogenous unit principle.

Yeah, yeah.

Was that the gospel in the church growth movement, specifically we see with Robert Schuller kind of starting that modern thread where it's now just been reduced to this justification decision moment, focused on the event and not the sanctification, glorification, or the process has been removed and we've seen a reduced gospel. And part of the reason we see some of the trouble is that in our society today, and again, it's so many different factors at play, is that there's.

There's bad theology, just bad theology that's been propagated and has now become kind of ensconced, especially in America with its high global influence. Because American evangelicalism, and I think it was Noel that said it has four characteristics.

It's pragmatic, it's populist, it's utilitarian, and it's activist. And I think that's true.

And a lot of different Americans are, especially in our short attention span society where it's big on the feeling we have downplayed doctrine because we deem it to be irrelevant, not realizing that doctrine was created in some respect to guard against the heresies of a time, whenever that time is, or whatever, it exemplifies itself.

So we have to breathe in re understand it today, as you said, relevance in showing that it's dealing with the cultural pressures and the thoughts of the age today.

Taking that into consideration just for a moment, being a historian, let's say that we could go 100 years in the future, 100 years in the future and you were to look back at the 21st century. What do you think they will say was the greatest challenge facing Christianity in the early 21st century?

I suspect it may relate to gender and sexuality, because these are the issues which are redrawing the map of Christian unity and disunity in a way that we've not seen until really the 21st century. It was hardly there at the end of the 20th century.

So I think in a hundred years time, the current denominational geography of Christianity is going to look quite radically different, probably according to the stance each church or denomination has taken in relation to those issues.

And I think the challenge is for those of more conservative theology to know how they hold to a more conservative position on such issues without appearing homophobic or without appearing harsh and judgmental or negative.

Because the issues are just polarizing Christians and churches into diametrically opposed camps with very little listening and often with rather little Christian love to those of different sexuality.

Do you think that's going to require us recovering a theology of suffering in the middle of society, meaning that we are to love, but to understand that that love might is going to come at great cost for us socially, relationally, perhaps economically. Do you think that's the case?

Yes.

I mean, I hadn't thought of it quite like that, but there needs to be a very close relationship between truth and love, rather than seeing them as opposing poles of the Christian faith.

And it's how you actually work that out in practice, in terms of your rules about church membership, your rules about admission to communion, your whole ethical standards as a church. I don't have the answers, but it's, as you know, becoming increasingly heated and ultimately damaging, I think, to the Christian.

The growth of the church.

I heard recently it was coming out of the uk, the first time that I've heard this word in a political debate, although I used it in Church probably 15 years ago.

Christianophobia, Christophobia, where people are now saying, wait a minute, because we've talked about bigots and homophobia and all these different phobias. Do you think that that is a legitimate stance for people to talk about in the public square? Christianophobia or Christophobia?

Yes. I don't know whether you're referring to a book by Rupert Short. I think it's got that title.

There's a Catholic commentator who has written a number of books on that sort of theme. But, yes, there are many circles in academia where just to acknowledge a Christian profession immediately puts you beyond the pale.

And that sort of Christianophobia is extremely damaging. And I think we should be really thinking as Christians about how to.

Not just to prepare ourselves to meet it, but how to open up dialogue where we are excluded from dialogue.

Do you think James Davison Hunter has said that Christians have been removed from so many different spheres and the political sphere is the only one that they really have left within the public world.

And the political theorist Michael Ware has said what we see today are Christians treating their politics religiously and their religion politically, which is a very interesting take on it. How do we then, as Christians, within society, in your opinion?

Again, I know you're a historian, you're operating outside of your area of expertise, but knowing what you do know historically, what is the proper way to go about exercising our, I don't want to say rights as Christians.

I mean, Paul draws upon his right as a citizen at different times, even though he was relying on, again, the empire that he was a part of in order to kind of protect himself or to move ahead within the political sphere. How do we do that today without jeopardizing our collective witness?

I think one way may be to begin by asking questions which those who are not Christian will also either already be asking or might regard as important questions to ask, and then gently to suggest that a Christian perspective may actually have rather more plausible answers to those questions which are questions of common human concern. And so there are one or two think tanks, certainly in the uk, that are doing that very effectively.

There's one called fios, which has an extraordinary reach in the public square, and it's not sort of tub thumping Christianity at all, but it's gently encouraging people to ask for sort of questions that may admit of a Christian conclusion. So it's opening up areas of debate which perhaps have been regarded as off.

Limits, taking that into consideration. And I've heard of Theos, I'd like to get to know them a bit more.

Yeah,.

I'm thinking of the conversation I had with Chantal del Sol. She wrote a book, a small book, called Prosperity and Torment in France.

And in the book she talked about how France was in many respects influenced by the Christian structures of Christendom. Now, that's obviously different.

I'm not a big fan of Christendom either, historically, but one of the commonalities that we're seeing not only in France, but in the uk and not yet so much in the United States, but I think this is growing is the influence of Islam.

How do Christians operating in the public square go about engaging the principles that Christianity has helped provide historically, even though in America, the United States of course was, as you said before, the only nation that was born during the Enlightenment. But how do we then go about engaging with an intolerant faith within a tolerant society?

It's a very small percentage, but I know that it's caused issue within Europe and in UK particularly.

How do we as Christians go about that within the public square without having a common morality to refer to when Christianity in some respect is denied access to create that moral framework?

Yes, I mean, my own impression of a UK situation is the greater danger comes from the political right, which is trying to co opt Christianity into an anti Muslim narrative. Yeah, there's a lot of that going on. But at local level you'll find relationships between Muslims and Christians are often very good.

Certainly at the level of the clergy, there are an awful lot of communal links where those of faith are actually cooperating, where they can cooperate. It's not about diluting one's theological position, but about serving communities together.

And I think the bigger challenge actually for most Christians is actually to get to know Muslims and then to realize that some of the stereotypes of them may not be true. I know you do pose a question about what happens when they become the majority. I still think that's a very long way off, even in Britain.

So I think the first thing is to is to model Christian hospitality to all of those of other faith and to use that hospitality ultimately as a bridge for witness. But even though it doesn't lead to that, it's still modeling something of the gospel.

I think that Christian hospitality is a key. It needs to be recovered. Yeah, I think it's a simple thing that almost any Christian can do.

But I think we've become so isolated from one another in our particular enclaves and in a litigious society that is continually to be that individualism or hyper individualism that you're referring to has done nothing except enable that to go Even further.

Is it necessary then for the church to understand and reconnect perhaps to the Christian past and its understanding of what it means to be a collective and a community again?

Yes, I think, yeah.

Just coming back to the point about individualism, so much of a way in which we present the gospel and encourage people to think about what it is is individualist. Only now I know the Son of God loved me and gave himself for me is part of the gospel. Absolutely.

But ultimately the Gospel is about the new creation of God's kingdom and it's a corporate enterprise and we have to have the vision of what God is doing that is not just an accumulation of individual saved souls. That is a rerun, but more than a rerun of a creative process which God pronounced to be very good. And he's going to be very good again.

I know we're coming to the near the end of our time seeing some of your work. You are one of the world's leading figures in the understanding of world Christianity.

When you're done, what do you hope that your work has done for world Christianity in the global church?

Well, I'm really a historian of Christian missions and mainly from the West. So I leave to other colleagues to write more about the extraordinary growth explosion of non Western Christianity.

So in a sense, I'm a bit old fashioned. I do stuff that others dismiss as Western centric, as outmoded.

But I think it is still important because we need to have a sense of where we have come from. We need to have an institutional memory in the whole area of mission.

If we lose that institutional memory, then we're unlikely to know which way to go in the future. Just as people who suffer from loss of memory find it very difficult to find their way in the world and find future direction.

So I hope I could be remembered as somebody who has helped us to understand the history of the Church's mission in a more rounded, more nuanced way. Not without a good deal of criticism, absolutely. But not to be ashamed of our Christian past.

There's been so much shame about the Christian past, which I think is actually unhelpful and distorted.

As we finish our time here together today. What is one word of encouragement that you would like to leave with our audience?

A water bottle that they can unzip on in the weeks and months to come?

I think it would have to be the growth of the church in China since the Communist revolution, which is the most extraordinary story, I think, in the history of Christianity. And we still not quite understanding how it's happened because it's happened largely without Western missionary agency.

It's happened under a state that regards religion as ultimately an opiate, something of from the past. But God has done it.

And I think that ought to be the most extraordinary encouragement to the church in the west when we're struggling with our own declining numbers, when we're struggling to know how to mount plausible Christian mission today, is to know that ultimately it's not down to us. It's down to the spirit of God, who uses people in ways that we don't always anticipate.

Dr. Stanley, this has been incredibly insightful. Thank you for helping us see both the past and the present with a bit more clarity.

And to everyone listening, if you're leading in a culture where Christianity no longer feels at home, this is exactly the kind of conversation you need to stay grounded and faithful. Make sure you subscribe to the Ministry Deep Dive podcast so you don't miss future conversations like this.

And don't forget to sign up for our newsletter for more resources, insights and tools to help you lead well in today's world. Dr. Stanley, again, thank you for your time today.

Thank you, Travis. It's been a pleasure.

That's it for today's episode. Everyone, this is Travis Michael Fleming signing off for Ministry Deep Dive. Stay watered, everybody.