Surveys show that the church crowds are beginning to reflect the same materialism and relativism as the general population. Could it be that, as in the days of Constantine, a sub-Christian worldview is being allowed to come in and take over the church?

Does history repeat itself? Not really, but sometimes there are interesting parallels. One example is the one I find between the Age of Constantine and today’s “seeker sensitive” and “emerging” churches.

In 313 Roman Emperor Constantine issued the Edict of Milan which granted toleration to Christianity, which had been a persecuted, illegal religion. Of course, the Christians at the time were overjoyed, but modern historians equipped with hindsight see it as a disaster. With conversion now the thing to do, hordes of untaught pagans flooded the church, bringing with them their familiar traditions that became the new Christian norm. The veneration of Mary, it is thought, was the result of pagans bringing into the church the cult of the Egyptian goddess Isis (sometimes called Virgin Mother) and her child Horus. Extant images of this pair appear hauntingly like Madonna and Child.

Today we have seeker sensitive churches, designed to attract the unchurched. I went to one a couple of times. There was a rock band. There were comedy skits. The senior pastor did stand-up comedy while baptizing babies. There were coffee bars at strategic locations. I asked myself, who has converted who here? Has the church converted the community, or has the community converted the church?

Once an evangelist visited my late wife’s home church. He told us how he got invited to speak at seeker sensitive churches, and then was told, “Don’t mention things like sin, judgment, or hell. We’re a seeker sensitive church, and you’ll offend our seekers.” My question is, when it gets to the point that key components of the Christian message must be deleted, can you call them seekers? What are they seeking?

Surveys show that the church crowds are beginning to reflect the same materialism and relativism as the general population. Could it be that, as in the days of Constantine, a sub-Christian worldview is being allowed to come in and take over the church?

Or take the parallel I see between the Age of the Crusades and the Age of American Missions. Both lasted about two hundred years. The Crusades began in 1095 when Pope Urban II called for the re-conquest of the Holy Land from the Seljuk Turks. They ended when the last Crusader fortress, Acre, fell in 1291. The Europeans of that era had had enough of Crusades; they were tired of expending the resources needed to keep the movement going. So they quit.

The American missionary movement began after the “Haystack Revival Meeting,” and in 1810 the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions was created. In the next two hundred years many missionaries were sent, the gospel was proclaimed, and entire societies were converted. Hospitals and schools were started. Today two-thirds of Christians live outside the West. Nowhere is Christianity growing faster than in Africa. The same movement is sweeping across the “Global South.” Read Philip Jenkins’ The Next Christianity.

But at the same time, I see enthusiasm in American churches for long-term foreign missions in stark decline. Like the Europeans at the end of the Age of Crusades, they have become weary of expending the necessary resources to keep the movement going. Over twenty years ago, one of my seminary professors observed that the Holy Spirit was in the process of passing the baton to others. In the early 1990s, missiologist Larry D. Pate wrote of the burgeoning ‘Developing World Missionary Movement.’ God is raising up Asian, African, Latin American and Pacific Rim long-term Christian missionaries, and they are the ones who will complete the Great Commission (Mt 28:18-20).

This is where African Bible College and institutions like it around the world come into the picture. They are training the leaders of this new movement of God. They are correcting the syncretism that results when the church has too few trained pastors and leaders.

So while history does not repeat itself, there really is nothing new under the sun. We see parallels in the epochs of history. Meanwhile, we can be confident that, as stated in the Southern Baptist Faith and Message, “God in His own time and in His own way, will bring the world to its appropriate end.”

Larry Brown is a minister in the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, a member of Central South Presbytery, and serves as Professor of church history, world history, hermeneutics and missions at the African Bible College in Lilongwe, Malawi.