New Around the Mission

March 2, 2009

Never Silent: A Story of Hope for a Nation in Crisis

Review by Michael A. Milton, Ph.D., President, Reformed Theological Seminary, Charlotte, North Carolina

We are facing a crisis in American Christianity:

•The breakdown of credal Christianity has reduced most of our older mainline denominations to teetering with heresy;
•The almost wholesale amalgamation of the evangelical churches with the culture has left the Church in North America without prophetic voices (but only therapeutic ones);
•The unmitigated propagation of “tolerance” teaching and hatred of Biblical Christianity in our secularized culture is staggering.

May I suggest a trilogy of books to you? I would begin with two of Philip Jenkin’s books, The Lost History of Christianity and The Next Christendom. But I would also add this third book that I want to highlight today: Never Silent: How Third World Missionaries are Now Bringing the Gospel to the US by Thaddeus Barnum.

The Right Reverend Barnum is a bishop in Connecticut, in the Anglican Mission in America, consecrated by the Church of England’s Province of Rwanda. I commend the first two books to you in order to see encouraging signs of how the Holy Spirit is in fact moving in nations around the world to bring the Gospel of Jesus to the world through transformed lives. In African and in Latin America and in Asia and the sub continent of India, God is at work in great ways that ought to excite the hearts of those living in Old Christendom. But in Thad Barnum’s book, which chronicles the story of the coming of the African Anglicans into America, we are not only excited for other nations but given hope for our own. There can be no doubt that one of the most exciting movements in America today is the Anglican Mission in America and other Anglican groups who are planting churches, revitalizing churches, sending out home missionaries to prisons and schools and universities. Who would have figured that God would hit the American church in the heart to revive us with Episcopalians? And who would have thought that the jump start would come from African Anglicans? And not only African Anglicans but those who come from the poorest, most war-devastated country in Africa, Rwanda? But isn’t this just like the God who, in the middle of the story of national spiritual collapse in Judges and the continuing story of Israel in 1 Samuel, places the story of Ruth and of Hannah. A Moabite woman and a childless and may be add abused lass, whose heart longs for redemption, lead us to see that God can do great things underneath the larger and more visible “higher history” of nations and kings and queens and rise and fall. And in our time, we must be encouraged that He is at it again. He is going great things as a new Christendom emerges, but He is sending missionaries from those places back to our “Babylon” to bring revival.

Barnum concludes his book with these words and his conclusion on how we in old Christendom must now respond to our own people in sin:

“It is hard enough to face the pain of my own sin, but to face the people who have bound my heart in anger and bitterness? To go to them while the pain is still fresh, the wound deep and exposed, and forgive them as the Lord Jesus Christ has forgiven me? But this is what the global South missionaries are demanding from us. They’ve come to mentor us in Christ’ to shake us from our sins of arrogance and prosperity that have lulled us to sleep and rendered us passionless...They want us in the mission field with those who are lost without Jesus.” (279).

I put down Never Silent after having read Jenkin’s books and turned again to Christ. I asked Him to give me the courage of not only the global South missionaries who are now coming to us to never be quiet in the face of sin, to always act on behalf of those in trouble, and to never bargain or make deals with blatant devils. And I think if you read this book you too will go to God in prayer. And maybe something will happen to you that happened to me; something that is becoming quite rare in these days: you will have hope.

Posted By: Cynthia P. Brust
Categories: Archived News