Here in the United States the events of the past 14 months have caused some Evangelicals with an interest in the "End Times" to take eschatological matters more seriously than ever, especially for believers who live in the New York area. We could not watch the towers burn and collapse without a certain existential chill. Here was downtown Manhattan on fire, part of a place many fundamentalists would call a modern Babylon. In the aftermath of the terror attacks all the talk about missing Russian suitcase nukes brought to mind an even darker vision of the entire New York City skyline in flames. 9/11 was a small taste of the apocalypse.

As the world simultaneously focused on strife in Israel and the machinations of Saddam Hussein, who wants to literally rebuild Babylon in the Western desert of Iraq, those of us who take the millenarian view could only hear the tic-toc of the Biblical countdown clock grow louder. Surely Armageddon and the return of our Redeemer was just around the temporal corner.

Of course events like these and worse have plagued much of the world during the past century. Disasters, manmade and otherwise, claimed the lives of tens of millions of human beings. In a sense the entire 20^th Century was apocalyptic. What, some might be tempted to ask, are the 3000 lives lost at "Ground Zero" compared to the bloodbaths of Hiroshima and the Holocaust? The answer for the average American is simply that the old mantra of "it could never happen here" has been blown right out of our vocabulary. It can happen here and we, as a nation, have been shaken to our very core. The United States had no idea of what it was like to live through a mass-casualty incident until the World Trade Center. On TV we watched the epic slaughters going on in the so-called "trouble spots" of the world and never imagined that it would come to our shores.

So what does this have to do with eschatology? Its more a question of what it has to do with American eschatology. Will the ratcheting up of prophetical speculation cause the Church here to adopt a "circle the wagons" mentality? The term refers to the pioneer days of our nation when a wagon train under assault by Indians would cease moving forward but instead create a circular fort in an attempt to hold on until help came. The spiritual equivalent in the 21^st Century is an American Church that has decided to dig in and wait for the heavenly cavalry to arrive, with Jesus on the lead horse.

There is a danger here. The primary mission of the Church in this present age is to engage the world around it and move ever forward in the evangelization of the lost in every culture on the planet. Today we are on the spiritual offensive in Africa, Asia and South America. Cultures that never received the Word of God are embracing the Faith in ways unique to them. The Body of Christ is changing as the fulcrum of Christianity moves from the West to the East and from the North to the South. Just look at the vibrancy of the Korean Church. The largest church in the world isn’t in New York or London it is in Seoul. Meanwhile the battle between the West and Islam is developing into the front line for the evangelization of the 3 billion Muslims who have yet to hear of the biblical Jesus.

Today the center of funding for missionary activity and recruiting of missionaries remains in the United States. As the wealthiest nation on Earth we export missionaries, and the financial and technical support they need, to the rest of the world. This will only continue if the American Church does not decide to circle its wagons and wait for the Rapture. The fact is that our Lord might return in ten years or in a hundred. His timing and ours are radically different from one another. Yes, the signs of the times seem to indicate that He is coming soon but we’d do well to define what "soon" is in the light of a God to whom "a day is as a thousand years". Exciting things are happening all over the world as Christ continues to "call all men to Himself". We Americans dare not miss out just because our sense of security has been shaken.