By 1529 Sultan Suleiman I of the Ottoman Empire had reached into modern Austria and was knocking at the gates of Vienna. Needless to say this deep incursion into Europe by Islam had Europeans deeply worried about the future of their countries, towns, and cities. Luther put the "Turks" on the same level as the followers of the pope. He thought of both as oppressive and legalistic regimes that despised the preaching of Christ as the only and true mediator for sinners in God's sight.

Sixteenth-century Europeans woke up to the threat of the Muslim Turks, just as twenty first-century Europeans are waking up to the internal threat of a growing Muslim population. It would be easy to panic under the force of this incursion. The question to which this growing Muslim population should demand an answer is, "Why are our churches so moribund that they are unable to take the gospel of Jesus Christ into the neighborhoods where the mosques stand?" Christians should look on the proximity of Muslim neighbors as a blessed opportunity to proclaim Christ to them, so that they would learn of His wonderful mercy for sinners and the habits of forgiveness and compassion, equity and rule of law; cultural habits that make western culture the envy of Arab autocracies the world over. The church has co-opted invaders in previous times. When pagan invaders took the city of Rome in the fifth century, the church took the pagans by converting them in the sixth through the ninth centuries.

It is easy to moan about the threat of the Muslim incursion into the west. It is much harder to see why God would permit this challenge to our culture, form of government, and institutions. Perhaps we should take a clue from the relative weakness of the church. She seems unable to project the truth about Christ into the spiritual and physical ghetto of Muslim construction in western countries. We had better get busy about teaching our children and grandchildren what it really means to be a Christian and modeling that in our daily lives. Unfortunately, most post-moderns only think that Christianity is another religion or set of superstitions just as true as any other, that is, not true in any meaningful sense. When we cannot see the fundamental difference between the humanistic character of biblical law and the brutality of Sharia law, it gives us some idea how little the people of the west know either about Christianity or its rival, Islam.