The road to Christ’s kingdom on earth is a decidedly bumpy one, including detours.

Looking back over history, we see a pattern: When Christianity appears on the cusp of spiritual world conquest, some failure snatches away the victory. Christ’s followers must regroup.

Perhaps most Christians in the first few centuries after Christ thought of the world where they spread the religion of Jesus as mostly or primarily the Roman world into which Jesus came. As then, Christians again and again have had to jettison their small world view for a larger one. This revelation often seems to happen during times of threat to Christianity.

The civil government of Rome collapsed, and Christian missionaries discovered, in the ruins of that world, the larger European world. That world continued its influence for many centuries. The world for Christians was mostly Europe and nearby areas: the Near East and North Africa.

When that world was shaken with stunning victories by tribes out of Arabia, the idea of a Christian world was put on hold while Europeans fought for survival.

However, during those dark times, Christianity continued to quietly spread—to the Anglo-Saxon world and Ireland and into the far north of Europe.

When Europeans defeated their enemies and began to claim power, the church, which had comforted and sustained its people during the dark times, was tempted toward power instead of seeking the way Jesus had walked. Even as Europeans began centuries of world conquest, Christians had to make choices. Some people calling themselves Christians too often sought domination rather than service. Horrible wars, surely an abomination to the spirit of Jesus, have left aftereffects in the repudiation of a Christianity by some who saw its adherents as seeking physical conquest, not spiritual.

Yet, despite the difficulties, some Europeans broke through the nationalistic wall and spread the religion of Jesus to the non-European world, just as their ancestors had spread it to the non-Roman world.

American Christians may have to choose between a religion which worships a nation and the one begun by Jesus for the entire world.