Monthly Archives: November 2014

The 67th annual meeting of the NWBC is in the books. Around 400 messengers met together for two days of encouragement and inspiration. Friendships were renewed and new friendships were begun. The general tone of the meeting was hopeful. The partnership we’ve entered into with our IMB partners in East Asia holds out a great promise of fruitfulness both in a difficult part of the world and in our own communities. After years of budgeting by dreams the NWBC is now very close to budgeting according to reality – being able to anticipate income and planning on expenses to achieve our goals. Our executive director, Randy Adams has now been on the field well over a year and has travelled extensively throughout our large geographical expanse. New staff are being added in order to more closely align our staffing with our goal of supporting churches with regional field personnel. The biggest ‘win’ of the past year was paying off the indebtedness of our building in Vancouver, WA. There is still work to be done in creating the kind of staff that will most effectively meet the needs of our churches, but actions taken this past year are making that vision more a reality than before.
As we move forward as cooperative churches our task is the same: pushing back the darkness of lostness in our local communities, in our region, and in our world. The fact that there is very little dissension or disagreement among our churches and our leaders speaks well of the foundation laid by leaders who are now experiencing the rest promised to believers in Jesus Christ. The opening of a regional campus of Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary in the Northwest has enabled several generations of leaders to be trained and deployed here and abroad. The lean structure of our staff means that our staff is more responsive to the needs of specific churches and less driven by programs emphases from other SBC entities.
As I write I often listen to symphonic works by classical composers. Listening to the musicians cooperate to create music that inspires and expresses deep emotions, I am always reminded that while first chair instruments are important, so are second, third, and fourth chairs. Without a strong connection between the sections of the orchestra and the conductor the sound would be indistinct and often cacophonous at best. As we loo forward to NWBC Annual Meeting 68, November 2015, let’s continue to play our parts, continue to fix our eyes on Jesus, and listen for the voices of thousands and hundreds of thousands to be added to the chorus of Hallelujah’s around the throne of God!

Word War I is often called ‘the War to End All Wars.’ From our vantage point one hundred years later, we now recognize that WW I was really the beginning of a century of conflict that continues even now. At the beginning of the 20th century many intellectuals thought that the inevitable progress of human beings would cause religion to fade as humans lived up to their full potential. However, WW I cruelly crushed those dreams as all sorts of horrors were unleashed by human beings against other human beings.
‘Holy War’ evokes all sorts of responses. Philip Jenkins, an eminent historian, claims that World War One (the ‘war to end all wars’) is just that: a ‘Holy War’ . This battle often called The War to End All Wars pitted Christian nation against Christian nation. Even notionally secular states (France, Italy, and the United States) used specifically Christian imagery to rally their constituencies to support the war effort. Jenkins demonstrates using accounts drawn from soldier’s diaries, contemporary newspaper articles, and other material that WW I impacted religious thought and practice for Christian, Jew, and Muslim. States/empires such as the German Empire, the Russian Empire, long associated with particular strands of Christianity were changed in significant ways by the brutality and scope of the conflict. Though WW I started as a regional conflict European nations used the opportunity provided to strengthen their colonial holdings in Africa, Asia, and South America.
Though citizens in Great Britain, Germany, Russia (pre-1917) and the United States all claimed to believe in the same God to an unbeliever the images and language used must have been extremely confusing. All sides claimed that the same God was indeed on ‘their’ side and that this God encouraged brutality and even in extreme cases, genocide.
Jenkins uses a compelling narrative to illustrate and highlight the religious nature of the conflict and to impress upon the reader how believers were forced to re-think their previous understandings of God. Victor and defeated alike were forced to evaluate their convictions and their theological understandings during and after the war. The protracted stalemate in France created an inherent tension as all sides sought to generate support and enthusiasm for continuing the war by using common religious symbols. Jesus was pictured as ministering to the dying by all sides. The eschatological concept of Armageddon was also used by Germany, Britain, and the United States as a tool to prop up support particularly during the stalemate of trench warfare in 1916-1917.
Particularly enlightening are Jenkins’ chapter on the religious impact of the war in African nations and the growth of Pentecostal-type movements during and after the war. The Muslim world was impacted as well. As the Ottoman-Turk Empire crumbled and the caliphate was abolished, Muslims were forced to look elsewhere for sources of authority and political/religious leadership. An interesting side-note in that chapter points out the impact of the shift in Muslim theology upon a young man who would later come to Iran as the Ayatollah Khomeini who authorized the captivity and imprisonment of a number of American diplomats in the late 1970’s.
Indeed, as Jenkins concludes, “Not only did the First World War show how calamity can transform the world, but it also suggested just how long it takes for the results to be apparent…Only now, after a century, are we beginning to understand just how utterly that war destroyed one religious world and created another” (377).