Not Part Of The Muslim Mindset

Not long after this post first appeared on September 6, 2013, it became one of my most viewed posts.  I am repeating it below with some updates.

Indonesia has some 17,000 islands (I say "some" because a few disappear at high tide─an Indonesian joke), with 266,000,000 inhabitants. It is the fourth most populous country on the planet, and has the largest Muslim population of all nations.
[Photo by Tom Fisk from Pexels.]

Many non-Indonesians are surprised to learn that 87% of the Indonesian population claims to be Muslim. In fact, Indonesia has more Muslims than any other nation on earth. The number exceeds the number of Muslims in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Kuwait, Yemen, Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan combined! 

How did it happen that this part of the world, so far from the Middle East, came to have such a large number of Muslims? Michael Baer, in his book, Business As Mission, shared this: 

"I once asked an Indonesian Christian why the country had become so predominantly Muslim...She said that when the Western Christians came, primarily from Holland, they built missionary compounds and missionary churches and expected the Indonesian people to come to them. The Muslims, on the other hand, came as traders, farmers, merchants, and businesspeople and simply lived among the natives."

The significance of this answer cannot be overstated. 

Dr. Darrell Furgason, an expert on Islam, has said:  

"In places like Africa and Indonesia, the church has been intellectually crippled, with one hand tied behind its back. Western missionaries generally brought the Gospel in the way they learned it, as a purely soul-saving faith, with no real bearing on anything else--religion was a mostly personal matter, nothing to do with things like politics, science, law, economics...African people were given the Gospel, but not how to build a righteous nation, how to apply Christianity to everything

...Muslims see their faith as all-encompassing..."

Most Christians have reduced the "Gospel" to the "Gospel of personal salvation." Yes, it is that. But it's more than that. Let me repeat: the Gospel is more than personal salvation. 

The Bible speaks of the Gospel of the Kingdom. And guess what. The Kingdom is larger than human souls. It is all-encompassing, and that's Good News!

The Sacred-Secular Divide, SSD, is not part of the Muslim mindset. Yet, regrettably, it is a big part of the thinking of many Christians. 

Reducing the Gospel to a matter of personal salvation has been done to the detriment of many nations, not the least of which is the United States, where we are now experiencing the painful outcomes. 

We have brought it upon ourselves.

David Oliver, author of  Work: Prison of Place of Destiny relayed this to me: “I visited Kuala Lumpur, capital of Malaysia, and was doing some work for the Focus On The Family folks. On one day off I was doing the tourist thing walking round the 360 observation platform on the Menara Tower. There were 12 observation stations, each one with an audio sound track, and when I got to the final station (12) I pressed the number on the MP3 player. Whilst looking out over row after row of golden domed Muslim mosques, I heard the following narration which is etched into my memory as clearly as if it had been yesterday: ‘In the 18th century Indian traders came to our land, and showed us by their faith and lifestyle that we could be freed from the shackles of Buddhism. So we embraced their faith, their language and their life style, and have done so till this day.'” [Photo of the Jamek Mosque, in Kuala Lumpur, by Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams (Earth), reprinted with permission.]

Posted by Dr. Christian Overman