There were crosses in the mountains near Urgut, a small town south of the ancient Uzbek trading city of Samarkand. The centuries had left these crosses weathered and faint, but they were unquestionably there. My friends and I spotted one, then another, scattered like stars on the uneven cliff face. No one could tell us much about the crosses—not Izad, the man who, with his broken Russian, had pointed us in their general direction; not Rashid Bobo, the Uzbek grandfather who had led us through his property to the mountains. A faded plaque told us that a Soviet archaeological expedition had come and gone, sometime in the 1930s. In the century since, and no doubt for many centuries before, the crosses have remained a riddle inscribed on the rocks, a reminder of a history that most have forgotten.1
The history these crosses represent is a long one. It is the history of the Church of the East, a branch of Christianity that spread across Persia and Central Asia in late antiquity, reaching China by the seventh century. This church was the face of Christianity on the Silk Road, Christ’s representative in desert cities where Buddhist temples and Zoroastrian fire altars vied for space with mosques and church buildings. This church gave many great minds to the universities of Persia, and spread yet further under Mongol rule. Then it dwindled under the weight of persecution and of centuries. The surviving “Assyrian” churches count their members only in the hundreds of thousands, many of them scattered outside their historic homeland. Countries like Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan look like they are, and have always been, Muslim, their faith only recently tempered by nearly a century of Communist rule. The memory of the Church of the East lingers on only in ruins, like the half-buried monastery that initially brought me and my friends to Urgut, or the crosses we saw in the mountains.
But why care about this history? Anyone traveling through Uzbekistan today would be forgiven for assuming the Uzbek people have more pressing concerns, like developing the economy, or modernizing their infrastructure and sanitation. The modern churches and missionaries in Central Asia already have their hands full with the legal hurdles put in place by hostile governments, not to mention their first task of preaching the Gospel. With all these challenges, the history of a forgotten, unfamiliar, often apparently heterodox branch of Christianity hardly seems like an urgent one to consider.
But I contend that this history is worth exploring, and that it is worth exploring soon. My reason for saying so comes from a conversation I had a month and a half later, in a very different setting. At this point, my friends and I had left Uzbekistan, and had passed through Kazakhstan, China, South Korea, and most of Japan. We had just attended a church service in Sapporo, the main city of the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido. I was talking to one of the church members, asking his thoughts on the limited growth of Christianity among the Japanese (by some measures, the world’s second-largest unreached people group).2 With questions as broad as “What does it mean for you, personally, to be both Japanese and Christian?,” I was no doubt testing the limits of his English, if not his patience. But as our conversation proceeded, he mentioned attending a workshop with some other Japanese Christians where they had discussed the history of Christianity in Japan. There were Buddhist temples, he said, that contained symbols that were originally Christian. One of them (he likely meant Todaiji Temple, in Nara) had a small gateway through a post, meant to symbolize the needle’s eye of entering God’s kingdom.
These claims fascinated me. As I mulled over them later, I came to two conclusions, which together also form an initial answer to the question of why we should care about the crosses near Urgut. The first conclusion is this: the history of the global church—whether of Christianity in Japan, or in Uzbekistan—is obscure, and thus often fraught with error and overstated claims. As Christians, we should be concerned with discerning error from truth. The Church of the East is not entirely unknown in the West, but often makes reappearances only through popular-level books whose claims, though often well-meaning, are difficult to verify. The same impression strikes me about the claims made in the workshop on Japanese Christianity: that while the temple decorations and the “needle’s eye” might be distantly Christian in origin, that claim would be difficult to prove, and its implications very challenging to establish. In pointing out this difficulty, I do not mean to discourage investigation of the claim. Quite the opposite. Christians, especially those in academic settings, should bring great rigor and curiosity to examining such claims—not only because it would be wonderful if such claims were true, but also because our commitment to a God who does not lie (Num. 23:19) gives us faith that, even if these particular claims turn out to be misguided, the truth we discover instead will abound all the more to the edification of the church.
This final consideration—the edification of the church—is a crucial one. If our first reason to care about the history of the global church is a general concern for truth, the edification of the church is the second reason, and adds urgency to the first. We should care about this history because the church worldwide—right now—is hungry for it. A global church needs a global church history. This point is particularly true for believers in unreached people groups, who can suffer from a sense of utter alienation from their families, traditions, and cultures. It is true that the gospel takes precedence over all ties of kinship and nation. Jesus is clear that we are to love him above all else, even when that means breaking all human ties (Luke 14:26). But we must hold this truth in tandem with two other biblical truths: first, the doctrines of creation and common grace, which tell us that not everything, or even most things, about culture, family, and tradition are inherently bad; and second, that while Christians should be prepared to suffer rejection and persecution from their kin and fellow-citizens, they should not therefore proactively initiate rejection or persecution, but should make a principled effort to live peacefully with their “old” kin group.3 Even persecution, when it comes, does not justify a flat-out rejection of the old network of associations. We are called to love our persecutors and seek their good (Matt. 5:44; Luke 6:27–28).
One of the main ways to love a persecuting culture is to seek its evangelization, an aim that is significantly aided when Christians are able to give some coherent account of that culture’s pre-Christian history. The task of identifying God’s hand in pagan culture and history is not simple. I take Paul’s discourse to the Athenian philosophers (Acts 19:22–31) to be, in part, a condensed Christian history of Greco–Roman pagan culture, but the specific details of that history have been debated constantly in the two thousand years since. Yet we in the twenty-first century are helped by the fact that many cultures that seem, even to their own members, to be wholly “unreached” have in fact heard the gospel before. This is especially true for those countries within the historic range of the Church of the East, whose histories abound with moments where we can more confidently say that God was at work through the witness of his people. A little precedent is a powerful thing. Pointing out to the Uzbeks and the Japanese that there have been Uzbek and Japanese Christians before can at least remove from the gospel—which is a stumbling-block enough on its own (1 Cor. 1:23–24)—the additional charge of being an unprecedented foreign imposition.
In short, the study of church history can build up the global church by equipping it with tools and historical knowledge to reach their unreached families, tribes, and nations with the gospel. But church history is essential not just as a tool to bring more unbelievers into the church. It is also essential in bringing up believers in the new family of the church. A missionary with experience in Tajikistan made this point to me: the history of the Church of the East, in his experience, is less useful in evangelizing unbelievers as in discipling believers. Believers are not meant to be alone. They are called into a community, and that community cuts not only across space, but across time. Telling the history of the global church is a way of introducing believers to that community, and of encouraging them to remain in it. This, at least, is the approach to history taken by the author of Hebrews, whose recounting of the lives of saints gone before shows us God’s priorities in the telling of history. First, it is faith, not any human metric of “historical impact,” that commends someone to God (Heb. 11:2). Second, history is meant to edify and encourage the struggling church. Going through a roll call of the “cloud of witnesses” serves to encourage those who are still struggling through the race to keep running, and to fix their eyes all the more on Christ (Heb. 12:1–2).
Like the writer of Hebrews, we should seek to make known the deeds of saints gone before, the missionaries and martyrs and faithful Christians from every tribe and tongue and nation—especially those saints who have been forgotten. We do this not for those saints’ benefit, for they have received their reward. We do this for the edification of the church, and of the world. By rediscovering the deeds of these saints, and letting them shine before men, we make the church that much brighter of a light, so that the world may give glory to their Father and ours (Matt. 5:16). By studying this history, we learn that the cloud of witnesses is much larger than we had imagined. Thus, we encourage ourselves, and the church at large, to run the race with that much more zeal, in imitation of the Author and Finisher of our faith. The crosses borne by these saints may now be faded and forgotten, like the crosses at Urgut—but by remembering them, by applying our studies to them, by sorting out what truly happened from what did not, we do honor to the saints of the past, we increase our love for our Lord, and we edify the saints of today.
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published at The Columbia Witness. It has been republished here with the author’s permission and edited for clarity.
Header Photo Credit: Doug RW Dunigan
- Since writing this article, I have learned from one of the scholars connected to Urgut that there has been more work on this location, and related sites, in recent years. This work is ongoing, and deserves to be better known outside specialized scholarship.
- https://joshuaproject.net/unreached/1.
- I draw this point by analogy with Paul’s commands to Christian converts married to non-Christian spouses: “if any brother has a wife who is an unbeliever, and she consents to live with him, he should not divorce her. If any woman has a husband who is an unbeliever, and he consents to live with her, she should not divorce him… But if the unbelieving partner separates, let it be so. In such cases the brother or sister is not enslaved. God has called you to peace” (1 Cor. 7:12-13, 15).