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Closure means everyone, including Iraq
by Justin D. Long
"The Persian Gulf war was a slaughter... 100,000 people killed in six weeks" stated Jim Wallis in Sojourners (May 1991:4-5). The public was told that the victims were "basically sitting ducks"; bombing them was like "shooting fish in a barrel"; and they were likened to scurrying cockroaches.
Wallis feels that the churches were the most important social institution against the war. He believes that we are at a kairos moment when in the context of "the arrogant assertion of American righteousness," Christians can go deeper in personal and social transformation so that weaker peoples will not simply be at the mercy of the strong but receive the justice they do deserve.
Our concern is not with whether churches are for or against the war. Our concern is that very few churches--or Christians, for that matter--have, throughout the years, expressed any concern for the evangelization of the Iraqi peoples. More than 65% of Iraqis have never heard the Gospel of Christ, and this seems to be of very little interest to either churches or mission agencies.
It's not that there are insurmountable obstacles to bringing the gospel to Iraqis. I could name half a dozen ways in which =ANY= church could be involved in evangelism within Iraq. Yet no one has even asked the question.
How odd that every event in the Middle East is viewed as some sort of fulfillment of Biblical prophecy--and yet the most basic of all points is consistently overlooked. The invasion of Kuwait by Iraq had Bible scholars attempting to understand its significance in prophecy, but they do not notice the fact that most of these peoples are beyond the reach of the gospel. A top priority, according to the Bible, is to see that they hear the message of Christ. Why is it so easy to be unmoved by the plight of the unevangelized world and to treat these people as enemies with no hope of redemption?