By Ravi Zacharias
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Though I mourn the decline of western civilization (I can never decide whether to capitalize the "W" and the "C"), I am encouraged about the rise of Christianity in other parts of the world. At the Resolved conference last winter, John Piper looked at the faces in the crowd of 3000 and commented on how many of the young people (mostly college students from southern California) were of Asian descent. He spoke of his hope for a great conversion in the east and he surmised that one day, not too far away, missionaries from the east would be bringing the gospel to America.
In his book What's So Great About Christianity?, Dinesh D'Souza, an Indian immigrant, also discusses the tremendous growth of Christianity in other parts of the globe:
Despite the limitations imposed by the Chinese government, it is estimated that there are now 100 million Christians in China who worship in underground evangelical and Catholic churches. At current growth rates, David Aikman observes in his book Jesus in Beijing, China will in a few decades become the largest Christian country in the world. In Korea, where Christians already outnumber Buddhists, there are numerous mega-churches with more than 10,000 members each. The Yoido Full Gospel Church reports 750,000 members. The Catholic church in the Phillipines reports 60 million members, and is projected to have 120 million by mid-century.
One might be skeptical of such large numbers considering the profession of easy-believism wimpy faith of many mega-church attendees and responders to Gallup polls in America. But consider the cost Christians in some of these lands must pay in order to believe in Christ. In their suffering and even lifestyle, they are similar to the early Christians portrayed in the Bible, and they hold the truth it contains very dearly, just as those early saints did.
Ravi Zacharias, born in the late 1940s, grew up in a culture very different from mine, though, like me, he was from a middle-class family. His father was promoted to a key position in the Indian government as deputy secretary in the Home Ministry (their State Department) in Delhi, allowing Ravi to meet some important international figures while growing up, at the same time he had to scrounge for change and count on the generosity of friends for spending money to keep up with their sports and other activities. Government work did not pay well and family debts made things tighter. Ravi was popular with his friends because of his humor and his athletic abilities, but he was an indifferent student and careless, something which annoyed his achiever father and caused a rift in their relationship—or deepened one which already existed.
One of the ways Indian (and eastern) culture differs from the west is the extreme, strict code of honor for one's family heritage. Often, it's not a person's own accomplishments that matter so much as what his father and ancestors have attained. One of the reasons an easterner would want to be successful is to bring pride to his family. This is true here, too, especially in Christian families where honoring your father and mother is not an option but a command; but it is much more deeply ingrained in the east, to the point that if someone does not live up to even very unreasonable demands of parents, they could be disinherited and ostracized, especially if they convert to another faith. Many young people, according to Ravi, would become depressed over not meeting the high expectations of their families, and the suicide rate was very high. Missing was the Christian concept of fathers loving their children and not exasperating them.
In his book, Walking from East to West: God in the Shadows, Ravi sensitively tells about the difficult life he lived with an unloving and angry father. His mother was a kind and gentle woman who tried to buffer him from his father's harshness. Their family was very religious, but that didn't mean they believed strongly in any one faith. As he says, they tried to have all the bases covered. Astonishingly, in a land of mostly Hindus, who worship 330 million deities, they inherited the Christian affiliation of a great-great-great-grandmother who was converted to Christ as a teenager in the mid-1800s. She had been talking to Christians from a mission near her home and was very interested in their faith. Her family forbade her from contact with them so she went to tell them she could no longer come visit. At that moment, word came that a cholera epidemic was rapidly spreading and that everyone must be quarantined right where they were. So she was consigned to remain at the mission where she could ask questions to her heart's content, and she gave her life to Christ. Though her family (and Ravi's) was from the highest caste of the Hindu priesthood, she married another convert at the mission, a man who had come from a lower caste, thus cutting her off from her family completely. The name "Zacharias" was probably given to the newly-married couple by the German-Swiss missionaries.
Though he had this heritage, Ravi and his family did not have a relationship with Jesus. They attended an Anglican church and his father sang beautiful hymns with a men's choral society (Ravi especially remembers "Abide With Me"), but his mother also consulted astrologers, and Ravi's parents didn't mind when he attended Hindu temple services with his friends. Just like the neighbors who lived above them, where the husband mercilessly beat his wife at night and piously prayed with her in the morning, they were religious but their hearts were not changed. That was the condition of almost everyone they knew.
Because of his strained relationship with his father, and his struggles in school, Ravi became very depressed and decided to end his life, at the age of 17. He seemed happy-go-lucky on the outside, but he continued to descend "into the shadows." He felt that his existence was only bringing shame to his family, so he rummaged through a chemistry classroom for packets of poison to sneak home and end it all. Instead, he got a bad stomachache and muddled head, but he didn't end his life, he began it from that time. Nobody knew for certain he had tried to commit suicide as a family servant apparently disposed of the empty packets, he didn't leave a note, and the doctors may not have realized it as the poisons he grabbed didn't have the effect he intended. While in the hospital, a man from Youth for Christ, whose meetings Ravi had attended a few times with his sister, came to visit him and left him a Bible with instructions that Ravi's mother was to read him a certain passage:
Because I live, you also will live.
These words were the means of opening his eyes to the truth of his need for a Savior, and he was converted to Christ from that moment on, with a dramatic transformation in his life. From being indifferent to reading and studying, he became a serious student of God's Word and voracious reader of Christian literature. One day he found that his father had thrown out a tattered, coverless book in the garbage out back, and with his new-found love of books he picked it up: The Epistle to the Romans: A Commentary, by W.H. Griffiths. He took it and read it (tolle lege!) and continued to grow in his faith. Through his discipleship with Youth for Christ he had opportunities to preach and found he had a gift for sharing God's Word with others. This later led to his well-known apologetics ministry through which many doors opened to him in high places to share the Gospel. He tells of traveling through Vietnam at the peak of the war in the early 70s, with a young translator (who was later captured and tortured for his faith with a tremendous story of God's preserving love in that dire situation), and teaching atheist Russian officers shortly before the fall of communism in the Soviet Union.
When he was 20, Ravi's family moved to Canada, where he met his wife and found his calling. There is more about how his relationship with his father was healed and both his parents became Christians. Through his education and reading and new life in the west, he came to relate more and more to that culture and mindset, but it didn't replace the eastern thinking he grew up with—rather, it embraced it and melded to make a unique person with a gift of relating to people from many walks of life and many cultures.
Though I find it challenging, I also think apologetics is fascinating, and I like to read about and listen to exchanges in which capable Christians answer skeptics' questions. Here is what Ravi says about this ministry:
Apologetics is not just giving answers to questions—it is questioning people's answers, and even questioning their questions. When you question someone's question, you compel him or her to open up about his or her own assumptions. Our assumptions must be examined.If you're predictable in your approach—if your listeners know where you're going—they will turn you off. If you hand people outlines, they're already ahead of you, just filling in blanks. If you tell them they need love, they already know that. The task is to find the means to stretch their thinking in unpredictable ways, to take them in directions they are not expecting to go. Sometimes it is through an argument, sometimes through an illustration, sometimes through a stretch of the imagination. But you've got to take them in a radius of directions, like the spokes of a wheel. That is an Easterner's natural way of thinking, while the typical Westerner's way is more linear.
For its honest portrayal of the difficulties of Ravi's boyhood, for the picture of life in India during that time, for the many stories of amazing providences as he traveled to give the gospel in many nations, for the examples of his apologetics in action, I appreciated this book (not to mention that I couldn't help enjoy it since it was a gift from Ben!) There were also a couple of things in it that bothered me that I do want to mention.
While he was involved with Youth for Christ, Ravi's first opportunity to preach was in a national contest sponsored by that organization. He was chosen to represent his group and region of India, but the contest was open to both young men and women to preach sermons and be judged on the best delivery and content. He tied for first place with a girl, and they had to have a "preach-off" to determine the winner. He won, but in his book he praises the young woman's sermon and expresses surprise that she didn't win. There was no commentary about whether or not it was biblically appropriate for her (or any of the girls) to be participating in such a contest. In other places in his book he very tactfully mentioned faults or problems (such as with his own family) while maintaining a humble and respectful tone regarding those sensitive issues. I'm sure he feels tremendous gratefulness to Youth for Christ for its work in his country which led to his conversion, but I do wish he had discussed this, though perhaps he does not think it is a problem, which would be another problem if he is defending the authority of Scripture as an apologist in other venues. Feminism has become one of the biggest issues facing our culture and the church, thus I think this deserves a mention.
Also, Ravi honestly addresses the fact that his chosen career is very demanding and has led to some health problems and stress that he doesn't always welcome. He mentions that his wife has told him that she misses his sense of humor and that over the years of immersing himself in philosophy and argumentation, he has lost the playfulness that used to be part of his personality. He travels at least two-thirds of the year and that has been his practice since he began Ravi Zacharias International Ministries (now in Atlanta). That didn't allow for much family life, though he did and does include his family in his travels and his work as much as possible. Perhaps this is his special calling, but like the question in a children's picture book we have, "What if everybody did?" It seems like more and more Christians want to tackle the world's issues from the top down, and while I think it's a blessed thing to have "our guys" at the top, if possible, I think it's a far better thing to have faithful Christians at the "grassroots," or working from the bottom up, serving God by raising children (and lots of them, if God so blesses) to be apologists as well as humble servants in their homes and in their communities and in their workplaces. I don't think Ravi Zacharias would disagree with this, but I think we need to be careful not to put Christian heros on a pedestal and think that we are not serving the Lord in just as important ways in our families.
I am grateful for his ministry and his story encourages me, but I think that 100 faithful Christian families can have a far greater impact on the world long-term, in God's timing, than one very impressive and godly man, even though he has spoken before leaders of nations and even the United Nations. Let's be faithful in the places we are called, and the world will be blessed, both east and west.
