MIRACULOUS MOVEMENTS

How Hundreds of Thousands of Muslims

Are Falling in Love with Jesus

JERRY TROUSDALE

© 2012 by CityTeam

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Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are taken from THE NEW KING JAMES VERSION. © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked NIV are from the HOLY BIBLE: NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House. All rights reserved.

All quotations from the Qur’an are from Quran, tr. Mohammed Marmaduke Pickthall.

ISBN 978-1-4185-4728-8

Printed in the United States of America

12 13 14 QG 5 4 3 2 1

ENDORSEMENTS

For seven years I’ve been hearing Jerry’s reports of God’s activity as Disciple Making Movements have unfolded in Africa. This past summer I had to go and see for myself. I heard many of the stories recorded in this book with my own ears from the people whose lives have been radically transformed. I joined prayer meetings as intercessors fasted and cried out to God for peoples and nations. I saw with my own eyes churches that had been planted and communities that were being transformed. And I met many former Muslims who have given up everything the world values, because they have fallen in love with Jesus. Truly, God is filling the earth with the knowledge of His glory as the waters cover the sea! Read Miraculous Movements and glorify the Lord with me.

Claude King

Co-author of Experiencing God:

Knowing and Doing the Will of God

Miraculous Movements is thirty-three amazing, true stories of how God is revealing Himself through visions, dreams, healings, etc. The book also shows how the power of much prayer and simple obedience based discipleship and training has transformed thousands of Muslim communities. CityTeam’s results over the past five years have been outstanding and we are delighted to be partnering with them for the glory of the Father

Hugh Maclellan, Jr.

Chairman of the Board

The Maclellan Foundations

With Miraculous Movements, Jerry Trousdale and his colleagues at CityTeam have made an invaluable contribution to the body of Christ!

David Garrison, PhD

Author: Church Planting Movements

If you want to be truly impacted by a book that has the ability to significantly increase your prayer life and give you a glimpse into how Muslims are making sacrifices to follow Jesus with everything they have, then this book is for you. In its pages are stories of men and women who have nothing to speak of in terms of material blessings, but everything in terms of passion and zeal for risking their lives to follow Jesus. It’s humbling, inspiring, and is exactly what can happen when we show people the gospel rather than tell them.

Arron Chambers,

Senior Pastor of Journey Church

Author: Eats with Sinners (Outreach Magazine’s

Recommended Outreach Resource of the Year 2011)

Kafka said a book must be an ax to the frozen sea inside us. This book is lethal to the frozen modernist Christian mind. God is being true to His Word doing greater things among Muslims as Jesus promised. My heart longs for the western church to wake up to the genius of simplicity found in these disciple making principles. These stories fuel a question that keeps me up at night, “Why not North America?”

Roy Moran

Shoal Creek Community Church

As a church planter for the last 10 years, our family has made it our mission to go where no one else wants to go. This book, Miraculous Movements, very much aligns with this mission of getting to know the community around you and then sharing the teachings of Jesus rather than trying to go in and hope people come to a church or, in some cases, a home church, just because you set up shop. This book shows how to attract people to follow Christ, not try to convert them to simply know Christ. If you want to read stories that will change the way you think about church plants and churches built outside our Western models, this is the book for you. Whether you are a church leader or a person who is curious to see what God is up to in other parts of the world, you won’t be disappointed.

Charles Hill, Church Planter, National Speaker

CONTENTS

About the Team and Author

Introduction

1. Unprecedented!

2. Jesus’ Counterintuitive Disciple-Making Strategy

3. Pray the Lord of the Harvest

4. Inside Islam

Disillusionment and Discontentment

5. Engaging Lostness

6. Discovery Bible Studies and Obedience-Based Discipleship

7. Simple Churches, Dramatic Transformation, Rapid Replication

8. Dreams, Visions, and Miracles Among Muslims

9. “Of Whom the World Is Not Worthy”

Learning from Heroes and Heroines of Faith

10. The Hardest People Yield the Greatest Results

11. Ordinary People Achieving the Impossible

12. Seven Paradigm Shifts

13. Getting Started

Biblical Practices for Engaging Lostness

Appendix 1

Appendix 2

Notes

ABOUT THE TEAM AND AUTHOR

TEN YEARS AGO

In 2002, CityTeam International was a seemingly successful “rescue mission” touching the lives of more than five hundred thousand disadvantaged urban dwellers every year. Yet while CityTeam was experiencing God’s blessing in helping-ministries and evangelism, the organization was a failure in discipling its converts to see real transformation in communities. But that was about to change. That year, CityTeam’s CEO Patrick Robertson read Good to Great by Jim Collins, and, inspired by what he felt was a call to recommit CityTeam’s mission to the cause of discipleship, he invited the staff and board of trustees of the organization to begin a journey into a highly intentional focus on obeying Jesus’ last words: “Go therefore and make disciples.”

Also in 2002, David Watson (now CityTeam’s vice president of Global Church Planting) had recently concluded a season of ministry in Southeast Asia and India that some have considered unmatched in its success in modern eras. But the successes he observed were born of the desperation that followed a tragic disaster earlier in his ministry when several people he had discipled were martyred in the process of planting churches among a very challenging people group. In the grief and discouragement that followed, David knew that something was missing, and he turned to the Bible for direction. He began to see that many of the barriers that keep the gospel from rapidly reproducing in challenging regions of the world are addressed in biblical principles that have almost been hidden in plain sight. The answer to his questions about ministry was more obvious than he could have imagined. In fact, the answer was the Bible itself. This new approach produced amazing outcomes in India as Watson stopped training missionaries from “best practices” models, and simply allowed them to discover what had previously been overlooked: God’s plan of making disciples from the text of the whole Bible.

One year later, in 2003, Jerry Trousdale (now CityTeam’s director of International Ministries) and a group of highly effective African colleagues met David Watson, and they resonated with the intentional application of biblical principles of making disciples who obey God. That led them to launch a ministry that set a challenging goal of seeing at least one hundred churches planted among each of the eighteen largest and least reached people groups of West and Central Africa, churches that would be characterized as “disciples making disciples.” Also around that time, another group of African leaders formed a large partnership of more than fifty ministries to more effectively make disciples among the least reached peoples of East Africa.

By 2006, God had woven together the experiences and newfound paradigms of Patrick Robertson, David Watson, and Jerry Trousdale and their partners in ministry into an alliance of organizations under CityTeam’s leadership. Together, they renewed and refocused their commitment to God’s work of passionately transforming individuals, their families, and communities throughout the world, by establishing self-replicating communities of believers who will serve people in need, proclaim the gospel, and make disciples in the cities and among the peoples of the world. In the last seven years, this network has seen hundreds of other ministries embrace the biblical values and principles that enable these outcomes and become part of the growing partnership of like-minded ministries, the result of which are the Disciple Making Movements detailed in this book.

The common element for all of these organizations is the discovery and intentional implementation of biblical principles and values that have been hidden in plain sight in the pages of the Bible. And each of the hundreds of ministry partners has witnessed the miraculous changes that people experience when they obey God with all their heart.

THE AUTHOR AND OTHERS

Jerry Trousdale and his wife, Gayle, served for some years among a Muslim-majority people group in Africa. Jerry studied missions at the masters and doctoral levels, and pastored mission-sending churches in California and Tennessee. Dr. Donald McGavran, the father of the “Church Growth Movement,” was a member of one of those churches.

In 2003, Jerry cofounded Final Command Ministries to catalyze Disciple Making Ministries among eighteen large unreached Muslim people groups in Africa. In 2005, that African team became part of CityTeam. Today, Jerry and Gayle live in Tennessee.

MUSLIM-BACKGROUND AND CHRISTIAN-BACKGROUND CONTRIBUTORS

Jerry was assisted by three individuals who greatly contributed to the assembling and shaping of this book, but whose names unfortunately cannot be made public.

Over parts of three months, thousands of kilometers, and several countries, more than 130 leaders from primarily Muslim backgrounds, and a few from Christian backgrounds, agreed to be interviewed in depth for this project.

The stories told in these pages are true accounts; none are fictionalized. However, all of the people mentioned have had their names changed, their locations masked, and some details of their stories adjusted to protect their identities. Some of these people’s lives are already at risk, and telling their stories in any form merely adds to the potential of reprisals from some in the Muslim world who might be offended by the reality of Muslims becoming followers of Christ. (In some areas, a Muslim who accepts Christ will face extreme violence, and even death, from the people in his community.)

Yet, in spite of this, many interviewees have told us that it is important for people to hear about the remarkable things that God is doing among Muslims today, even if their stories put them at personal risk. Therefore, you will be reading some of these dramatic stories in the pages of this book, all drawn directly from our interviews with these courageous Christians, and many of them in the interviewee’s own words. (Almost all of the people whom we interviewed either spoke through interpreters or spoke English as a second or third language, and in some instances we have chosen not to “correct” their wording, which may sound somewhat strange to a native English speaker.)

INTRODUCTION

Miraculous movements are sweeping through some parts of the Muslim world today. The Spirit of God is moving in a powerful way—indeed, in a way that we think is unprecedented—as hundreds of thousands of Muslims are turning their lives over to the Lordship of Jesus Christ. Former sheikhs and imams; men who bombed Christian churches and mercilessly persecuted the followers of Christ; ordinary men and women who have followed the teachings of Islam their entire lives—these and many others are finding the truth of eternal life through Jesus Christ, and the number increases every day.

Many of these Muslim people come to God’s Word by dramatic means, through dreams and visions, or as a result of seeing miracles, for men and women are being healed of physical disabilities and addictions, bands of hardened rebels are voluntarily laying down their arms, and thousands are seeing the power of God’s Spirit in their lives. You will read some of these stories in this book, and you will see that what God is doing among Muslims today is indeed unprecedented.

It is not easy to be a Muslim today. If Christians can begin to engage Muslims beyond the headlines of burkas and bombs, we will discover hundreds of millions of disheartened and discouraged people. Muslims’ lives are too often bounded by desolation and broken walls, but today many of them are desperate to discover people who love them, a God who loves them, and hope for the future.

We know this because we have observed up close thousands of new churches planted among Muslims; we have met these courageous people and heard their stories. You are about to meet some of them as well. Their lives will illustrate for you a marvelous picture of what transformation looks like among new Muslim-background Christ followers. Reading their stories is a paradigm-altering experience, which is precisely what we Christians need in order to believe that this is possible and to make it happen.

When Jesus looked upon the lost people in first-century Palestine, “He was moved with compassion for them, because they were weary and scattered, like sheep having no shepherd” (Matthew 9:36). And then He proclaimed something remarkable: these lost souls were a “plentiful harvest” that only lacked harvesters. Therefore, it is tragic when Christians look at Muslims, not with compassion, but with a default to fear, anger, and rejection.

If Christians were to be highly intentional about approaching Islam in a way that is inviting and attractive, without compromise, staying as consistently biblical as possible, here are some of the characteristics that we should expect to see:

That approach would demonstrate the compassion and love that Jesus has for individual Muslims.

It would be grounded in much prayer.

It would depend on Muslims discovering God in the Bible and faithfully obeying His Word.

It would be grounded in making disciples who make disciples, and churches that plant churches.

It would be achieved by the efforts of very ordinary people participating in an extraordinary harvest.

It would expect the miraculous favor of God to reproduce transformed people who are transforming whole societies.

And what would reproduction and transformation look like in Muslim countries? It would look like Muslim-background Christ followers proving their discipleship by bearing much fruit. And when disciples multiply and obey, things change!

CityTeam and our partner organizations are seeing changes as increasing numbers of churches are being planted among Muslims in Southeast Asia, Central Asia, the Middle East, and Europe, but our longest and deepest involvement with Islamic regions has been in Africa. Therefore, over the last seven years, for us and for a few hundred African ministries with whom we partner, the changes among African Muslim peoples has resulted in the following:

more than six thousand new churches have been planted among Muslims in eighteen different countries;

hundreds of former sheikhs and imams, now Christ followers, are boldly leading great movements of Muslims out of Islam;

forty-five different “unreached” Muslim-majority people groups, who a few years ago had no access to God’s Word, now have more than three thousand new churches among them;

thousands of former Muslims are experiencing the loss of possessions, homes, and loved ones, but they are continuing to serve Jesus;

multiple Muslim communities, seeing the dramatic changes in nearby communities, are insisting that someone must bring these changes to their community also; and

more than 350 different ministries are working together to achieve these outcomes.

DISCIPLE MAKING MOVEMENTS

Throughout this book, we will use the term “Disciple Making Movements” to describe what we see God doing to spread His gospel worldwide. In recent years, we have concluded that “disciple making” is a more accurate term than “church planting” to describe the core biblical principles at work in these rapidly multiplying movements.

In the coming chapters, we will explain in detail what this means and how the gospel is being spread to Muslims in particular. In a nutshell, Disciple Making Movements spread the gospel by making disciples who learn to obey the Word of God and quickly make other disciples, who then repeat the process. This results in many new churches being planted, frequently in regions that were previously very hostile to Christianity. All the principles that we are seeing at work are clearly outlined—indeed, commanded—in the pages of Scripture.

As we examine each of these principles, we will use terms that might not be familiar to the average reader, such as “Discovery Bible Study” or “person of peace.” If you encounter a term or phrase with which you are not familiar, don’t lose heart! We will define and explain these terms as we go along. It is not our desire to create a new set of buzzwords and jargon to be bandied about in discussions of missiology, but merely to find easy ways to express important biblical concepts that are at the heart of what God is doing among Muslims today.

GOD’S STORY

This is God’s story, a testimony to the blessings that are “exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think” (Ephesians 3:20), the movements of God’s Spirit that have made these first years of the twenty-first century “miraculous.” It is also the story of many brave men and women who, even this day, are taking God’s story to one more Muslim community, often at significant personal risk. And for those who have endured great suffering for the gospel, and especially for those who have given their lives in recent years for the sake of the gospel, this is also their story. It is our great privilege to share it with you.

CHAPTER

1

UNPRECEDENTED!

You must come back to this area! A tidal wave has come! Muslims are coming to Christ in a flood. Come and help us.

—plea from a former regional Muslim leader who had become a church planter

THE SHEIKH’S DREAM

Sheikh Hanif’s dream was very curious indeed, both over-whelming and hopeful.[1] It was not at all like the frightening and troubling nightmares that he had sometimes known. No, this was very different, and there was little time to reflect on this dream. It required immediate action because, according to the dream, something important would happen today, something that required him to be in place before first light.

Hanif was a seasoned Muslim leader. Like his father before him, he had studied the Qur’an for years. One of Hanif's superiors had observed Hanif’s people skills, which had resulted in his being recruited to organize Muslim communities and launch new mosques. For eight years, he had done this with excellence. For his community, Hanif was the voice and character of Islam, a decent man who represented what it meant to be a good Muslim.

But there was one thing that no one else could ever know. Hanif’s commitment to Islam was genuine, but there was a deep void in his soul that Islam had never really satisfied. He longed for certainty regarding his status with God. He struggled to find answers or reasons for the violence inside his Islamic world. He grieved at the lack of compassion for suffering people. And he recognized that his religion did not allow him or the people he led to make choices for themselves, nor did it give them satisfying answers for the huge struggles of life. But this night, Hanif had awakened in the dark hours with a new hope burning inside: perhaps he was about to learn the answers to these questions!

It had been a dream like no other dream. In it, Hanif had encountered a very handsome and graceful man. The man addressed him by name, simply saying that he wanted Hanif to serve Him. But then came a warning: Hanif must learn to listen to Him, the man said. Surprised and shaken, Hanif asked, “Who are you?”

“I am Isa al Masih [the Qur’anic term for Jesus the Messiah],” the man answered, “and if you obey me, you will succeed in what you have longed for in your life.”

“What should I do?” Hanif asked.

Jesus showed him a tree standing alone atop a hill, a very busy road running beneath its branches. Hanif recognized the place, for it was well known to him and not too far from his home. Jesus then showed him the face of a man and said, “Go now, and wait under the tree by the road. Look for this man, for he is my servant. You will recognize him when you see him. Find him, for he will show you the true answers to all your questions about God.”

Hanif awoke from his dream, pondering his encounter with Jesus, still seeing the face of the man he was commanded to meet. He must not forget that face! In the press of crowds, he might only have a second to make the connection. Within an hour, the first glowing of the East African sky would begin, and the designated road would quickly fill with carts, livestock, and thousands of people with their loads, sometimes overflowing the road space beyond its shoulders and ditches. Finding the man in the midst of this chaos would be a genuine challenge.

Hanif dressed quickly and quietly, not bothering to pack food or water in his haste. He would have to try to outrun the sun to the exact place he was told to be so that he could be there to examine the face of every passing person. Hanif dared not tell his wife about this assignment. She might think that he was under a spell or becoming unstable. Or worse, she might even betray his intentions to the local Islamic council. And even if she was sympathetic, how could he explain that he was looking for a stranger who was being sent to answer all his important questions, deep questions that had tormented his soul?

How many years had he prayed daily, asking God seventeen times a day to show him the right way? But until this dream was given to him, he had feared that he would die without ever experiencing the right way of true peace and certainty. Of course, he had kept all the requirements of Islam—devotion to the Qur’an, leading the daily prayers—yet still he had no assurance of paradise, no enduring “salaam” (peace) inside. How many times over the years had he grieved when trusting Muslims asked him for help with the same issues he struggled with, or came asking how to find unity and love in broken families? How humiliating it was to give them the same answers of “more sharia” that had left him empty for years.[2]

Hanif made his way to the appointed tree, sat down at its base, and waited. He waited and he watched; he sat and he scanned, searching every passing face. From time to time, a thrill would shoot up his spine: “That’s him! It’s . . . no . . . not him.” Time passed and people passed, and still Hanif waited.

In the late afternoon, several miles away, a man named Wafi was wondering if he would finally have a chance to get some sleep when he returned home the next morning. It had already been a full day, and there was still another hour of walking to get to the secluded place selected for this week’s all-night prayer meeting. Thankfully, the sunset winds so common in this part of Africa refreshed him and his companions. Today had been a good day, traveling on foot with the two promising young leaders whom he was currently mentoring, visiting new Christ followers in their homes. There was no better way of making disciples than this.

Wafi had developed an ability to find the people whom God had prepared and positioned to become bridges for bringing the good news of Jesus into a new town. For those who had the privilege of spending time with him, Wafi could always be counted on to model and mentor the disciplines of prayer, the processes for finding those “bridges” into a community, or the patience of overcoming trials. For Wafi, sharing, teaching, walking, praying, and enduring together were how Jesus discipled the Twelve, and it was the only way he knew to do the same.

Curiously, Wafi had recently had a strange dream, in which God had said to him, “I will give you a sheikh!” Wafi understood the dream to mean that God might have a plan to use him to disciple a shiekh who would perhaps become a bridge for taking the gospel to other Muslim leaders. But Wafi would have to wait to find out. That dream, however, was not in his mind as he and his two friends walked along the darkening road.

Meanwhile, Sheikh Hanif, still at his appointed place, was beginning to despair. He had not imagined that his dream-imparted task would take more than twelve hours of scanning innumerable faces, until the last light was growing dim in the western sky, matching his own fading hope. Then, in near darkness, there came a few more people on the now almost-empty road. He could barely discern three figures as the distance closed between them. And then, the one in the middle . . . yes! It was the face for which he waited!

It took a few minutes for the excited sheikh to convince Wafi that he meant him no harm, in spite of the intensity of his greeting. “My friend, understand! It is Isa al Masih himself that requires you to answer my questions tonight.” This seemed to Wafi like a heavy burden, to be met unexpectedly by a stranger and told, “You must answer all my questions . . . tonight!” But the man was unwilling to meet at a later date; he had waited all day—actually, many years—for answers to life-and-death questions, and he was not inclined to wait any longer. And Wafi could not pass up the chance to share the good news of Christ with this man who was so hungry to hear. (Strangely, it was not until much later that he made the connection between Hanif and his dream of God sending him an influential sheikh.)

Finally, Wafi suggested that they go quietly to Hanif’s house where they could have privacy to talk more in depth. There they found a stunned wife who understandably had more than a few concerns about what was happening in her family. But within days, she and her husband had both experienced what true freedom in Jesus Christ means, especially for those who had lived for so long with dark uncertainty and discouragement.

* * *

Since that time, Hanif has been well discipled in God’s Word, and in turn he has discipled two new leaders who are now planting churches in another area of his country. He has also felt the Lord calling him to an even more challenging Muslim area, where he has planted seven churches. And he loves to tell this story with much joy.

The very good news is that every day, hundreds of stories like Hanif’s are happening throughout the Muslim world. In the coming chapters, you will meet many remarkable men and women whom God is using to begin to change the Muslim world. Meeting these men and women of faith helps to move us beyond the narratives of Islam that have been shaped by yesterday’s history and today’s headlines, to discover that the God of love and grace is writing a new story of Islam in our lifetimes. Welcome to the heroes and heroines of God’s Story, the ordinary men and women living in challenging places, praying much, and often with limited physical resources, but in God’s power achieving the extraordinary.

MIRACULOUS MOVEMENTS SPREADING ACROSS THE MUSLIM WORLD

For hundreds of ministries serving Muslim populations worldwide, the story of Sheik Hanif is not all that unusual. Gathered reports from different organizations serving the Muslim world suggest that there may be a million or more people turning from Islam to Jesus every year. Whatever the global numbers, there is no doubt that God is creating a remarkable and unprecedented momentum of ministry in some of the least expected places in the Islamic world, a ministry that looks a lot like a continuation of the book of Acts.

In our own ministry context, “unprecedented” is used to describe the following:

multiple cases of entire mosques coming to faith;

thousands of ordinary men and women being used by God to achieve seemingly impossible outcomes;

tens of thousands of Muslim background Christians becoming dedicated intercessors who fast and pray for the gospel to penetrate the next community;

Muslim people groups that never had even one church among them now have more than fifty churches planted, and in some cases more than one hundred churches—within two years of engagement; and

former sheikhs, imams, and militant Islamists making up 20 percent or more of the new Christian leaders in Muslim regions.

And God’s unprecedented work in the Muslim world has been bringing to light some thrilling and truly unprecedented stories, such as:

two disciple makers refused to give up on a town that had martyred five Christians, and within a few years there were seven churches in that community;

in one country, upon observing the dramatic, positive transformations happening in the newly Christian families and clans of their neighboring towns, Muslim leaders in more than twenty different Muslim communities began seeking for someone to come and share the same stories that had changed their neighbors' lives (biblical accounts told in story form, beginning with creation and working through Scripture to Christ); and

a former Muslim who bombed churches now spends his life praying for Muslim neighbors, engaging them with genuine compassion, making disciples, and planting churches.

A WIDOW, A BLIND MAN, AND THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD

A year after Sheikh Hanif and Wafi met—and a few thousand kilometers away—a man named Zamil stumbled into a taxi and rode away. He stumbled because he had tripped on the curb, and he had tripped on the curb because he was blind. More specifically, he had recently become blind and was still struggling to compensate for his loss of vision as he navigated his way with his stick, learning the art of traversing unseen terrain by feel rather than sight.

Within a few hours, a woman named Nadirah was mobilizing her community to search for the missing blind man. She was called “Mama Nadirah” by those who knew her well, a term both of endearment and deep respect, and she felt personally responsible for Zamil’s well-being. But now he had disappeared.

By any measure, Mama Nadirah was an extraordinary woman. She had grown up in a Muslim home where she was grounded in the Qur’an and the rituals of devotion that were common training in the Muslim families of her city. Unfortunately, that background did not include a chance for girls to have any formal education, and Nadirah never had the opportunity to learn to read or write. But that challenge did not diminish Nadirah’s clear conviction that her life was blessed by God. She knew that God’s hand had been upon her from an early age. God’s hand had brought her together with a Christian man named Charles, leading her to a happy marriage and family and to exposure to Jesus the Messiah. Sadly, after many years of marriage and raising a family, when their children were grown and beginning to leave home, Charles died. Yet Nadirah quickly discovered that, even in her sorrow, she was not alone; she found that she had the Holy Spirit of God to guide and strengthen her, and she also discovered the power of prayer.

Never one to sit and feel sorry for herself, she decided that, since she could not read God’s Word, she would have someone else read it to her and she would memorize it, word for word. And this she did with comprehensive skill, memorizing the Bible so thoroughly that people were frequently amazed to learn that she had never read the Bible for herself. But perhaps most important was the ministry that God developed through her willing heart, a ministry of prayer and loving-kindness to those in need. Eventually, her son Joseph introduced her to the biblical principles of Disciple Making Movements, and she realized that God could use ordinary people like herself to make disciples and even to plant churches. This was revolutionary news!

Over time, Nadirah began to pray with a new level of faith, and then with fervent prayer, prayer with fasting, and even all-night prayers. She lived to pray and to introduce her friends to a life in the presence of God, coaching and mentoring them in the process. Despite the disadvantage of not being lettered, Nadirah took all the training she could get in prayer, disciple making, and church planting, and she excelled. She opened her home and her heart to anyone who came in need of prayer, healing, counsel, friendship, or simply a hot meal.

Before long, the Lord had given her a whole new family of people, young and old, who came to stay in her home. They included those seeking a safe place for a season, others who had suffered tragedy, still others who were desperate to find the truth about the God of creation. These and many more would come to visit her and would end up staying, some for a day, some for a month, but all remaining until they received what God had provided for them there.

This was how Nadirah had met Zamil. He had been a very successful businessman in his city, employing many people and becoming influential in civic affairs, noted in his city for the enthusiasm and zeal that he brought to every business deal. He also was a respected leader at his mosque—not a sheikh, but an important lay leader whose opinions influenced many Muslims. One night, Isa al Masih (Jesus the Messiah) appeared to Zamil in a dream and told him that He (Jesus) was the Light of the World. Ironically, Zamil awoke to the horrible realization that he could no longer see.

Over the course of time, Zamil came in contact with some Christians who took him to a prayer camp, a gathering of Christ followers who had dedicated five evenings to learning how to pray, and whose approach was to learn it by doing it. The believers prayed for Zamil, but his sight did not return. Instead, two things happened that Zamil later came to value more than his eyesight: he gave his life to Jesus Christ, and he met Mama Nadirah, who was the organizer of the prayer camp.

When Zamil’s family learned that he had become a Christian, the response was immediate. He was cast out of the family. His wife abandoned him. His home was lost. His personal possessions were thrown out. But he did not waver in his decision to follow Jesus, the Light of the World.

Zamil turned to Mama Nadirah, who gave him a place to stay, and Zamil started attending Discovery Bible Studies.[3] He learned what it meant to be an obedient disciple of Christ, a person who hears the Word of God and obeys it; and he learned that Jesus had commanded him to go out and lead others to be His disciples. The Spirit of God moved in him, and he found a new zeal: to become as successful in God’s business as he had been in his own.

So he told Mama Nadirah that he was going to other villages to become a disciple maker for Jesus, and she told him that he couldn’t because he was blind. He then approached the missions team that had trained him, asking to be sent out to make disciples for Christ, and they, too, gently reminded him that he was blind.

And so it was that, one sunny morning, Zamil climbed into a taxi and drove away to a Muslim community that God had put on his heart, without telling anyone where he was going. He was searching without eyesight for a person of peace (Luke 10),[4] someone whom God had already begun preparing to bridge the message of Jesus into that community.

A few days later, Zamil phoned a very relieved Mama Nadirah to tell her where he was and what he was doing. About a month after that, he called with the incredible news that, already, a church had been successfully planted in the community where he was ministering, and he was coming home, but only for a short time; he had more work to do. And just six weeks or so later, another church was planted in another Muslim community to which Zamil had found his way.

An unlettered widow discipling a successful businessman who had previously been a committed Muslim until he was blinded by the Light of the World, these are the kinds of miracles and turnabouts that are happening every day, launching movements of new Christ followers all over the world. And the story does not end there. God continues to use both Mama Nadirah and Zamil in powerful ways for His kingdom. The believers of Nadirah’s church have made a corporate commitment to engage the unreached Muslim peoples of their country and to plant new churches nationwide. Mama Nadirah was given the responsibility to build multiple prayer ministries to intercede for God’s guidance in their church’s ambitious project, and she disciples younger women, training them to be intercessors and disciple makers. She also coaches and mentors other men and women who have taken on responsibilities for new prayer ministries under her direction. Some of those ministries include:

advance intercessory teams to research new ministry areas and to lay the important groundwork of prayer in those areas;

intercessors to pray for the pioneer teams who go into those Muslim regions, many times at risk of their own lives; and

intercessors to train new Christians how to pray effectively in every new church. This ministry began by training hundreds of new Christians and has seen a harvest of more than two hundred thousand new Christians in seven years.

The goal was and continues to be that every new Christian in the Disciple Making Movements would fast and pray corporately every week, and that every family or individual would invest time every day in prayer and studying God’s Word. It was and is of utmost importance to Mama Nadirah that every person who becomes a follower of Jesus also becomes an intercessor. To that end, networks of communication have been established to share urgent prayer requests. As of today, more than three thousand believers have given their commitment to fast and pray on immediate notice whenever a spiritual crisis requires it.

Across several movements of Muslims coming to Jesus, Nadirah has provided leadership in the building of a strong intercessory prayer base over the last seven years. Weekly days of fasting and prayer have become an integral part of the normal Christian life, and most of their members spend two to four nights a month in half-night prayer meetings. The churches being planted are often small, basic churches built around family and clan structures and out of public view. But as the movement has engaged more extreme Muslim areas, the levels of violent persecution have grown, and new levels of intercessory prayer have been required. In seven years, more than four thousand new churches (most of them among Muslims) were planted in five countries. Dramatic transformations of whole communities have been common. You will read about some of them in the following pages.

The prayer camps that were so instrumental in Zamil’s spiritual transformation continue to be an effective way of helping Christians to pray for their neighbors and to learn by doing it together. Amazingly, Muslims who are hungry for prayer consistently show up at these Christian prayer camps. And typically, scores of them have an encounter with God that causes them to seek baptism on the last night of the camp.

Near Mama Nadirah’s home is a new house of prayer that has been established to take daily prayer requests from across Africa and beyond. It turns out that Mama Nadirah, who never had the chance for an education, did not really need to read and write after all. She leaves her mark in broader strokes than any pen can make. And as for Zamil: Mama Nadirah just smiles when she tells you that he is in yet another new community seeking to plant his eighth church among Muslims in less than two years. He still has no physical sight, but every day he brings the Light of the World wherever it needs to go.

* * *

Quite candidly, when one reads or hears of all that has transpired and continues to transpire—the remarkable and rapid growth of these movements, the incredible numbers of people who are born again in such a short amount of time, the fantastic and unexpected ways that unlikely people are brought together to make a way for spreading God’s Word—none of this really seems possible. Yet everything you read in this book is happening through a highly intentional focus on making disciples the way Jesus did, informed by the Bible, and somewhat counterintuitive to the types of ministry that most of us have experienced before. Every chapter of this book is about what God is doing, including:

calling Christians to intercede for Muslims;

preparing hearts of Muslims to bridge the gospel into their communities;

revealing Jesus and the Bible in dreams and visions;

turning the hearts of major Muslim leaders to Jesus;

accelerating the process of evangelism with miracles; and

dramatically transforming former persecutors and terrorists.

For sure, this story has many extraordinary heroes and heroines of faith, men and women living in very difficult places, persevering under extreme risks to take the good news of Jesus to the next community. But the headline message for us is an extraordinary invitation to cooperate with God to manifest His glory among Muslim people, as He extravagantly invests His love, drawing them to become His people.

CHAPTER

2

JESUS’ COUNTERINTUITIVE DISCIPLE-MAKING STRATEGY

It didn’t take the goat-herder a long time. Whatever he learned, he went out and shared; every day, whatever he learned, he went out and shared it. In that way, the first church was planted in his home.

—a Muslim-background regional leader

It was Monday, just after lunch, the first of five days of a Disciple Making Movement training in a major African city, as Thomas surveyed the other seminar participants. He wondered why more people weren’t as upset as he was. He knew most of these folks; they were his good friends and colleagues, clever enough people, for certain. But they just kept taking notes while this “expert” who was speaking revealed one nonsensical idea after another, often followed by an even more confounding strategy.

“Don’t do mass evangelism, just focus on one family?” Thomas asked incredulously, aloud. “Disciple people toward salvation? Don’t preach and teach, just help lost people discover God’s Word and obey it? Disciple people toward salvation?” He had never heard so many backward or strange ideas in his whole life. What was he thinking when he agreed to come? He had much better things to do than listen to this guy named David Watson, just one more in a long line of Western evangelism “experts” telling Africans how to be more effective in Africa.

It was true that David knew something about India and Southeast Asia, and he had some interesting stories of what Indian Christians were doing; he would give him that. But this was Africa, home turf for Islam and African traditional religions, not Hinduism; Africa, the place that Western ministry theories go to die a horrible death. So what were his friends thinking? They clearly had not seen through this seminar yet. They were busily looking up every Bible reference and taking copious notes.

With a bachelor’s and master’s degree in biblical theology, a large ministry team, and a measure of success in church planting, Thomas figured that he had earned some right to object. If he was indeed stuck here, he might as well make the best of a bad situation and take on David. It was time to bring some sanity to the week, and Thomas knew he could do that. It was almost his responsibility, in fact. So he would take his notes, but then he would use them to push back hard on the American every time he felt David did not make sense.

Which, as it turned out, was pretty much the rest of Monday and the following four days. And that is how Thomas spent those days. He contested every one of David's points and resisted every answer. And when the Bible seemed to support David's claims, Thomas still found other good reasons to discount the conclusions. By midweek, a few other participants were also beginning to resist David’s training. During the breaks and in the evenings after class, Thomas encouraged his colleagues not to take seriously the things that they were hearing.

The final days of the seminar were a heavyweight fight between two very committed men. Very few people would take on David Watson’s ability to point every question back to the Bible for answers, or to dispute the remarkable outcomes in his long years of missionary service, to say nothing of his lifelong disciplines of prayer and Bible study. But David had never met someone with Thomas’s bulldog tenacity in defending the ways he had always done ministry, never giving any ground. Mercifully, Friday finally came, the training was over, and David headed to the airport to begin a long journey home, exhausted and disheartened from the ordeal. He was sure that this had been the biggest waste of a week in his life.

I clearly remember his phone conversation with me a few days later: “Jerry, never, ever ask me to go back there, because I won’t go! It was the most miserable experience of my life. A brother began arguing at ‘hello’ on Monday and did not stop until ‘God bless you’ on Friday. I won’t go back.”

I knew David well. I knew that he would endure any challenge for an opportunity to help Christians be more effective in engaging lost Muslims, regardless of the risk or inconvenience, wherever it led, whatever it required. This pursuit had led him to endure being arrested and imprisoned, being shot by an arrow at point-blank range, avoiding two hit men searching for him on a train, suffering nearly fatal heart attacks, experiencing chronic and extreme pain, and overcoming a heartbreaking disaster in his ministry to see God do impossible things on the other side. But taking on Thomas again? Well, that would be asking too much!

What David had forgotten, however, was that, in the final session of the seminar, the organizer had passed around a sheet of paper and asked people to sign it. It was simple enough, just a commitment sheet that said: “I commit to obey what I have learned this week from the Bible about making disciples and planting churches, and to share it with the people I influence.” The participants had signed the papers and taken them home when they were done, and David had thought no more about it.

Thomas, too, had forgotten that piece of paper. After the seminar, he had gone back to his fairly successful ministry and to working on his remarkable goal of seeing a church planted in every village and community in his country, and he had completely forgotten about the Disciple Making Movement training. That is, however, until one day, when he was clearing his desk and he spotted his commitment sheet from the seminar. He didn’t remember signing it. He had not meant to sign it. Of that he was certain. But there was the document with his signature at the bottom.

Thomas had no compunctions about having ruined David’s week during the seminar, but he was still a man of high principles. The commitment sheet was staring him in the face, and he knew that, if he had made a promise to God, then he just had to keep it. So he called a few of his church planters and decided to let his team at least look at the biblical principles taught during the Disciple Making Movement training and to discuss whether they might help them to be more effective in the field. And when his team gave him their feedback, Thomas was surprised to find that the principles from David’s seminar were actually well received by his team. In fact, they seemed fairly upbeat and encouraged about this material. Thomas realized that perhaps he ought to give it a test. So, in spite of his prior reservations, Thomas trained his team in the very principles he had once rejected, and then redeployed them in three regions to implement what they learned and see what happened.

Three months later, the organizer of the training seminar sent out an e-mail to everyone who attended David’s seminar, inquiring how their projects were going. Thomas had no idea what was happening with the team he trained, so he called those church planters to get a report. He was stunned by the results. In three months, they had planted more than fifteen new churches with 450 new believers! They had never dreamed of such outcomes. It used to take them more than a year to start one new church in these regions. Thomas was turning from a militant skeptic to a proponent, and he decided to maintain the church planters in these test regions, and also to implement David’s training with another team in a different region.

Six months passed, and Thomas was invited to attend a regional gathering of leaders who were beginning to have success with Disciple Making Movements. David Watson also attended that meeting and, when someone approached him asking if he would be willing to speak with one of the leaders, he willingly followed the man across the room . . . until he saw they were going straight to Thomas.

“Oh, no no!” he cried inwardly. “Please, not him!” But Thomas had come prepared with a “please forgive me” speech that stunned David, along with some news for him. “I may have been a big problem for you, but you were right. In these months, my teams have planted 120 new churches. I never dreamed that this was possible.”

Today, David and Thomas are good friends and colleagues, and Thomas’s teams have planted many hundreds of churches in their own country and in surrounding countries. Among these are 150 churches among two 100 percent Muslim people groups where the gospel had never penetrated before.

HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT, IN THE BIBLE

In hindsight, the passionate intensity of Thomas’s resistance during his first exposure to Disciple Making Movements is amusing. But his response illustrates how difficult it is for most of us to self-evaluate whether or not our ministry efforts are highly effective, let alone whether they are well shaped by biblical values and principles.

Happily, most leaders find this process somewhat less traumatic than Thomas did, but it is never easy for any of us when our paradigms are challenged, even if those paradigms are confronted by the very Bible itself. And the fact is, we have seen the Disciple Making Movement ministry model before, especially in the Gospels and the book of Acts . . . actually, throughout the Bible. In CityTeam’s and our partner organizations’ trainings globally, Christian leaders are sometimes surprised that we don’t supply a syllabus, just the Bible. That’s it! And we typically don’t tell people what conclusions to draw. We simply gather Christians into groups with their Bibles to look at different sections of Scripture, and we let them discover together from those passages how they can be more intentional in applying biblical values and principles to engage lostness and make disciples.

Until recent years, this approach has largely been overlooked because it is so simple, and it is counterintuitive to the way ministries normally do evangelism. A simple summary of Jesus’ themes in Matthew 24 and Matthew 28 could be: Complete the task I have given you to make obedient disciples of all the peoples of the world. I will be with you always to accomplish that task. And when you are finished, I will come back for you!

How do we go about making obedient disciples? Well, the answer again is hidden in plain sight in the Bible. Some of the steps that we outline in this book may seem counterintuitive to Western Christians, as the church is often influenced more by modern communication models than by biblical values, principles, and practices. Too often, ministries focus on mass marketing the gospel, creating enough consumer impressions to drive demand, casting a wide net hoping to restrain a percentage of the fish from jumping out of our boat, reducing the gospel to the lowest common denominator of conversion rather than discipleship, with a hope (but not a plan) for eventual maturity. Without intending to dilute the gospel, the traditional approach to evangelism sometimes settles for making converts, instead of Jesus’ final command to “make disciples . . . teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you” (Matthew 28:19–20).

The irony is that Muslims in scores of different people groups are submitting their lives to Jesus at rates that are much faster than most church growth in North America. And it is happening, not by making the gospel journey somehow easier to traverse, but by focusing from the first day on making obedient disciples who are daily seeking to follow Jesus and obey His will. That is the pathway over which hundreds of thousands of Muslims have come to Jesus.

JESUS’ COUNTERINTUITIVE DISCIPLE-MAKING STRATEGIES

As we’ve already stated, successful disciple making among Muslims is often very counterintuitive to the way that twenty-first-century Christians think. That is why Thomas had such a problem. But the people you will read about in coming chapters all, like Thomas, had to discover that on their own. Amazingly, when former Muslim Christ followers begin to take the gospel to the next mosque, the Disciple Making Movement approach feels natural because it is biblically based, and therefore mirrors what they have read in the Bible.

1. Go slow at first in order to go fast later.

We know that Jesus had a timetable for His public ministry. He had just three years to prepare people to launch a movement that was planned before the foundation of the world. So He chose disciple making as His strategy, the most time-consuming strategy that one could imagine. But within seventy years, the cadre of people around Jesus had taken His good news into every corner of the Roman world. Do we have better efficiencies in mind?

2. Focus on a few to win many.

Westerners are in love with well-packaged mass marketing of the gospel. In church, as in advertising, growth is a numbers game about getting as many impressions as possible out to the masses. Mass communication and evangelism may have their place, but they show no signs of dramatically transforming the world. But Jesus gave almost all of His attention to intentionally discipling just twelve men, especially focusing on four of them. The results speak for themselves. Can we do better, investing in Christian mass messaging and once-a-week preaching services?

3. Engage an entire family or group, not just the individual.

The New Testament record shows that Jesus and the early church had a strong focus on seeing whole families come to faith. That’s why Discovery Bible Studies are designed in such a way that they almost always begin with a family or affinity group at the core. In that context, a whole group, rather than just an individual or two, become disciples of Jesus and are baptized together. And with that, a small church foundation is in place that will spread as the process is repeated in the next family.

In most parts of the world, major faith decisions are typically not made by individuals alone but by families in concert. When families decide to become disciples of Christ, their decision is buttressed by community, and the message of Christ is more likely to spread. A community of unbelievers can exile an individual who has become a Christian, but it can’t throw out a whole family without creating major social and economic problems for everyone. This avoids the tragedy of seeing one new Muslim-background Christian essentially isolated and ostracized from his family and the Christian message being eliminated along with him.

4. Share only when and where people are ready to hear.

The Muslim world is absolutely sure that it does not want to hear the Christian message. The same is true with the Hindu world, the Buddhist world, and secular America and Europe. Selective exposure is a problem; people don’t listen to what they don’t want to believe. Selective perception is a problem; people reinterpret what they do hear to align with their presuppositions. And selective memory is a problem; people often forget what they know but don’t agree with.

When engaging lostness, only invest time in people whom God has already prepared to bridge the gospel into their oikos: their family and community. Give them all the time needed, but if they do not respond to the gospel, then keep on looking for the right person.

5. Start with creation, not with Christ.

We all like shortcuts in communication. Unfortunately, Muslims need to start in Genesis to discover the true character of the Supreme God of the universe. Muslims believe that God created the heavens and earth, and this offers a place of agreement from which to begin a discussion. There are, however, huge differences between how the Qur’an describes God and how the Bible reveals Him. Without that foundation, it is very difficult to get the significant worldview shift regarding two radically different views of mankind and of God. Every person needs to understand the truth about the God who created the universe: about His love and the barrier of sin that separates us. That message is truncated unless it starts at the beginning of God’s story, not in the middle.

6. It’s about discovering and obeying, not teaching and knowledge.

Do the parables of Jesus sometimes make you wonder why He did not just tell people what He meant and what they should do, and then move on to the next subject? If so, you’re not alone. These stories puzzled even His disciples! But rather than simply telling them the answers, Jesus was patient and seemed quite content to let people process information, internalize it, and eventually understand for themselves what it required of their lives. Likewise, the process of group discovery of the Bible, group processing, and group accountability to obey God takes more time than teaching and preaching, but it yields remarkable transformation of whole families and communities when it is coupled with obedience.

7. Disciple people to conversion, not vice versa.

Christians around the world know that becoming a follower of Jesus requires repentance of sins and a verbal affirmation of faith in God and the sacrifice of Jesus’ blood for those sins. And this is where most ministries begin when engaging the lost: at the point of conversion. New believers are then encouraged to work from the point of conversion toward discipleship, participating in a water baptism and finding a Bible-believing church where a discipleship class is waiting for them. From then on, it’s pretty much up to the new Christian to continue to grow in the Lord.

But Jesus’ example of making disciples takes a different approach: in fact, it works almost in the reverse. Jesus chose some ordinary men and had them walk with Him as He revealed truths of God and asked them to live their lives according to those values. Eventually, they began to do what He did, and they also began to experience God’s power and blessings in their own lives. Then they came to a point of understanding that a decision to become a follower of Jesus Christ would cost them everything. Eleven of them said yes, and they changed the world. This kind of discipleship model—one that begins with discipleship and moves toward the point of conversion—is how many Muslims are becoming Christ followers.

It was a tragic choice of knowledge rather than obedience that led Eve into sin, and that same worship of knowledge ripples through the millennia of human experience. Maybe that is why Jesus’ parables drove home the foolishness of knowing God’s will and ignoring it. Some of us grew up singing a children’s song, “The Wise Man Built His House Upon The Rock,” without understanding that the “rock” is not just God’s Word, it is obeying God’s Word. Our computers can be filled with biblical aids to help us parse and peruse the Bible’s depths at remarkable speed, but discipleship requires a daily choice to intentionally and consistently obey God’s will.

8. Coach lost people from the beginning to discover and obey biblical truth.

Can lost people actually read passages from the Bible, internalize the message, and agree together to obey God in whatever that passage shows them? Again, many of the Muslim peoples that you will meet in this book discovered God’s will and learned to collectively obey God in a group like that.

Almost always, a veteran disciple maker is closely coaching the facilitator of that discovery group. By the time these groups make their way through Scripture to the death of Jesus, they have already begun to see God changing their lives as they obey what little they are learning. When they discover that their sins have been paid for by the blood of Jesus, there is no altar call, often just a whole family or clan joyfully receiving water baptism.

9. Prepare to spend a long time making strong disciples, but anticipate miraculous accelerations.

More than half the time, when the disciple makers with whom we work are engaging a new Muslim community with the gospel, the Lord does a dramatic miracle on behalf of the fledgling new Discovery Bible Study, and everything immediately accelerates. These Bible studies begin with creation and work their way through Scripture; when miracles take place during the beginning of this process, it may become necessary to skip over some passages of Scripture and go to the New Testament to quickly learn about Jesus the miracle worker. Discovering these biblical miracles will provide a context for new believers, helping them to understand the miracles that they are experiencing as they begin to know Christ. You will then need to go back and cover what you skipped.

God is very strategic, but quite wonderfully unpredictable. When you turn people loose with a Bible to obey, you can’t predict what they might do when they discover that God answers prayer, or how extravagant God’s blessings can be on this kind of new faith. It is very hard to even keep track of the continuous flow of God’s dramatic blessings on communities of Muslims striving to discover and obey the God of the Bible. Be prepared for a long-term commitment to seeing these disciples grow in faith, but watch for God’s miraculous provision along the way.

10. Expect the hardest places to yield the greatest results.

Remarkably, the most hostile and dangerous Muslim communities often yield to Disciple Making Movements much more rapidly than communities that have experienced many traditional churches in their midst. We are not sure why this is the case, but we sense that it has to do with simple churches among Muslims being low-key and culturally appropriate, while people exposed to traditional Christianity reject the Western cultural overlays out of hand.

Muslims who have only known Muslim fundamentalism are, under the right circumstances, profoundly open to the joy, freedom, forgiveness, and assurance that comes with being a follower of Jesus. And they have unimaginable courage and desire to take that message throughout their communities.

CHAPTER

3

PRAY THE LORD OF THE HARVEST

Jesus was Lord, but before He started His ministry, He went into the wilderness to fast and pray. He knew the power and place of prayer for the expansion and transformation of the kingdom. There is no way that you are going to succeed in the ministry if you don’t believe in the power of prayer; if you don’t practice what prayer is.

—Jacob, whose story is told in this chapter

A couple of years ago, I had the privilege to be in a very challenging Muslim region when a baptism was scheduled involving some three hundred believers. Such baptisms occur on a regular basis in this region, but they are held in strictest secrecy. They are always planned with care to find remote bodies of water, using multiple baptizers, and operating with military precision to arrive simultaneously, pray, immerse hundreds of new Christ followers, worship, pray, and scatter rejoicing, all within forty minutes. I was told that it was important to gather without drawing unusual attention and to be dispersed before the serious consequences of discovery could materialize.

Arriving at the waterside, I took a position where I could closely watch the faces of the people being baptized. I was quite early, but there were already fifteen or twenty people around making preparations, and I could not help observing a very interesting woman. I noticed her because she stood under a tree some distance from the water with a look of happy anticipation that never changed. This woman was clearly full of joy to be there, and I felt sure that she must have some role to play.

Finally, the candidates for baptism began arriving with an unforgettable rising chorus of worship as they neared the crest of the hill above the waters. I did not speak the language, but I understood the universal sound of joyful thanksgiving, of people who are gladly exchanging bondage for freedom. These moments were unforgettable. I had baptized many people over the years, but this experience uniquely had the feel of angels in attendance, rejoicing together with us.

Once or twice during and after the baptism, I took note of the lady under the tree. I kept expecting her to do something, but she never left her place in the shade. And after almost all of the people left, she was still under the tree. A few people greeted her, but it seemed that the people who were baptized did not know her. Finally, perhaps thirty minutes after the new Christians had dispersed into the countryside, curiosity got the better of me, and I asked someone, “Who is that woman with the smile standing under the tree?”

Astonished, the person said, “Don’t you know? Without her, none of this would have ever happened. She is Hadhi, the mother of the movement! This is more than a Disciple Making Movement, it is a prayer movement. And it all started a few years ago in her home when people began praying for us.”

FIVE YEARS EARLIER, ON A SUNDAY MORNING

The Gospel Church for the World included 250 Christians in a city of seven million, a city with high unemployment contributing to desperate poverty, coupled with constant violence. These factors would provide enough challenges to any pastor, even one as resilient as Jirani, the church’s founding pastor. But Jirani had two remarkable assets that helped him maintain a smile throughout his difficult work: a sense of humor and a godly wife.

He was a very funny man. He had that rare ability to find humor in life, especially as he taught the Bible. He was a disciple maker, and he lived the message that he proclaimed: “With God’s help, you can do anything!” But Jirani’s greatest blessing was Hadhi, his wife and partner in ministry. If Jirani was appreciated by his community, his wife was treasured. When there was a problem, she prayed, and wonderful things happened. She was a magnet for people who wanted to pray. Jirani and Hadhi’s home was well known as a place where Christians gathered for encouragement and prayer. Years earlier, Hadhi had convinced her husband that the secret to everything was prayer, especially for the people whom God had called them to serve.

One Sunday morning, as Jirani dismissed his church, he found himself face to face with a young man wearing Muslim clothing and a very intense expression. This young man, whose name was Aazim, asked to speak privately with him. Hadhi had already spoken to Aazim as he entered the church, and she had sent him to see her husband, but neither was prepared for what was coming.

“I came today,” Aazim began without any introduction, “because of your church’s name: Gospel Church for the World.”

Caught off guard, Jirani blurted out the first thing that came to his mind, “Oh, so you have a heart for missions?”

“Actually, I was wondering, how long have you been meeting as a church?”

“What a curious person,” Jirani thought. But he answered aloud, “Four years.”

“So how far have you gone with the gospel?”

Jirani wanted to say “Look here!” but something stopped him. “We minister here, in the city,” he said. “That’s all.” He was having unsettled feelings about where this impertinent fellow was headed.

“It is not good to have a church for four years and not follow your calling. You should have started before now!”

By this time, Pastor Jirani was thoroughly confused. “What are you talking about?” he asked in an exasperated tone.

“Your name!” the young man cried. “Gospel Church for the World! Why do you have that name if you haven’t taken the gospel to the world yet?” Before Jirani could digest this challenge, Aazim continued, “If you will let me, I will take you to my people, the Muslims of the Yappa plains.”

Jirani was taken aback. “No church in this city goes to the Muslims,” he declared, “and no mission agency in this city, or even in this country, is going there. You are talking about a dangerous business.” Jirani was afraid that the next question was going to be, “So are you going to change the name of this church?” His natural cheer and good humor were in full retreat, as was his “glad to see you” smile.

But Aazim’s face softened into a warm grin. “I really can take you to these Muslims,” he said. “Will you let me?”

Jirani countered with the only answer that might end the conversation. “My wife and I will pray about it.”

“How long will you need to pray?” Aazim asked quietly, leaning close. “Another four years?”

It only took Jirani and Hadhi a week of prayer, supported by intercession and counsel from the other believers in their church, to recognize that this man had been sent to them by the Lord. This was a radically new direction for their ministry, but they faithfully obeyed God’s call and agreed to go with Aazim. One month later and a few hundred kilometers away, Jirani and Hadhi climbed out of a public bus to greet a group of about fifty Yappa Muslims who had been waiting under the shade of a great tree. Nobody in either group seemed exactly clear about what was going to happen. As Jirani walked toward the group, he asked Aazim what he should do. Aazim had a simple answer. “Don’t you want to tell them something about Jesus?”

Jirani began to speak, but he noticed that all of the men held spears and appeared to be quite unmoved by the words he was choosing so very carefully. As Jirani hesitated, Hadhi seized upon the pause and suddenly began to pray. Not a soothing, gentle prayer of blessing, but a loud and bold one; Hadhi was rebuking the devil! She was asking Jesus to bind the power of every evil spirit that tormented these people, and rebuking in Jesus’ name all of the dark powers of the region.

Shocked, Jirani begged Hadhi with wide eyes, shaking his head and whispering frantically to her to please stop. This prayer was going to get them killed. But when Hadhi felt the need for bold prayer, then bold prayer was coming out. And this was one of those times. It is certainly not an advisable strategy for engaging unreached Muslim people to begin by antagonizing them, but from that moment, it was game on in the battle for the souls of the Yappa people.

Jirani’s pleas for Hadhi to stop grew more desperate, until first one person, and then another, and then clusters of people began to weep and drop to their knees. At that moment, Jirani wisely switched his message to Hadhi: “Keep going! Don’t stop now!” He had reached the certain conclusion that they were now in the middle of God’s blessing.

Five years later, of the fifty people under that tree, several have become remarkable Christian leaders. To this day, they like to laugh and tell a stranger the story about Jirani and Hadhi’s unusual meeting with them on that first day. And Jirani’s church is living up to its name and has a heritage that cannot be measured. The prayer movement that started in Jirani and Hadhi’s home ultimately produced hundreds of intercessors, as well as many occasions of passionate fasting and prayer for provision, protection, and God’s miraculous interventions. And those prayers are being answered in the witness of seven generations of disciples making disciples, and churches planting churches, more than five hundred simple congregations populated by 26,000 former Muslims who have given their lives to Jesus.

And the regular baptisms continue in varied places, when hundreds of joyful worshippers arrive for their appointment with Jesus Christ, singing, while a smiling “mother of the movement”—Hadhi, the prayer lady of the Yappa—stands under her tree, treasuring the moments. This is God’s story for the Yappa, catalyzed by prayer, sustained by prayer, and continuing to be written today.

BEHIND EVERY DRAMATIC STORY IS MUCH PRAYER

A dramatic revival is taking place worldwide, as thousands upon thousands of Muslims are moving from the enslavement of hopeless legalism to embrace the only means of salvation and eternal life, available as a free gift through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. The question that many ask is, why is this happening now? Why and how are entire mosques of Muslims becoming followers of Christ? The final answer, of course, is this: God has chosen to do so at this time. But on a human level, there is one constant theme that keeps coming up in the interviews we have conducted with Christ followers from a Muslim background: abundant prayer.

Prayer is the greatest weapon that any disciple maker can wield, and God’s people are using it effectively around the world at this very minute. Prayer takes the spiritual battle out of the human realm and puts it fully into God’s hands, and not even the powers of hell itself can stand against His mighty Spirit. It is prayer that has opened the doors of mosques, torn down the walls of bigotry, and broken the weapons of hatred. When God’s people kneel in prayer, God’s will is done on earth as it is in heaven (Matthew 6:10).

UNSEEN HEROES AND HEROINES: MEN AND WOMEN WHO PRAY

Around the world, Muslim families, mosques, and communities are being dramatically transformed by the love of Almighty God into faithful disciples of Jesus, and the process repeats from one place to the next. A huge spiritual battle is raging, and the heroes and heroines of the battle are tenacious warriors in prayer. These anonymous men and women have the passion and faith to pray without ceasing for impossible things, to stay up half a night or even all night in fervent prayer, asking the Lord to raise up men and women to become bridges for the gospel of joy to penetrate the homes, mosques, and hearts of imams and the people they lead, and even of those who persecute Christians. Where many people are praying and fasting much, engaging lostness by intentionally applying the disciple-making values and principles of the Bible, the God of the Impossible is bringing about the salvation of thousands of the most difficult to reach Muslims, more than we had imagined possible.

We twenty-first-century Christians are privileged to see the fruit of this harvest, borne on the shoulders of unnumbered brave men and women of God who have plowed and planted for centuries among Muslims without seeing the harvest for which they sacrificed. Those labors of tilling soil, planting, and watering have not been in vain. If we are seeing the beginning of Jesus’ “plentiful harvest” among Muslims, then some of that fruit is linked to their years of faithful service and the prayers of the saints (Matthew 9:37, 38; 1 Corinthians 3:5–7).

There are several crucial elements of disciple making that we will explore in this book, but one is always the starting point and sustainer: prayer. Abundant evidence suggests that a primary element in successful ministry among Muslims is the measure of prayer support. The one absolute prerequisite for progress in this endeavor is praying until the impossible happens.

JESUS’ RESOURCE: ENGAGING THE IMPOSSIBLE IN PRAYER

In His final words before ascending to heaven, Jesus commanded every Christ follower to become a partner with Him in engaging lostness everywhere, with a promise that He will always be with us in that task. So we must begin and sustain that work in much prayer, such as the ones He prayed for a plentiful harvest among the Muslims, for God to heal them and deliver them from darkness.

Then Jesus went about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues, preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every sickness and every disease among the people. But when He saw the multitudes, He was moved with compassion for them, because they were weary and scattered, like sheep having no shepherd. Then He said to His disciples, “The harvest truly is plentiful, but the laborers are few. Therefore pray the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into His harvest.” (Matthew 9:35–38)

And when He had called His twelve disciples to Him, He gave them power over unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to heal all kinds of sickness and all kinds of disease. . . . And as you go, preach, saying, “The kingdom of heaven is at hand.” Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out demons. Freely you have received, freely give. (Matthew 10:1, 7–8)

Acts 16:14 describes the goal of intercessory prayer: to reveal a person of peace. Notice the result of prayer, highlighted in italics, “Now a certain woman named Lydia heard us. She was a seller of purple from the city of Thyatira, who worshiped God. The Lord opened her heart to heed the things spoken by Paul.”

You will discover that the unanimous testimony of thousands upon thousands of former Muslims who have accepted Christ is the extreme joy and assurance of a loving Savior, an ability to breathe the air of personal freedom, and thanksgiving for the healing that comes from Jesus’ hand. For this to happen, someone needs to be praying:

Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they do. Father, answer their daily prayer to know the right path; may they see it and believe. “For they being ignorant of God’s righteousness, and seeking to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted to the righteousness of God” (Romans 10:3).

WHAT DOES MUCH PRAYER FOR MUSLIMS LOOK LIKE?

Here are some characteristics of prayer that we have seen among the hundreds of ministries that we coach and train, and within our own teams serving among Muslims:

Many Christians pray for Muslims, and new Muslim-background disciples fast every week at least two meals in one day.

Throughout Africa, many new Christians gather regularly for all-night or six-hour prayer vigils, sometimes interceding for Muslims in their communities by name.

Midday prayers for members of churches and ministry teams are common.

Personal disciplines of early-morning prayer are very common. One hour to two or three hours of prayer is not uncommon.

Family devotions centered on discovering the Bible together and praying together are common.

Every new Christ follower is discipled, even before he fully understands Jesus, to begin to pour out his heart to God. When Muslims discover that God welcomes the prayers of our hearts and answers them, their spirits begin to rejoice. The former disciplines of forced Islamic fasting and rote repetitions of the same prayer seventeen times a day are willingly left behind as people discover the freedom to pray as God leads them. This happens even before they fully understand Jesus, in part because they see their mentors in the gospel living lives of much prayer themselves.

FOUR ELEMENTS OF A PRAYER STRATEGY

There are four key elements in developing a prayer strategy in ministries to Muslims.

1. Leaders Living and Modeling Personal Disciplines of Prayer

One Muslim-background Christ follower has helped catalyze more than three hundred churches in a radical and violently anti-Christian region where he is safest when he speaks Arabic and takes care to fit in with his community in all outward appearances. He prays for at least one hour each morning, then gathers his family together for Bible reading, worship, and prayer. He then meets with his ministry partner, and the two of them spend another hour in Bible reading and prayer. “Really,” he told us, “prayer is just part of our daily life, at any time of the day. Wherever we are going, our hearts are always in prayer.” These disciplines are very typical of what we have heard from hundreds of men and women who are actively taking the gospel to Muslims worldwide: their lives are characterized by prayer.

Another leader says, “By praying together, we pray for unreached people groups, and the prayer mobilizers get the idea of how they should pray. We want to model prayer, not just to teach it, so we pray together. That’s modeling.”

2. Praying for New Regions and Pioneer Teams

The biblical term “apostle” denoted people who were sent out where the gospel needed to go, often two at a time. Today, these teams sent into Muslim regions are often referred to as “pioneer teams.” Before these courageous Christians enter a new region for ministry, before the groundwork is even laid, before the research is even done to lay that groundwork, intercessors gather regularly for prayer. One leader told us, “In our prayer mobilization training, we teach one day and we pray one day.”

And dedicated prayer teams often gather on a regular basis, sometimes several times a week, for fasting and prayer. They pray specifically for key Muslim leaders by name, for the specific issues of bondage and sin that are abundant in that area, and for the Lord to go before them preparing persons of peace to bridge the gospel into that area, binding the demonic influences that will inevitably fight against their efforts. Some believers fast during daylight hours, only eating small meals in the evenings and taking breaks on Saturdays, and they continue that discipline for an entire month prior to taking the gospel to a new area. In addition, overnight prayer meetings are common among these believers as a part of their normal lives, not just on special occasions.

Many new regions are beset with demonic influences, and those influences must be recognized and bound by prayer before the gospel is taken in to those places. This includes a process known as “spiritual scanning.”

Spirtual Scanning and Intercession to Support Pioneer Teams Among Muslims

The process of spiritual scanning (or spiritual mapping) involves gaining an understanding of the historical, social, cultural, and spiritual issues that may be barriers or assets in the process of making disciples and planting churches in a particular region.

This process may involve firsthand research into the background of how a community was formed, its major social issues, the things that hold the community together, the location of trouble spots, the people groups in the area, the traditions that hold a town together, and so on. It is also very important to discover the most pressing physical, health, educational, agricultural, business, and social needs of the community.

Spiritual scanning may also involve “prayer walking” (walking through the streets of a city and interceding for the people who live and work in the buildings one is passing) and other types of prayer to discern the spiritual strongholds in the area and look at issues of prevailing sins, spiritual bondages, and what covenants have been made with spiritual forces.

The information gathered by spiritual scanning equips intercessors and pioneer teams to pray for and engage the community by meeting specific needs. For example, a particular town was named after a famous woman who had been a witch doctor in that region, and she had left behind a legacy of animism and demon worship.[5] This knowledge enabled the believers to specifically pray that God would bind those demonic influences and that He would bring deliverance from demonic possession in specific people’s lives.

One church planter told us, “What we learn about the spiritual conditions of an area—the things that keep people from the gospel, the history of the place and the people—these things will help us understand what we need to address in prayer, so that God will break the bondages that keep people in deception and darkness. So we train people how to do a spiritual survey and, when we find the prayer points, we pray to see those bondages broken before teams go in, so that the Spirit of God will prepare hearts to receive the good news. We do this before we allow teams to enter and engage.”

Case Study in Persevering Prayer

Here is a story from a church planter, told in his own words.

There is a village where I sent two of my church planters. After a few days, the village discovered that the men were Christians and sent them out. They don’t want anything to do with Christianity, they said. The men came back and reported to me, “That village is hostile. We went to the chief and the chief said, ‘No, they don’t like that,’ so they don’t want us to be there, and we have come back.” So I said, “Okay, if you have come back, then let’s pray.” So we spent about two days; I told the intercessory team, I said, “Let’s pray for that village.” So we prayed for that village. And I said, “Okay, by next week, I am adding another person to you, so there will be three of you. Go there again. Let’s see what happens.”

So they went there, but the amazing thing was that the chief’s son had a problem. He had a physical problem and they had tried a lot of things, a lot of ways to amend that problem, to no avail. You know, as they entered the village, they went to the chief’s compound, and the chief still replied to them, “No way! You people again? We have sent you out, you have gone, and you have come again? No way!”

So they said, “Well, Chief, may we pray?” and the chief said, “Who will deny prayer? As long as it is prayer to help us, we will not deny it. Pray for us, but after prayer, please, you can go, because we don’t want you to come and say anything to our children to turn their heart from what they are taught, from Islam to another religion; that is the white man’s religion. We don’t need it here.” They saw the son’s sickness, a kind of polio, and they said, “Can we pray for your son?” And he said, “Yes, you can go ahead and pray, but remember, after prayer, the way is open for you to go, because we’re not going to accept you. But you can pray.”

And here’s the exciting news: they prayed for that child and instantly he became healed, completely, no limping, no nothing. The child jumped up and said, “I am healed, father!” and grabbed his father.

The father said, “You people, you are magicians!” And they said, “No! This is Jesus!” And the man said, “As from today, this is your home. If you want, you can build a very big cathedral, that is your business, but take the town, you are welcome!”

They did not take the chief up on his generous “cathedral in the bush” offer, but they were permitted to make disciples and plant a church in that place.

3. Training New Christians to Pray

It is important to understand that we train new Christians to pray, we don’t teach them. This process is done, not by seminars and training materials and lectures, but simply by doing it, and, more important, by seeing it done. New believers learn how to pray by spending time in prayer with more mature believers. This process is vitally important for a person coming out of a Muslim background, where daily prayer is a ritual and a rigid requirement, and prayer is done by reciting memorized words. For Muslim-background believers, it is always a joyous revelation to discover that prayer in Christ is a conversation between a child and his Father.

Pastor Jirani told us, “My wife is a strong prayer woman. Wherever we go, she asks the people to pray with her, even if they are not believers. She tells the people that prayer is simply asking God what they need. She prays with people, not just for them. Many people agree to pray with her and many are freed from bondages as they pray, and many come to the Lord. The people here love her very much. She has a very joyous spirit, and that attracts many to her and then to the Lord.” This woman trains others to pray by modeling a life of prayer.

4. Developing Intercessory Prayer in Every Church

The disciplines of “much prayer” are a regular way of life for Muslim-background believers. Countless home churches hold at least one night of prayer per week, where believers come together to spend the entire night (or sometimes half the night) interceding for their families, villages, neighbors, and nations.

One ministry leader told us, “We have our overnight prayers three nights a week. We start the prayers at 8:00 p.m. and end at 6:00 a.m. We pray for the whole world, we pray for our nation, we pray for our community, we pray for our church, and we pray for our ministries. We also pray for individual needs and problems. We pray that every person hears the good news and engages in spiritual warfare.

“We have a tea break at midnight. The group is usually ten to twelve people in one house, and composed of men and women of the church. We also have a monthly overnight prayer among church planters in which we share and pray for our visions and ministries. In these monthly prayer nights, we encourage each other, discuss our struggles, and plan for the coming months.”

ONE MAN, ONE MONTH OF PRAYER

Jacob was a committed Christian living in Africa whom God had called to serve in a Muslim area. He had moved his young family to a distant town surrounded by dense forests. Jacob had wonderfully ambitious visions for what God would do through him and his ministry in the coming days, despite the fact that he lacked the tangible resources required. His solution to this problem was simple: pray! And pray he did, along with his wife and several supporters who lived in a distant town. Jacob had moved to this area because it was a strongly dominant Muslim region, and he wanted to live among Muslims for the simple reason that there were no other Christians around.

One dark night, shortly after moving to this place, Jacob was walking toward the forest where he liked to spend time in prayer each evening. Suddenly, he was stopped in his tracks by a horrific scream, the shrill voice of a woman in panic and pain. Jacob listened, hoping not to hear that sound again, praying that it was not what he thought. He turned to go back to his house and was almost inside when another distant scream of terrified anguish shook his soul. The Mbacama Order, one of many secret associations that periodically gather in the bush, was assembled to initiate young women into very dark occultic practices, a mandatory rite of passage in some bush cultures. Jacob knew immediately what was happening and that he would not be walking and worshipping in this forest, where the laws of the land would be effectively ignored, for many weeks.

Jacob knew that, once the initiations had begun, they would not stop, not even for one hour, until every uninitiated woman had submitted. The tragedy had begun, and Jacob began to weep. The normal course of his ministry would have to wait a while because Jacob knew that a battle was ahead. That very night, he arose from his bed at midnight and went as far as he dared toward the forest and began praying with these words: “God, I believe that you are God. And if you are God, then these people should know your power, because these things should not be happening here. I am not going to confront them, but I am going to invite you to use your power to demonstrate something to them.” He prayed from midnight until just before sunrise, and for one month he prayed every night, all night long, for God to break the power of this demonic activity.

After that time, a group of initiates came running out of the forest, screaming and in pain. Some were near death from loss of blood. The women had to be transported to a hospital, and the cultic activities became a public scandal. Shocked and confused by this unprecedented occurrence, the leaders of the order visited some witch doctors in the region, asking them to determine how this had happened. The witch doctors consulted the spirit realm and soon had their answer: they identified Jacob, saying, “He has a different spirit. He is opposing us and causing us to be ashamed.”

Outraged, the leaders of the society with about one hundred followers came to Jacob and openly confronted and threatened him, and then began to throw stones at his house. Jacob told his family not to say a word, but to let God defend them. “Let them threaten,” he said. “Just forget them.” After a while, the crowd went into the nearby town and conscripted several men to terrorize Joseph and his family. That group went immediately to Joseph’s property and announced their intentions of punishing him for opposing the order. One of the men climbed atop Joseph’s animal shelter and began ripping off the roof. (The roof was made of metal, and the vandal could also have sold it for a tidy profit.) But the moment he bent down to pry the metal, the entire roof collapsed underneath him and he fell to the ground in a cloud of dust and debris. He did not wait to investigate further, but fled in haste back to town, the rest of his order following on his heels.

Eventually, the order left the area and it became a place of peace, “a garden” as Jacob described it. This was the first great victory that Jacob experienced from God, and it elevated his faith to a new level. Every morning, Jacob would walk in the predawn darkness to worship and pray in the area that had been redeemed from the order.

One Saturday morning during prayer, Jacob sensed God telling him, “If you need this place, then ask me for it, and I will give it to you!” Jacob did not take long to kneel down and say, “My God, if you are offering it, then I need it. If you have spoken, then I believe you.” He then went home rejoicing to tell his wife the good news.

Later that day, a man named Jamal had a most unusual sense that he was supposed to go to a church the next morning. He was the son of a very prominent Muslim businessman, and he had never been in a church in his life. He could not imagine anything in church that he wanted to experience, yet somehow he knew that he had to go.

On Sunday morning, after worship at his small church, Jacob announced that, if anyone in the church knew who owned “the garden place,” which the order had vacated, then he would like to talk to them about buying it. Immediately, Jamal approached him and said, “I heard your announcement about the land. It was owned by my father.”

Then Jamal told Jacob that his father had bought the land years ago in order to build a mosque, but he had died before doing so, and the land had remained unused ever since. Then Jamal said, “I just had this conviction to come and worship in this church. I’ve never been to a church. This is my first time in any church. I just walked in and I heard this announcement, so this must be from God! I want to be a follower of Jesus! Oh, and you do not have to buy the land. I will give it to you for free!”

And that is how Jamal became a disciple of Jesus, and how his family’s land became part of a ministry center from which thousands of intercessors for the nations have been trained, and more than a hundred pioneer disciple makers have been trained and deployed among some of Africa’s most difficult Islamic regions. Today in that same ministry, more than one thousand new churches among Muslims give testimony to the power of prayer, of even one man standing in prayer all night, every night, for a month, asking God to push back the darkness and reveal His glory. And God’s response continues to unfold beyond what Jacob asked or imagined.

CHAPTER

4

INSIDE ISLAM

Disillusion and Discontentment

Nothing is sure in Islam. Even the sheikhs are not sure if they will be in paradise; they tell you that only Allah knows.

—a former Muslim, now a church planter

SHEIKH ALI

Ali had been born into a family of privilege and influence and, as he approached middle age, he looked back on a very full life. By then, he had already lived many roles and had experienced both fulfilled dreams and major disappointments. Diligent in his studies and a hard worker, he had risen quickly in society. He had dabbled in politics and, when the revolutionary tide suddenly turned, he and thousands of other officials for a time exchanged power for prison. Then came exile and joblessness. Not one to be discouraged, Ali became a fighter and a leader of a militia, and, eventually, a respected businessman.

In all of this, Ali was a committed Muslim and teacher in the madrassa (an Islamic school). His people had always been associated with a very strict form of Islam, and he was indeed a son of Islam. He tells part of his story here.[6]

I had a deep hunger to learn the Qur’an, wanting to know how to live for God. As a young man, I became devoted to convincing others that the Qur’an is the true word of God. I was a sought-after madrassa teacher. I also found that many Muslims don’t know what the Qur’an says; they simply accept what their mosque leaders tell them. And I began to realize that, when ordinary Muslims can read the Qur’an, they will begin to ask very difficult questions of Islamic leaders, questions that don’t have easy answers. So they are almost always told that questions regarding the Qur’an are not allowed.

I did many different things when I was a young man. I was a student and a businessman. I was a politician and also a prisoner. I experienced what it meant to be part of an influential African tribe, and I experienced what it meant to be a refugee, a stranger in my own land. I was a fighter and a leader of fights. I was a worker and I was unemployed. And through it all, I was a religious man.

But none of these things brought me any satisfaction. No matter what I did, I could not find a deep satisfaction in my life. So I said to myself, “The reason I am up and down like this is that I’m not strict enough in my religion.” I started reading my Qur’an even more than I used to, and I would read anything at all that was related to it. But this intensive study had an unexpected result: I began to have doubts about Islam. And remember this: I was an influential sheikh at the time!

One thing that disturbed me was the Islamic prayers. I would pray five times a day, with a minimum of seventeen total rakats every day (a sequence of standing, bowing, and sitting in prayer), always at the specified times like any good Muslim, but I always prayed the same thing, the same prayer that all other Muslims were saying. This to me did not seem like true prayer.

But what really disturbed me were the things I was beginning to see in the Qur’an. In fact, I was bothered by where the Qur’an even came from. The Qur’an says it came to Mohammed in the cave of Hiram, and what Mohammed heard in the cave he went and told to his followers. Those things were not written down at that time; some of his followers wrote some things down years later, and years after that another man, Caliph Uthman, wrote down stories he’d heard and put them all together, and that is the Qur’an. It was something like forty years after Mohammed had the visions, and at least twenty years after he died.

So my question was: how much can a person remember after all those years? And how can he hope to record it perfectly? And how could I take this book as being 100 percent the words of God?

Then another thing that disturbed me was the chronological aspect of the Qur’an. In other books, there is clear chronology: a beginning and an end. But the Qur’an is very difficult and very confused, very hard for an ordinary person to understand. And all the promises it contains, they are all for Mohammed! What about promises for me? I asked.

And with these questions, I had not even begun to wonder about the Hadiths, the other writings of Islam. The Hadiths are a collection of stories and sayings of Mohammed—what he did, what he ate, what he said—all collected and written down, but they frequently contradict the Qur’an.

One of the Hadiths teaches that Allah created Adam, then touched his right shoulder, and out of his shoulder came many people, all with white skin. Allah said to those white people, “You belong in paradise, and who is going to oppose that?” Then Allah touched Adam’s left shoulder, and out of his shoulder came many people with black skin. And Allah said to those black people, “You belong to hell. Who is going to oppose that?” [7]

“But wait,” I said, “I am black! If Allah is already sending me to hell, then why do I pray and fast and do all these things? If black people belong to hell, then why do we build mosques in my African country and teach people about Islam?” I went and asked this question to many wise sheikhs, but no one was able to answer me.

Then I found in the Qur’an this teaching: “Those who disbelieve in Allah and His messengers, and seek to make distinction between Allah and His messengers, and say: We believe in some and disbelieve in others, and seek to choose a way in between; such are disbelievers in truth; and for disbelievers we prepare a shameful doom. But those who believe in Allah and His messengers and make no distinction between any of them, unto them Allah will give their wages.”[8]

“So,” I said to myself, “if a person says, ‘I love Mohammed more than Isa [Jesus],’ or ‘I love Isa more than Mohammed,’ Allah says, ‘I am going to judge them!’ So why are we taught that we should not read the sayings of Isa? Instead, we should be reading the writings about Isa, because there are many blessings for reading all the holy books.”

In another place, the Qur’an says that anyone who does not believe in Isa will be punished, both on earth and in heaven, but those who do believe in Isa will have a great reward.[9] And I said, “I do not want to be punished!” I also saw that Isa al Masih is the Word of truth and His followers are superior to those who don’t believe.

And on the day I found these teachings, I became very happy. I had been confused about how to get to heaven, because in Islam there is no assurance; they just say, “God knows.” But at last I knew. And that day, I began to search for the followers of Isa to learn more.

A LOOK INSIDE THE MOSQUE

When most Christians look at Muslims, they see a monolithic mass of humanity, staunch in their beliefs, ready to fight for their religion, and aggressively seeking to extend the rule of Sharia law into all the world. That is not a complete or accurate picture!

Most Christians cannot imagine what is really going on inside mosques, as more and more Muslims are doubting the teachings and worldview of the Islam that they inherited from their parents, a rigid belief system about which they are not supposed to ask questions. Inside Islam, disillusionment and discouragement are widespread and closely related to the Qur’anic teachings, Islamic cultural pressures, social mores, and so forth. The church of Jesus Christ is largely not aware that God Himself is working inside Islam, orchestrating events that are even now beginning to crack the foundations of Islam and prepare hearts to discover the loving God who sacrificed His Son that they might know Him.

Actually, we are discovering that a shockingly high percentage of Muslim leaders are discouraged and disillusioned because they struggle to meet deep spiritual needs in a system built around a very different view of God than the loving God of the Bible. Additionally, we hear Muslims declare the hopelessness of a system of Sharia that, in the end, provides absolutely zero assurance of paradise after death. A personal, loving relationship with God is not only impossible in Islam, it is not even a desired goal.

WHEN GOD IS NOT A LOVING FATHER

Muslims living in Christian-heritage countries, like the United States, find that it takes some courage to face each day in public. Despite a hefty dose of political correctness, in dozens of ways a message is transmitted clearly to Muslims every day: “Since you choose a religion of intimidation and violence, you are unwelcome here.” But many peaceful Muslims worry privately that something is terribly wrong with a violent Islamic worldview.

Unfortunately, most Christians have difficulty looking beyond the perplexities of today’s news from the Islamic world to imagine what can happen when a Muslim family discovers and obeys truth in the Bible. No devout Muslim anywhere has any concept of what it means to call God “Father,” nevermind something as intimate as “Abba” (Daddy). There is no room in Islam’s theology for a Son of God, for God becoming a man, for salvation from sin, for God’s Holy Spirit to indwell a human being; these core principles of Christianity are far outside the thinking of Muslims, but when they discover and obey these truths, their lives are transformed in unimaginable ways.

In chapter 3, we looked at Matthew 9:35–38, where Jesus reflected on lostness and harvesters. Recall some of the words and phrases describing Jesus’ view of the people around Him: “Moved with compassion,” “weary,” “scattered,” “without a shepherd.” If we are to follow the example of Jesus, we would do well to learn similar responses to the Muslims who live in our own communities, learning to be moved with compassion toward those who lack godly leadership, who are trapped in bondage to a religion that warps and despises human individuality, who are exhausted with their endless pursuit of good works that cannot lead to salvation. In short, we should be moved with compassion toward those who are lost, those who pray endlessly every day that God will show them the “right way.”

DESPERATION FOR ASSURANCE, LOVE, AND FREEDOM

In the last seven years, we would never have seen such dramatic transformations in the world of Islam—more than two hundred thousand Muslims becoming Christ followers—if a compassionate Lord Jesus had not been creating an environment that was preparing their hearts. For certain, God is preparing more and more Christians to engage Muslims with the gospel, but He is also starting the process before missionaries even show up. From first to last, these movements are about God doing what only God can do, and inviting His people to join Him in the process. He is taking the initiative so that, by the time Christians are on the scene, Jesus has already strategically prepared hearts to engage. Undeniably, this is “stony ground” (Matthew 13), but the fact is that Jesus seems to be softening the soil and extracting the stones so that the ground is prepared for seed and for harvest. Jesus still has compassion, and He still invites laborers into His harvest to pray and to engage. His people need to learn how to cooperate with His work of invading the impossible with love.

To a Christian, Islam can appear to be a daunting bloc of humanity marching in lockstep with a resolute commitment to world domination, where all people on earth will finally submit to Sharia law. And, in fact, that truly is the internal Islamic narrative, and it is both a political and religious goal. Wherever the Islamic religious system has gained even minimal leverage in society, it has also become a political system. This is not an accident; it is in the very fabric of Islamic worldviews.

But Islam’s twenty-first-century reality is not nearly as monolithic or impregnable as Westerners think. This is the message we hear from almost all of our interviews with former Muslim leaders who are now Christians, that multiple levels of disconnection exist between what Islam teaches and promises Muslims, and the expectations and dreams of what they actually long for. Muslims long for spiritual security outside of jihad, for a God who cares and answers prayers, for peaceful societies of compassion and mercy, for equality in God’s eyes for men and women alike, for an end to violent Islamic sectarianism, for individual freedom of choice, and for practical help and answers beyond “more sharia” for life’s daily challenges.[10]

We have been very surprised at the depth and degree of disappointment and disillusionment revealed by every former Muslim whom we interviewed. These were otherwise very positive and joyful people. We did not shape questions to get those answers; the truth came out in their life narratives. And they also reported that many of their Muslim friends shared the same feelings. Perhaps the most remarkable result of our interviews is the discovery that Muslim leaders seem to have much higher levels of disillusionment with Islam than their followers.

Of course, Christianity is not the first place to which these disillusioned Muslims were inclined to turn for an answer. Muslims know about the wickedness that is thriving in countries with a Christian heritage, things like homosexuality, serial divorce, pornography, greed, abortion; the list goes on. Muslims are rightly offended that our sins have become their problem, as “Christian” countries export much of the world’s pornography, degrading art forms, and entertainment media to the rest of the world. They have some good reasons to judge our cultural values.

So most of these former Muslims were not expecting to find truth and holiness in Christianity because many had seen and rejected the sins of Western culture and also the foreign culture in which the church was packaged. Several former Muslims reported that they had hesitations about approaching traditional Christian churches with their questions about Jesus. It was not the historic Christian church that attracted them; instead, it was usually the transformed lives of former Muslims who had accepted Christ.

The single greatest challenge that we hear from former Muslims is the absolute lack of any assurance of paradise for any Muslim, regardless of how devout he may be. This may in part explain the rise of violent jihad. Islam’s inherent tolerance for violence as a cultural norm is acknowledged by many Muslims as a corrosive element inside the religion, and many of them complain that the pervasive and violent schisms inside Islam are perplexing and distressing.

As a religious and political system, Islam does not tolerate independent thinking or individual freedom. It does not tolerate probing questions about Islam and the Qur’an; such questions are often brushed off or even flatly prohibited by many Muslim leaders. Many Muslims report that this fear of freedom creates even more doubts about their faith. Almost all former Muslim leaders report a feeling of liberation and joy when they read the Bible and discover the truth about God.

A WORLD OF DOMINATION AND CONTRADICTIONS

Another area of discontentment among Muslims stems from the treatment of women in Islamic culture. Former Muslims tell us that poor treatment of wives and children is almost a cultural norm within Islamic society. And then there’s the issue of Islamic cultural imperialism: Islam’s marriage to Arab language and culture often makes non-Arab Muslims (who are the majority of Muslims) feel like second-class participants in the faith. Islam also has very strict restrictions on food and alcohol. And while alcohol and certain foods are strictly prohibited, there is widespread addiction in some regions to popular Middle Eastern drugs such as khat (a leafy plant with effects similar to amphetamines), and even to alcohol itself. Leaders report that, strangely, chewing khat every day is common in many mosques.

One of the Five Pillars of Islam is zakat (almsgiving).[11] Zakat requires giving at least 2.5 percent of one’s wealth for distribution within the local community to alleviate human need and suffering. In Islamic teaching, this demonstration of mercy to those in need is as significant as the pilgrimage to Mecca, fasting during Ramadan, the Islamic affirmations regarding Allah and Mohammed, and the obligation of daily prayers. Zakat is a very important foundation of the religion. However, we hear many former Muslims report that, in their lives inside Islam, they found that their religion somehow did not promote a spirit of joyful generosity and compassion, despite the obligations of zakat. Additionally, they frequently noted with admiration that Christians seemed to be the people who could be counted on to befriend and help people in need, even Muslims. Christianity became more attractive to these Muslims when they personally experienced Christians going out of their way to befriend them or extend kindness to them. This repeating theme of both disappointment with Islam and being drawn to generous-hearted Christians is found in a very high percentage of Muslims who went on to become disciples of Jesus.

UNDERSTANDING THE QUR’AN

Another area of frustration for a high percentage of the former Muslim leaders whom we interviewed was the Qur’an. As a religion, Islam has become known for its almost fanatical obsession with upholding the perfection of the Qur’an as God’s word. But the vast majority of Muslims can’t read, and those who can read still don’t read the Qur’an. Significantly, it is clear that some Muslim leaders don’t want it any other way.

Translating the Bible into modern languages is a high priority for which Christians invest millions of dollars each year, because most Christians have discovered that the Bible is the source of truth for all who seriously read it. And it is especially meaningful and helpful to read God’s Word in one’s mother tongue. In contrast, translating the Qur’an into the languages of common people is generally discouraged or even prohibited. Muslims venerate the Qur’an, viewing it as a miracle that cannot be imitated or translated—it should remain in Arabic. Translations are viewed only as interpretations. Many former senior Muslim leaders whom we interviewed believe that this practice of restricting translations of the Qur’an effectively prevents most Muslims from discovering its contradictions with other Muslim writings and some Muslim practices, and also conceals the multiple passages that affirm the special status of Isa al Masih (Jesus the Messiah).

LACK OF ASSURANCE IN ISLAM

We have heard, again and again, that those within Islam—even sheikhs and imams—are troubled by the fact that they have no assurance of salvation. After many years of praying every day “lead me in the right way,” many Muslims come to the point in life where they wonder why they say that prayer if they are already in the “right way.” When they begin asking that question, they realize that they are not in the right way, and they eventually discover Jesus and come to Him.

One of the most serious problems in Islam is Mohammed’s own dying confession that even he didn’t know what would happen to him after death. Many Muslim thinkers eventually decide that they cannot follow a prophet who has no confidence in his own eternal destiny, especially when the Bible invites people to forgiveness, peace, and confident assurance of eternal rest in Jesus.

We met a former Muslim imam who made it his specialty to pursue Muslim-background Christians and try to lure them back into Islam. As it turned out, however, he was compelled by his own studies of the Bible to become a Christ follower himself, despite the fact that this made him subject to the death penalty. He shares his perspective here.

I come from an area that is 98 percent Muslim. I went to Qur’anic school, but I did not know the Qur’an much at that time. But my grandfather was an imam, and my father also, so every morning we would sit there, just as we do as Christians, and they would read the Qur’an to us. And one day, my grandfather taught us in the morning, and we were talking about the death of Mohammad the prophet. When Mohammed was dying, his daughter Fatima was standing close by his bedside, and Fatima asked, “Father, you are dying, but where are you going from here and what will happen to us?” And Mohammed said, “Ask me anything from my wealth, but I cannot save you from Allah’s punishment.”[12] “By Allah, though I am the apostle of Allah, yet I do not know what Allah will do to me.”[13] That’s why, whenever Muslims call the name of Mohammad, they say “peace and blessing be upon him,” because he left that instruction. So that was in my head.

Now, at that time, I was very interested in challenging Christians. And there was one pastor who used to walk several miles from his own village to my village to preach, and one day he went to give me the pocket Bible—you know, the New Testament, the Gideon Bible—and he told me, “I’ve preached to you the whole time, but start reading this Bible and start from John.” I liked reading it, because I wanted to pick some things I could challenge Christians with. But while I was reading it, I came across this passage where Jesus said, “I am going to the Father,” and “I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself; that where I am, there you may be also. And where I go you know, and the way you know.”[14]

I ran to my grandfather and said, “Grandfather, what did Mohammad say when he was dying?” And he repeated these things to me. I said, “Grandfather, look at Jesus. He said he was going to his Father and he would prepare a place for his followers, and after that he will come back. But Mohammad doesn’t know where he is going, so which one would you follow?” And he said, “The one that knows where he is going.” And I said, “I am going to a church.” And that’s how I came to know the Lord.

THE GOD WHO ANSWERS PRAYER

The notion is very foreign to a Muslim that a person can approach God and ask for things, as a child might ask of his father. Muslims notice that marabouts (Muslim priests found in many parts of Africa) will give sick or demonized people bottles of things to drink, or string to tie around their bodies, to protect them from evil and give them health, but Christians presume to pray directly to a God that they seem to know personally and ask Him to heal or deliver people, and it happens. That sort of involvement of the Supreme God in the needs of people by the prayers of simple Christians is the single most powerful reason that Muslims turn from Islam to the loving God of the Bible.

Here is another man’s story, told in his own words.

I grew up in a Qur’an school, but I was allowed to go to a secular school when the sheikh died who had been teaching us the Qur’an. I was thirteen years old at the time. My father was a sheikh at that time, and he also was a marabout; he practiced occultism. When I got to the eighth grade, the attack of evil spirits in my life became very fierce, and I became very sick, so my family advised me to go back to learning the Qur’an to reclaim my health and peace. But I thought that it would be a waste of my time learning the Arabic language in order to understand the Qur’an, since that was necessary because we did not have the Qur’an in my language. So I didn’t go back.

After this, my older sister also got sick when the evil spirits attacked her, and that was when I saw firsthand how evil spirits attack a person. I was always afraid and forced to follow the ways of Islam because of the repercussions that I might face from my father and other sheikhs. I used to always ask why the god we worshipped wouldn’t help us in our troubles. I didn’t have peace in my heart and was struggling to find it.

It was during this time that a friend of mine from school told me about Jesus and the life I would get through Him. I asked my friend to give me the book he was reading so that I could read and understand it for myself, and he gave me a Bible. I was in charge of opening and closing the library in the school, and I put the Bible under many books in the library and hid it there. I didn’t read the Bible for the first three months because the sheikhs always taught us that the Bible is a corrupted book. But then a church held an open-air meeting nearby under a shelter, and I went to hear a Christian couple (Jirani and Hadhi) to see what they were preaching.

The area was suffering from lack of rain at that specific time, and we were all struggling with the farms. During the message, a powerful rain and wind came and shook the area, and a woman started praying, with authority, for it to stop. The lady was the wife of a pastor, and she prayed for the wind to stop, but also for rain to come to the area in the coming days. While she was praying, I said to myself, “My god is the one that controls the rain and the wind, but this lady is ordering the rain in the name of Jesus!” I then said to myself that I would believe in Jesus if her prayers actually stopped the rain and wind and brought rain to the area in the coming days.

Then the powerful rain and wind stopped, but only around the shelter that we were gathered in, and the sermon continued calmly. There was rain and wind a little farther from the area where we were sitting. I then said to myself that I would start reading that Bible that my friend gave me, rather than simply believing in Jesus at that time. But the next morning, the sheikhs in our area were teaching that the Bible was a corrupted truth, and that all should keep away from the Christians.

So I went back to the Qur’an and prepared twenty-one written questions that I had from the Qur’an. I attended a Qur’an teaching class the next day and presented my questions to the sheikh there, but he refused to answer them, and I went back to my house that night disappointed. The next day, I took my Bible and went to the mountain alone to read it. Before reading the Bible, I prayed to God to help me understand the Bible and tell others if it’s a corrupted book or accept it if it is God’s true word. I prayed that God would show me if the Qur’an is the true word and take away the things I believed from the Bible if the Qur’an is the true word. I prayed that God would speak to me in some manner and tell me which book to follow, and then I went back to my house to sleep.

I saw a dream that night. The dream I saw was that my father’s land with a wheat crop was divided in two. In the first half of the land, the wheat had grown very nicely and there was a Bible among the wheat. In the other half of the land, the crop was filled with weeds. It was really a mess and had a Qur’an among the crop. A man came and told me that the crop in the weedy land was not actually wheat but another useless crop. The man told me to go from the farm full of weeds to the wheat harvest farm, and then he held my hand and took me there. The man reaped from the wheat harvest and fed it to me. I asked him what the other farm was, and he told me it represented an answer to the questions I had been asking about the true book of God.

In the dream, I was also told about Jesus and His resurrection. The next morning, I went out to a farm, lifted up my hands, and prayed to give my life to Jesus. I went to my father’s farm and prayed to Jesus that I’d follow Him for the rest of my life. I asked Him to protect me from my father and the sheikhs and to give me strength to serve Him. My Christian friend took me to the church, and I continued to read and better understand the Bible.

And all this began because I saw that the God of the Bible answers prayer!

CHAPTER

5

ENGAGING LOSTNESS

The chief, who is also the imam, stood there openly, and said, “Now you have given us natural water to drink, but we will not be satisfied. We want you to come with your church to this village.”

—Muslim village chief to a well-digging team who had also prayed for his people

BRINGING THE GOSPEL THROUGH SERVICE

Wasim had been prepared for many years to accept the role of a paramount chief in his country. It was his right of heritage. He was the senior son of his father. His Muslim training was excellent; he even spoke and read some Arabic. His path was secured for a lifetime appointment to lead his people. But before that could happen, Wasim’s life had taken a turn that he had never expected: he had become a Christian. In 2006, he received training in Disciple Making Movements and he decided to take the gospel back to his homeland.

Sometimes Wasim wondered if his resolve would hold when the time came to reveal his new faith to his family and turn down the inherited position of chief. But when the day came after his father’s death, he shocked his family and the whole community when he said, “I cannot accept this position.” That decision created many problems for him, as his Christian faith was fully exposed and his people felt that he had turned his back on them for a foreign religion.

Wasim eventually became a church pastor in another area of his country where he was not known. In this new place, he could get away from the troubles at home and be just an ordinary person again. His challenge in this new area, however, was no less severe than the one he had faced at home, because his new region was 97 percent Muslim. Wasim decided that God was calling him to utilize what he had learned from his Bible studies regarding making disciples in the communities around his town, so he began to survey the areas. And he knew that he would never get into any of the Muslim villages as a pastor. He had to set aside his “credentials” once again and approach these people as a friend.

So his research began. He spent each day walking, as far as fifty kilometers from his town, exploring places to plant the gospel. He didn’t own a car or motorcycle or even a bicycle; he called his mode of transportation “leg-mobile.” Wasim eventually discovered a community thirty kilometers from his town that seemed like the right place, and he began spending most of his time there. He enjoyed the people there but, as he spent more time with them, he discovered that, because their town was so remote, they lacked access to simple resources needed to make life a bit easier. They even resorted to making do without the most basic, inexpensive resources, simply because they were too far away from the town where they could purchase these items, and they were suffering as a result.

So Wasim made mental notes of the kinds of things that they needed and, with the little money he had, he walked all the way to town and bought those supplies, walked back to the village—thirty kilometers each way—and sold those items to the people for very little profit. And every time people purchased something, Wasim smiled his infectious grin and said something like, “Do you know that God really loves you?” It required a great sacrifice on his part to make the long walks back and forth to the town, and he was barely surviving on the money he earned from the sales, but he was making many friends. And after two or three weeks of this, his encouraging words became the main reason that people bought small things from him, rather than the price or availability.

But he had learned a secret in his disciple-making training: if you want to touch a Muslim’s heart for the gospel, you have to be a genuine friend. You need to ask God to give you honest concern for them, not see Muslims as trophy conversions, but as people whom God loves and whom you can love as well. And Wasim was good at that. One thing was sure: the people of the village were very happy, and others were coming from the nearby villages to meet the kind man who had befriended them.

After some time, the chief of the village approached Wasim with a surprise. “We have seen you in this community; you have been with us. We don’t know you or where you are coming from, but the way we are seeing you is like you are someone sent from God to help us overcome our problems. What can we do for you?”

Wasim had wondered if God would provide a breakthrough for him in this village. He had prayed for that breakthrough for weeks, and now a door was opening. He replied, “The only thing I want you to do that would make me very happy is for you, sir, and your people to let me tell you about the God I serve, to tell you true stories about God, beginning with the creation of the world.”

And the chief said, “This is nice, and tomorrow I will give you a chance to talk to my people. If people are willing to listen, I will give them my permission.”

So the following morning, the chief called the people of the village to the community’s courthouse and invited Wasim to speak. Wasim began to share the story of creation, allowing the people time to reflect on the things he shared. It was clear to the listeners that this was not going to be just storytelling; Wasim was asking them to think, to reflect on what his words would mean for their lives if they were true. Eventually, he asked them this question: “God said to Adam, ‘You have access to eat from every tree, everything in this garden; but the one in the middle of the garden, you are not to eat it, because if you eat it, you will die.’ But Adam sinned, yet he did not die. So why do you think God would say that and then not kill Adam and Eve immediately?”

The village discussed this among themselves for some time and then settled on an answer: “Because God loves us.” And Wasim said, “It is that love that has also prompted me to come to this village, to stay with you, regardless of who I am.” As he continued to share stories from the Bible, Wasim led the people in this same discovery process that moved them to a deeper understanding of the nature of the God of the Bible. And at every point of discovery, there was a call to begin obeying everything they were learning about God.

Eventually, Wasim came to the stories in the Bible concerning Jesus, and the people were ready by then to comprehend that, because of God’s love for mankind, He sent His Son Jesus to come and die for us. Wasim helped the people to understand that if they were willing to give their lives to Jesus, He would set them free.

At this point, the Muslim chief got up and said, “I and my community are willing to give our lives to Jesus.” The people of the community said the same thing, and that day sixty-eight men and women were baptized. The discipling of those people continued as they learned about prayer and fasting, and obeying God in everything. Even those who did not read and write received special training in oral Bible stories and Scriptures, and they, too, became strong disciples. Today, this church is very strong, and it has planted seven other churches. Eight total churches exist simply because one man said no to being a chief, and a chief said yes to hosting a stranger.

Wasim grew in effectiveness in making disciples and training many other leaders, and he eventually transferred to a very difficult region of the Muslim world where it is forbidden to proclaim the gospel or to leave Islam—both under penalty of death. Yet Wasim and his colleagues have coached a few other Christian ministries who had previously tried to engage that region but had experienced very limited success.

Wasim once described their situation this way: “They had been trying without success in this area before our coaching. They were not successful. But we told them, ‘You are looking at Muslims as the enemy.’ We told them that you don’t have to look at Muslims as enemies. If you want them to follow Jesus, then you have to go to them, live with them, let them know you love them. When you show them love, you will find men and women of peace whose hearts are changing.

“And most of the churches and ministries we coach have started practicing that, showing love to Muslim communities. And because of that, they have been able to enter into some communities that you would never think possible. That has helped them to start Discovery Bible Studies in those communities. You will not be able to start a visible church there at first, but you can launch Discovery Bible Studies that become underground churches.”

WHEN CHRISTIAN COMPASSION ENGAGES GOD’S PEOPLE OF PEACE

Consider once again Matthew 9:35–38, which gives us remarkable insight into how Jesus viewed “lostness.” Do we, as Christians, typically respond to Muslims with compassion and a desire to engage them with the gospel, or are we more inclined to respond to them with fear, anger, and resignation regarding their fate? Is it possible that when many of us see Muslims, we reflect on the Twin Towers of New York City and the horrific things done in the name of “honor,” and we become overwhelmed by the challenge, not inclined toward compassion?

Jesus leads with compassion for people. Can we imagine that He views the world of Islam with anything less than grief for the suffering, oppression, desperation, for what has been stolen from these people? Can we imagine that He is not yet ready to reach the Muslim masses with people who carry His message and are empowered by His Spirit?

Jesus saw the masses, and He saw a great harvest ready to reap. Is that not possible among Muslims today? When the church decides to engage Muslims everywhere, and with high intentionality to follow Jesus’ guidance on how to engage lostness with the gospel, then we will see God moving mountains every day to facilitate success. And that is precisely what we are seeing happen around the world with Disciple Making Movements.

God is preparing Muslim hearts to respond to genuine Christian compassion. So we succeed now; not when we go with a nifty program, but when we go simply as friends who love Muslims.

God is raising up Muslim people of peace prepared to bridge the gospel into their communities, and intrepid Christian pioneers are finding them!

The stories in this chapter will give you a clear picture of how, in the last few years, some of the most hardened and violently anti-Christian Muslim communities are being penetrated by the gospel. This is not a programmatic process. It depends on prayer, the Holy Spirit, and the human touch, and it works well because it is God’s idea of how to engage lostness.

GENUINE CHRISTIAN COMPASSION: A CRITICAL ELEMENT

Jesus came to seek and save the lost. In order to do that, He took on the form of a bond servant, and He “went about doing good” (Acts 10:38). Jesus seamlessly merged compassion, healing, and deliverance with a life of proclaiming repentance of sins, the coming kingdom of God, and salvation of the soul. When confronted with the paralytic man who was lowered through the roof (Mark 2), Jesus both healed his physical disability and addressed the issues of sin and repentance.

Yet most ministries today are one-dimensional, extending the love of Jesus in primarily one of two ways. Many ministries focus almost exclusively on meeting people’s physical needs with only a minimal idea of making faithful disciples of Jesus. Other ministries focus almost exclusively on personal and mass evangelism with only minimal attention given to relating to people personally, meeting their needs, and demonstrating the loving character of God as a pathway to making faithful disciples of Jesus.

If we want to emulate the model of Jesus, we must learn to minister as He did, meeting human needs while also confronting the lost with the truth of the gospel.

ONLY SHARE WITH PEOPLE WHOM GOD HAS PREPARED TO RECEIVE YOU

In the Bible, there are two occasions when Jesus sent out His disciples into the harvest. In Matthew 10, He sent out the twelve apostles to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. In Luke 10, He sent out seventy others into every city and place where He Himself was about to go. In both cases, the ones sent were also the ones who were commanded to pray for the laborers in the harvest (Matthew 9:38; Luke 10:2). In Jesus’ sending of the twelve, they were told to find a “son of peace” or a “worthy household” and remain there (Matthew 10:11–15; Luke 10:5–7); and the seventy were told to “remain in the same house. . . . Do not go from house to house” (Luke 10:7). In both passages concerning the disciples, Jesus told them not to remain in a city if they did not find a house of peace there. And in both cases, they were told to heal the sick and demonized, and also to proclaim the good news of the kingdom of God. Jesus sent His disciples to do what He did: to minister with compassion and also to proclaim the kingdom of God. And He summarized His instructions this way: “Freely you have received, freely give” (Matthew 10:8).

The reality is that people of peace are God’s pre-positioned agents to bridge the gospel to their family, their friends, or their workplace. This element of Jesus’ strategy for engaging lostness is perhaps one of the most significant principles, and also one of the most neglected principles, for entering unreached people groups. Obeying Jesus’ commands on this (and note that His words are commands, not suggestions) overcomes historic barriers such as:

how to gain access into highly restricted Muslim areas of the world through a home that God has already prepared to welcome and protect you, which will replicate quickly in that context;

how to overcome cultural barriers and the challenges of contextualizing the gospel, during which the household of peace becomes an embryonic church that learns to discover from God’s Word how to overcome these barriers;

and many other challenges that we will see later.

Examples of people of peace in the book of Acts would include:

Cornelius and his household (Acts 10),

Lydia and her household (Acts 16), and

the Philippian jailer and his household (Acts 16).

AFRICAN EXAMPLES OF PEOPLE OF PEACE

Our experience in Africa now counts approximately eighteen thousand different people of peace who have opened the doors of their communities for disciple makers. A cross section of this list reminds us a lot of the above list from the book of Acts (military people, women in the marketplace, and people who have observed God do a dramatic thing). They are often (but not always) people who are naturally hospitable and welcoming to strangers.

Surprisingly, it is not uncommon for sheikhs and imams to be the people of peace in Muslim communities as they discover the answers to their spiritual longings. Many thousands of people of peace have been women, although in Muslim contexts women typically have to be very wise and creative in how they facilitate the entry of the gospel into their community. People of peace in many cases are people of influence in a community, but thousands of people of peace are very ordinary people who would not see themselves as leaders. And, in some cases, the first encounter with God’s person of peace is not exactly what we would have expected. There are cases of indifference or even hostility at first.

THE ANIMAL CHASER

Azab had moved to a distant village in hopes of telling others about the gospel of Jesus. He met a couple there named Ihmaad and Lina, who welcomed him to the village, and Azab thought for sure that he had found a family of peace. He was on the verge of staying with them and their children for an extended time when they asked him an unexpected question: “Are you a follower of Jesus?” Azab told the truth, that he was committed to Jesus the Messiah, and immediately, the entire family cooled in their welcome. They told him that he could remain with them if he chose, but he was not to speak of these things in their home. So Azab agreed to their conditions, realizing that this might not be the traditional “household of peace” that he was expecting. But they had welcomed him as a guest, so he decided to remain with them and see what God might do. And what happened next was definitely not encouraging.

That same evening, a cow went missing from the village and most of the men went into the bush looking for it. Azab joined in the hunt, and he and the search parties did not return until after midnight, with no sign of the cow. After this, the people of the village began to suspect that Azab’s presence in the community somehow caused this bad fortune to befall them. Later that night, things got even worse: two calves were also missing, and this meant that the herdsmen would be unable to milk the cows of the missing calves, since calves are needed in order for them to produce milk. Suddenly, no one in the entire village would even speak to Azab. They did, however, speak freely about him behind his back, referring to him as the “animal chaser.”

Early the next morning, Azab wandered into the bush and threw himself on the ground, weeping and crying out to God. Why was all this happening? He had been confident that God had sent him to this village, but in a single day he had alienated the entire community. He was pouring out his grief before the Lord when he heard a commotion in the village: both the cow and the calves had returned! This was wonderful. The people were actually smiling and speaking to him as he came running back.

These good feelings lasted until later that afternoon, when some goats were discovered to be missing. Now the people were certain: this man had brought a curse on their village, for the missing goats would be likely to lure hyenas into the settlement. No sooner had he arrived back in the village than Azab returned to the bush to resume pouring out his heart before God. Why had he been disgraced when he knew that God was with him in this venture?

The next day, the goats returned, but this time the people began to make fun of Azab, calling him names. Azab’s training to go and befriend people was obviously not working out, so he decided to leave the village and find a place to pray for seven days. At the end of that week, he returned, taking care to enter the village during daylight, in hopes that no animals would go missing.

Ihmaad and Lina permitted Azab to stay in their home, although their children did not refrain from making fun of the “animal chaser” over tea that evening. But in the course of conversation, Ihmaad told Azab that he wanted to build a stable for his animals because the cows made him wealthy and deserved a better place to stay, but he could not find a builder to construct it. Azab was experienced in carpentry and, seeing this as an opportunity to serve Ihmaad, he offered to build the stable. Ihmaad, however, only chuckled. “Of course you could,” he said, “assuming that you even know how to hold a hammer!” His children roared with laughter at that jibe, and Ihmaad made it clear that he was not about to trust the animal chaser with anything. But before Ihmaad could speak again, Azab told him that he could quickly retrieve his carpentry tools in another town.

Within twenty-four hours, Azab had returned to the village with his tools, ready to work. He even agreed to do the work for nothing, or to let Ihmaad decide what to pay him. A few days later, the job was done perfectly. Ihmaad was both surprised and impressed. “I thought that you were just a man talking nonsense, but you have surprised us. You are a very clever and strong man.” Ihmaad praised Azab to the other villagers and instructed them to never call him by their favorite name again.

During the time that Azab was building, the children of the village came to watch, so he began talking to them about respecting and obeying their parents. He began telling the children stories about God, creation, and the fall of mankind. It did not take long until some families noticed a change for the better in their children, and they discovered that Azab was sharing some wonderful stories with them.

About that time, Azab had to leave the village to stay in town for a while, and during that time the people of the village realized that they, and especially their children, were missing the animal chaser. They wanted him back. So they started sending him gifts and inviting him to come back to the village.

He came as soon as he could. And when he returned, it was to a welcome reserved for dignitaries. The people wanted to hear more stories. They wanted to discover more about God. And so Azab began that night with another section of the Old Testament. After each story, there was time to talk about what the story meant. If it was truly God’s story, then what did it require of their lives? The stories continued every evening.

The first people to make Jesus the Lord of their lives were Ihmaad and Lina. The others followed rapidly. And since that time, Azab has moved on with his tool kit to other Islamic regions. But today there are twelve churches in that Muslim area, a living memorial that the “animal chaser” told them stories, and Jesus changed their lives.

FINDING PERSONS OF PEACE

Jesus commanded His disciples to seek out a person of peace whenever they entered a new community. In this process, two things should connect. First, the person of peace is waiting for someone to help him deal with a significant spiritual hunger (in fact, to tell him about Jesus) although he might not be consciously aware of it yet. God has put a hunger in his heart, the longing to worship or just to know God.

Sometimes, the people of peace in Muslim communities are not whom we expect to find. Approximately 20 percent of the time, the community’s person of peace is a sheikh, imam, or even a militant. In the story of the “animal chaser,” Azab had located a person of peace, but he still needed to discover what that person’s real needs were before he could establish a bridge for the gospel. By building a simple stable, Azab added service to his ministry, and that opened the door to sharing stories from Scripture.

Second, the church planter or disciple maker must be looking for the person of peace. And according to Matthew 10 and Luke 10, a disciple maker must go prepared to pray for people, serve them, and speak about God’s kingdom. By blending into a community and finding creative ways to serve its people, the disciple maker will generally find the person of peace that he is looking for.

We asked Jirani (chapter 3) about this: “You smile a lot and are very happy. Do you show the same joy when you talk with Muslims?”

“Yes!” he cried. “I do! Many unconverted Muslims like to sit down and have tea with me to just enjoy my company because they say I am nice and easy to be with. Muslims tell me and my wife that they love us, even if they don’t agree with what we believe. I love the people in my area and always engage in dialogues about the social things that go on, and eventually we move on to talking about the Lord.

“One Sunday, five Muslim leaders showed up in our church while I was speaking, and they began raising their hands to talk. I thought that they wanted to disturb us, so I said, ‘You must wait until later,’ but it turned out that they just wanted to say that they were ready to publicly give their lives to Jesus and just could not wait to tell us.

“Sometimes we find creative ways to serve our Muslim friends, whether praying for them or otherwise. The Muslims are really drawn by the compassion and generosity we Christians show in contrast to what they see in Islam.”

It would not be prudent to share any of the more creative ways that disciple makers serve people in Muslim lands, as it might endanger lives. But God has led His people to some very innovative ways of bridging the gap into Muslim communities. Sometimes they are self-supported by a job. Sometimes they work for governments. Sometimes they are traders or people in the market. Sometimes they are taxi drivers or they can be teachers, tailors, or truck drivers. They are the body of Christ in the marketplace looking for people of peace.

They meet people, make friends, demonstrate a life of compassion, and find the people God has looking for them.

CHAPTER

6

DISCOVERY BIBLE STUDIES AND OBEDIENCE-BASED DISCIPLESHIP

God’s love language to us is mercy and grace. Our love language to God is loving obedience.

—David Watson

Nabil is a former Muslim leader who became a Christian a few years ago. He reflects on how he was discipled:

A few weeks after I made the decision to accept Christ as my personal Lord and Savior, the church I was attending announced that there would be a discipleship program for new believers. I registered, and the following week I started a twelve-week class. It included two things: (1) the doctrines of the church; and (2) the memorization of important Bible verses. On the last day, we had a test to see what we had learned. I passed and was presented to the congregation and given a certificate of completing the church’s discipleship training program.

Today, when I think back to that experience, I recognize that there were some good things about those weeks. I memorized more than sixty verses related to biblical themes. I learned some good things that I did not know. But those twelve weeks did very little to help me develop the kind of disciplines and the lifestyle that Christ requires of His disciples. I was given some good knowledge, but I was not taught to obey. The focus was on knowledge about God, not on faithfully obeying God. I got only part of what I really needed. It took me some time to discover what it really meant to be a Christian and how important it is to obey God’s will. It is a tragic thing when the church overlooks Jesus’ last command.

OBEDIENCE-BASED DISCIPLESHIP

In Matthew 28:19, 20, Jesus said, “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you.” Jesus didn’t tell us to teach all the things that He has commanded us; He commanded us to teach others to obey these things. There is a big difference between teaching knowledge and teaching obedience. A disciple is taught to obey what Jesus commanded.

Knowledge without obedience creates a spiritual dichotomy between knowledge and obedience. This, tragically, is a toxic spiritual brew. In the garden of Eden, Adam and Eve had knowledge—they knew what God had told them to do—but Adam failed to add obedience to that knowledge. It is significant that the serpent offered knowledge to Eve while simultaneously urging her to disobey God’s command. Eve’s sin was choosing knowledge over obedience, and that same foolish choice plagues the modern church.

However, knowledge coupled with obedience creates disciples and draws them closer to God. Today, the church has put a lot of focus on knowledge, while obedience is assumed instead of being stressed as the very purpose of all knowledge. By so doing, we have created weak Christians and weak local churches. The worldwide phenomenon of “one mile wide and one inch deep Christianity” in the church is a direct result of a focus on knowledge rather than knowledge and obedience. Discipleship is not a matter of knowledge alone; it is equally a matter of obedience. The Bible is not a collection of information to be used to increase our knowledge; it is a collection of truths to be obeyed. Knowledge alone never produces spiritual growth and maturity because it doesn’t transform life. Obedient discipleship does. The gold standard of discipleship is Jesus’ own words: “Make disciples . . . teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you” (Matthew 28:19, 20).

The church today is preaching to produce conversion; then teaching to increase knowledge; then giving periodic attention, usually in sermons, to encourage converts to obey what they have learned. Jesus’ strategy was very different. In fact, as we have noted earlier, what Jesus did with the Twelve was exactly the opposite: He discipled them to conversion. He selected the Twelve and spent more than three years with them. They went where He went, asking questions, watching what He did, doing it with Him, and then doing it by themselves, being coached and mentored to be obedient disciples. Then one day, He asked them, “Who do you say that I am?” (Matthew 16:15). All those years, Jesus was revealing Himself to the Twelve. He brought them from the point of not knowing Him to the point where they discovered who He really was and were ready to follow Him anywhere, even to die for Him. This is the model of disciple making that Jesus gave us.

When we look at how Jesus discipled the Twelve, we can see several key elements:

Discipleship is relationship based: Jesus developed relationships with the Twelve. He lived with them, traveled with them, ate with them, did ministry with them, spent time in their homes, visited people with them, and so on.

Discipleship is coaching and mentoring based: Jesus trained the Twelve in the context of His ministry. It was on-the-job training, so to speak. He lived out the truths of God’s Word, expected the disciples to also live that way, observed and corrected them, and then sent them to go and make new disciples.

Making disciples is group process based: In the Gospels, we see the Twelve discussing things that Jesus said or that they saw Him doing; they processed together the things they were learning. Sometimes, Jesus intervened to bring correction when they failed to understand (Mark 9:31). Western Christians, like most people in Western culture, are much more individualistic than people in the Majority World: our relationship with the Lord is often very private and personal. But in cultures described in the Bible thousands of years ago, and today in much of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, important spiritual decisions are assumed to be a group experience, and there is much more accountability and support.

Disciple Making Movements depend on group processes for the following reasons, outlined by David Watson:

Groups remember more than individuals. Collective memory is always dramatically better than individual memory.

Groups learn faster than individuals. Groups require less repetition, and group repetition becomes individual memory.

Groups replicate faster than individuals. Because of the speed of memorization and learning, individuals in a group reach a point where they can pass on to others quickly what they are learning.

Groups replicate more often than individuals. Speed of replication affects frequency of replication.

Groups are a protection against bad leadership and heresy. When the authority of Scripture and dependence on prayer and the Holy Spirit are part of a group’s DNA, groups can protect themselves against bad leadership. Measuring leaders by God’s Word is a powerful defense against extrabiblical and unbiblical practices.

Groups self-correct. We see this happen frequently when groups measure themselves by the requirements of Scripture.

Groups keep individuals accountable. When churches are planted in established affinity or family groups, each member sees the others enough to hold one another accountable. If a group member disobeys Scripture, the group will know and respond quickly.[15]

Making disciples is discovery process based: Jesus spent time with the Twelve and gave them the opportunity to discover who He is. He revealed Himself progressively to them, until they came to the point where they knew that He is the Christ, the Son of God.

When working with lost people, we have to avoid falling into the role of explaining Scripture. If we do, we become the authority rather than allowing Scripture to be the authority. If we are the authority, replication is limited by our leadership capacity and the time we have to teach every group. Consequently, shifting from Scripture being the authority to the teacher being the authority will keep groups from replicating as they should.[16]

This is hard to do because we all love to teach what we know. But when we put ourselves between the Word of God and His people, we usurp God's role.

Making disciples is obedience based: Jesus always expects His disciples to obey Him. For Jesus, loving Him means obeying Him (John 14:15, 21, 24; 1 John 5:3). This does not mean that anyone looks at lost people and shakes a finger at them. It means that we help them ask themselves, “If this is truly from God, then what must change in my life today?”

PROMISES OF JOHN 14 AND 15 FULFILLED TODAY

The book of John takes us deeper into our understanding of the importance of obedience. It is not just a demonstration of our love for Christ; there are powerful promises attached to it. Let’s look at a few of these promises in John 14 and 15.

14:15–16: “If you love Me, keep My commandments. And I will pray the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that He may abide with you forever.” This is a conditional promise; our obedience is required if we want the Lord’s promised blessings.

14:17: “The Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees Him nor knows Him; but you know Him, for He dwells with you and will be in you.” Obedience welcomes the Spirit of Truth, who helps us discern truth and deception. What a great gift this is for Muslims desperately hungry for truth and love: the Spirit of God breaking the power of deceptions and revealing the truth.

14:19–20: “Because I live, you will live also. At that day you will know that I am in My Father, and you in Me, and I in you.” When we obey God, He reveals Himself to us; even difficult concepts like the Trinity are experienced and known.

14:23: “If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our home with him.” This is a promise not only for the love of God, but for His love to be manifested in obedient disciples.

14:26: “The Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all things that I said to you.” When we obey God, the Holy Spirit will aid our understanding of the Bible and help us know and remember what we need.

14:27: “My peace I give to you. . . . Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.” When we obey God, the peace of God calms our hearts and gives us courage.

15:7: “If you abide in Me, and My words abide in you, you will ask what you desire, and it shall be done for you.” When we obey, we pray prayers that God can answer.

15:8: “By this My Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit; so you will be My disciples.” When we obey God, we are His disciples, and the fruit that we bear brings glory to Him.

15:10: “If you keep My commandments, you will abide in My love, just as I have kept My Father’s commandments and abide in His love.” When we obey God, we abide in His will and His love.

15:14: “You are My friends if you do whatever I command you.” When we obey God, Jesus recognizes us as His friends.

15:16: “I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit, and that your fruit should remain.” When we obey God, the fruit of our lives will not be lost, but will remain beyond our days.

DISCOVERY BIBLE STUDY (DBS)

The challenge in making obedient disciples is to teach obedience. In the context of Disciple Making Movements, we have seen that the best tool to teach obedience is Discovery Bible Study (DBS). Do not teach or preach; instead, facilitate discovery and obedience.

When people are simply exposed to the Scriptures, God will reveal the truth to them. Abdul Nur and his team have seen exciting things happen through the Discovery Bible Studies in homes:

We have the Discovery Bible Studies in our house-to-house programs, and we study different books of the Bible. When we study a certain book of the Bible, we prepare questions that will help participants understand the verses and messages. People love the Discovery Bible Studies and usually read more than the weekly assigned readings. We make sure that the people understand the passages through the questions, and we continue to read the passages if the people don’t understand what they’ve read. We have leaders lead the DBS and that is how they make disciples. We encourage the believers to translate what they’ve learned to applications in their lives.

The Discovery Bible Study uses the inductive method of Bible study. Its purpose is not to build knowledge, even though people do develop their understandings of biblical teachings as they develop sound doctrine. Rather, it is a careful analysis of the Word of God in order to discover what are the principles of life for a disciple, for a Christian leader, and for the church. As people discover these principles, they align their lives to them. So the primary purpose of the DBS is to help people (nonbelievers and believers) discover and understand the teachings of Jesus in a way that leads them to obedience (2 Timothy 3:15–41).

In the context of Disciple Making Movements, the DBS is a group meeting. It introduces and develops from the beginning the core values of discipleship, leadership, and church. The DBS is designed in such a way that the different parts of a session develop the DNA of church in the group. (When we refer to “the DNA” of a church, we mean that habits learned early—obedience to God’s Word, prayer, worship, and so forth—will remain habits when a person accepts Christ. Those habits become part of the new believer’s daily life, simply because they were implanted as “DNA” previously.) By so doing, when the group members accept Christ, they will discover that they have already been “doing church” from the first days.

Each DBS session is very discussion oriented so that all members participate. We will discuss DBS processes in more detail in chapter 13.

WHAT OBEDIENCE AND DISCOVERY LOOK LIKE IN REAL LIFE

One leader who has catalyzed movements among three Muslim people groups in his country shares how the biblical value of obedience gleaned from personal discovery has been critical in the process:

In our experience, every Muslim who is given a Bible—especially those Muslims that are highly placed—they experience the Bible itself as the Word of God. There is power in the Bible. It is God-breathed. It will not return void. And that power just captivates Muslim leaders. It holds them bound.

I’ve heard some say, “The story of Jesus—what He did and what He went through—how can someone go through this for you?” That demonstration of a man loving someone to the point of laying down his life, it really grips them. It resonates with them. It is the power of the Bible.

And the simplicity of the Bible—it is so simple. People have fooled us when they tell us that it is so complex, so difficult, but really it is so simple. I want to say that the power of the Holy Spirit is really the driving force when people are reading the Bible.

And for our own prayer points, we pray: “God, as your people we pray, that when they come in contact with your Word, as they read it, let your Word come alive in their lives.” The power of that prayer, all put together, is responsible for all that we are seeing.

Most of the time, we leave the Trinity out with Muslims, as they are just becoming disciples. Those things just become clear to them down the road. When it comes time to explain the Trinity, it is easy for them to understand. You don’t want to explain that at the front end; you just want to let God the Father, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit reveal Themselves in Muslims’ lives.

When the imam speaks, nobody questions, everyone obeys. On the other hand, obedience within Islam is pushed to the limits of what it is supposed to be. This is something that we always help people understand: when you teach obedience and the principle of grace—not as a law, but with grace—they understand it. And that is when you find total obedience. You find it in what they are doing, in their walk. In Discovery Bible Studies, we have seen transformation; and when that happens, the conviction of being changed by God pushes them to want to be baptized.

In our research for this book, we met people who came to the interviews with their Discovery Bible Study notebooks filled with pages of hand-written Scripture, insights from God’s Word, and “I will” statements of obedience to God. It was precious to see how important those notebooks were to these people; the pages had swelled from the pressure of the pen on paper. They knew what they had promised God, and they had recorded His answers to their prayers.

This is the power of discovering God: the power of friends and families together turning their lives to Jesus; the power of obedience that transforms us and changes our part of the world. This is how Muslims are falling in love with Jesus.

CHAPTER

7

SIMPLE CHURCHES, DRAMATIC TRANSFORMATION, RAPID REPLICATION

Our goal is not only the multiplication of churches or numbers of believers; our goal is to see transformation.

—Habib, senior disciple-making trainer

Maysa was a very ordinary person living in Africa. She and her husband owned livestock, and they traveled about the countryside with groups of other nomads looking for grazing areas for the animals. The couple were both Christians, alone in an area where everyone else was Muslim, and they had no church or Bible study to join. Maysa realized that since none of the other people in her nomadic community could read, she had to be the one to bring the life-giving story of the gospel to her people.

So Maysa attended a training seminar offered by a missions organization, in which she learned how to tell stories from the Bible, beginning at creation and moving forward chronologically toward Christ. As soon as she rejoined her family, Maysa began sharing these stories with other nomadic women. In her village, the men would go out every day with the animals to find grazing, while the women stayed behind to care for their children. Maysa used this time as an opportunity to tell many women about God. She told them how God created the entire world in just six days, and how a man named Adam had disobeyed God’s command and brought sin and death into the world—a world that had previously been perfect and free from suffering and death. She told them about the great Flood and the man named Noah who obeyed God, and she told them how God had repeatedly made Himself known to men like Abraham and Moses so that mankind could live according to His will. And after every story, the women would discuss what the stories meant and, if they were true, how their lives must change to obey the God of Truth. The most important thing that the women learned was this: don’t just hear God’s Word; obey it!

Within a few weeks, more than forty women had accepted God’s gift of salvation and eternal life through His Son Jesus. Those women began to change as God’s Spirit moved in their lives, and their husbands were quick to notice. Now, the people of this village did more than travel about with their livestock; the men were raiders, marauders who would periodically attack other villages and steal their livestock. These attacks were a matter of both livelihood and pride in this culture; a successful raider could boast that he had fought and won. But the men became puzzled by the changes they saw in their wives, and they knew that Maysa’s stories were responsible in some way, so they began asking her husband probing questions while they were out grazing their livestock, and he was privileged to lead many of the men to Christ. After this, the men stopped their raiding and began instead to take the good news of God’s Word to other nomadic groups of Muslims.

When Muslims discover the truth of Christ, they almost always begin to share with their families or close friends about God’s free gift of eternal life. About one year after Maysa began telling Bible stories to the people in her village, two men named Ahmed and Mechela were driving through the desert, on their way to visit some Christ followers in a distant region. Ahmed’s missions team had trained Maysa how to make obedient disciples using a chronological Bible storytelling format, and they were presently traveling around to visit with other Christ followers whom they had trained. They were about two hundred kilometers from the region where Maysa lived.

As they bumped along the rutted dirt track, they came upon two elderly men walking with large burdens wrapped in blankets on their shoulders. The men had heard them coming and were waving them down, asking for a ride. In this region, a person can walk the entire day without seeing more than a few vehicles, and one does not waste any opportunity to catch a lift.

But Ahmed didn’t slow down; in fact, he stepped on the accelerator, hard. This region was frequented by bandits, and he was very suspicious of the blanketed goods these men were carrying. It was not uncommon to be waylaid by criminals brandishing AK-47s, and Ahmed was in no mood to take any chances. The two Christians roared past the elderly men in a cloud of dust, but after a moment, the Holy Spirit pressed Ahmed as hard as he had pressed the gas pedal. “Why did you leave them?” his conscience said. “You have space in your car.” Ahmed felt instantly convicted that he had made a poor choice, and he found himself easing off the gas and stepping on the brake. In a moment that paralleled his own inner conflict, he threw the car into reverse, grinding the gears, and began the run back toward the hitchhikers.

As Ahmed glanced in the rearview mirror, he saw the elderly men running toward him, their burdens bouncing on their shoulders and their faces alight with relief. They clambered into the backseat, bowing and grinning to the Christians in the front as they dumped their burdens, from which no firearms appeared, onto the floor. Mechela breathed a sigh of relief to see nothing more dangerous than brightly colored scarves within the bundles.

“We are taking a dowry gift to a young man in a distant village,” one of the hitchhikers explained. “We would have been walking all day if you had not come past.”

Mechela asked a few polite questions about the engaged couple, then suddenly asked, “Do you know God?” He bit his tongue the instant the words were out, darting a guilty look toward Ahmed. This was not the right question to ask new Muslim acquaintances. Ahmed gave him a quick disapproving scowl. The young man had probably offended his new guests by implying that they might not be good Muslims.

But the passengers surprised the Christians by throwing their heads back in laughter. “Of course we know God,” one of the men replied. “Who do you think made you stop and give us a lift? You didn’t want to. You had already dusted us up pretty good. But who made you back up?”

The ensuing laughter broke down all barriers between the men, and soon they were chatting together like old friends. After a while, Mechela decided to try his hand at conversation a second time. “Would you like to hear a story?” he asked. There were no radio stations in the desert, and storytelling was a good way to pass the time, so the men readily agreed. “Well,” continued Mechela, getting comfortable in his reversed position on the front seat, “do you know where the whole world came from? It was like this: in the beginning . . .” He had not gotten more than a minute into his story when he was abruptly interrupted. “Oh, we already know that story!” cried the hitchhikers in unison.

Poor Mechela was taken aback once again. He stared at his new friends with open mouth, too surprised to speak, so Ahmed rescued him by asking the men to tell their own story of creation. And they proceeded to recite it verbatim according to the way his missions team taught the Scriptures to those who could not read. As the men began to tell Mechela and Ahmed the story of Noah, Ahmed asked them, “Excuse me, but where did you learn these stories?”

“Last rainy season,” the men answered, “a man moved to our village and taught us these stories and many others. Let us tell you about the great Flood . . . and we have many other stories that we would like to tell you.”

It took the remainder of the trip, but Ahmed and Mechela eventually were able to piece things together. They traced the source of the Bible stories that the men had learned all the way back to Maysa and her husband, who had led others to become disciples of Christ, who in turn had gone to distant villages and shared the gospel with more nomads. These two elderly men, hitchhiking their way through the desert, were the fifth generation of Christ followers growing out of Maysa’s efforts, and they were on their way to share the gospel with a young couple who would soon be married and would carry it on to others. And all this took place in the space of one year!

This spreading of the gospel through the desert, one person sharing Scripture stories with another outside of any formal setting, is what Ahmed and his team call “the church on the camel’s path.”

SIMPLE CHURCHES LEAD TO RAPID REPLICATION

When the vast majority of American Christians talk about “church,” we have a fairly common idea of what we mean. Our idea of church usually focuses on facilities, leaders, and programs, and the more of each, the better. The challenge for most Christian leaders is that, regardless of the size of their church, the perceived minimum elements needed to sustain that church are often greater than the existing budget and staff can sustain. It is very tough to lead a traditional church today. Pastors need much prayer and support.

We often talk about two kinds of churches:

Elephant churches have lots of programs, activities, and people. We need churches like this, but they are very slow to multiply, just like two elephants that take two years to produce offspring.

Rabbit churches are small, able to hide in plain sight, and multiply very quickly. Two rabbits can theoretically produce more than one hundred million rabbits in three years.

God bless elephant churches; they serve wonderful functions. But from every strategic perspective, megachurches and even average-sized churches will never fulfill the Great Commission without a goal and plan to launch thousands of rabbit churches. Only a rabbit church has the ability to reproduce rapidly, thrive in a dangerous environment, and naturally facilitate obedience-based discipleship within every member, as evidenced by Disciple Making Movements taking place among Muslims.

In our studies of Muslim church-planting outcomes for more than seven years, in more than six thousand new Muslim-background churches in eighteen countries, including seventy different Muslim people groups, we have found that “church” is being done this way:

The average church size is 31.2 Christians per church (approximately 15 Christians per church in extremely high-risk areas).

Every member is expected to participate in ongoing Discovery Bible Studies in which people together learn how to obey God and help one another grow in faithfulness to Him.

The leadership of the church is somewhat collective, but typically includes a facilitator, leader, or pastor who is receiving ongoing biblical training. These leaders will typically serve the church and also support themselves financially.

As noted before, many churches set aside special times every week for prayer and fasting.

Between 60 and 70 percent of the churches report that, within the first few months of the first Discovery Bible Study, they experience a dramatic healing or deliverance that usually causes the church to suddenly accelerate in growth. Among the most radical Muslim communities, that number is closer to 50 percent.

The tithes of the church are spent on things like meeting needs of people inside the church, doing acts of kindness for the larger community, and sometimes supporting some members to pioneer the gospel in new Muslim communities.

The meetings of the church are very simple Discovery Bible Studies, with frequent prayer meetings to pray for the lost and for needs in the local community.

More than half of the Muslim-background churches are planted among people who are considered totally unengaged by the gospel, or where there is no viable “Jesus option.” In these cases, persecution is very common, and church buildings only increase that risk.

About one quarter of these churches are in “Muslim-dominant” regions where there may or may not be heavy persecution. In some areas, the sheer number of churches that are planted in a region changes the spiritual environment, which in turn gives Christians much greater freedom.

The remaining 25 percent of the churches are planted in areas that might be considered dominated by “Folk Islam,” a syncretistic mixing of traditional religions and Islam. While serious persecution occasionally happens in these areas, there is typically more freedom, and sometimes small churches will expand rapidly to one hundred or more members and have the freedom to build an inexpensive structure to facilitate larger meetings.

Leaders in these churches are typically trained two to four times a year, without extracting them to other regions, through the use of more experienced Christian leaders cycling through pioneer areas training, coaching, and mentoring new leaders. Some are mentored in the meantime by cell phone.

Disciples reproduce disciples, and churches reproduce churches in ways that are biblically informed and culturally appropriate.

Did you notice that everything these churches do tends to fulfill a function of reproducing obedient disciples of Jesus? There are not many programs, but quite a lot of genuine transformation of individuals, families, and whole communities.

SIMPLE CHURCHES LEAD TO TRANSFORMATION

Let’s return to Ahmed and Mechela, the men who picked up the hitchhikers in the desert. Sometime after that encounter, they were once again bumping over a desert road—hitting potholes, slogging through muddy ruts, choking on dust—when the check engine light came on. On an American highway, this means getting off at the next exit to find a gas station, or calling the auto club on one’s cell phone. But in an African desert, it can mean real trouble. Ahmed did not have the tools or spare parts needed to repair his old Land Cruiser, for money and resources were tight for these two men, and they could only observe with dismay as the engine died and the vehicle rolled to a stop.

Fortunately, they were less than three kilometers from a small village where there was a Christian colleague, Waseem, whom Ahmed had trained in making disciples. Unfortunately, they knew that it would take a minimum of three days for a truck to arrive with the spare parts they needed. So Ahmed and Mechela left the vehicle and walked the remaining distance to Waseem’s home.

That evening, after milking his cows, Waseem invited the two men to join him for his Discovery Bible Study at a nearby home. He didn’t actually say “nearby,” but he did not correct the misunderstanding of his guests, either. Ahmed and Mechela readily agreed, picturing a short walk to a peaceful round hut with thatched roof, owned by a quiet family in the village.

Waseem smiled innocently, then led his friends on a long, arduous trek under the desert stars. After several hours, Ahmed saw a large hut in the distance. It was indeed round with a thatched roof, and things were certainly quiet, but perhaps too quiet. The three men entered the hut and Ahmed stopped dead in his tracks.

Huddled inside was a group of some thirty men. All were dressed in desert camouflage, and all were heavily armed. Several of the men had automatic rifles in their hands or within reach. Most had ammo belts draped across a shoulder, and all had unwelcoming eyes focused toward the strangers. Ahmed recognized the men as a group of rebels, whom the Western press would term “freedom fighters,” but whom most Africans know as dangerous brigands. Had Ahmed known in advance that these men would be here, he would never have agreed to come. But Waseem simply beamed his smile once more, then sat down next to the rebel leader as the leader opened his Bible.

“ ‘You have heard that it was said,’ ” the rebel leader read, “ ‘ “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ ” But I tell you not to resist an evil person. But whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also. If anyone wants to sue you and take away your tunic, let him have your cloak also. And whoever compels you to go one mile, go with him two. Give to him who asks you, and from him who wants to borrow from you do not turn away.’ ” [17] Then the leader asked, “What did Isa say here, in your own words?”

For the next hour, the thirty men discussed the words of Jesus, considering His commands that were so radically opposed to their own traditions, and wrestling with their conviction that they must begin to obey them. Ahmed and Mechela sat silently in a corner, gazing with amazement as many of the men, including the leader himself, wept openly over their sinful condition. These rebels, and many others like them, cloaked their crimes under the guise of fighting for independence, but they supported their “initiatives” by old-fashioned highway robbery. Indeed, these were the very types of men that Ahmed had feared when he passed the elderly hitchhikers some weeks earlier, knowing that they habitually hijacked cars and trucks in the desert, frequently murdering the passengers under the old adage “dead men tell no tales.”

The rebel leader blinked through his tears at Ahmed, then started to laugh. “You don’t have to be afraid, my friends,” he said, gesturing toward the fearful countenances of the two church planters. “You are in the safest place in the region!” The entire band broke into laughter as Waseem translated, many nodding in agreement as they hefted their loaded weapons. Ahmed smiled politely, but his eyes measured the distance to the door.

“My brother,” the rebel leader said in a serious tone, “our friend [pointing to Waseem] has been reading God’s Word to us, and it has changed our lives.” He glanced around the hut at his comrades. “We have been changed. We used to do all the stealing and . . . and other things . . . but now, now we are children of God!” As Waseem translated these words, a few men at the rear of the group scowled and exchanged glances, but many others nodded with smiles or tears; a few cried “praise God!” in their native tongue. Many of the rebels had already given their lives to Christ, and the group had slowly been diminishing as, one by one, the new believers returned to their homes to share the Word of God with their families. Some were still hardened in their ways of wickedness, but God had not finished yet. It was for that very reason that the leader himself yet remained, working to obey God’s commands by urging his men to continue following him into eternal life through Jesus Christ.

The next morning, the rebel leader sent several men with donkeys to tow the Land Cruiser back to the rebel hideout. “It will be quite safe here,” he joked. Ahmed and Mechela remained with the band for several days, until the spare parts arrived, and in spending time with these men, whom they had once feared, their understanding of God’s Word was transformed.

“These men were my brothers,” Ahmed explained later. “What I learned was that people don’t need to fight such men to disarm them; the Word of God can easily disarm. I realized how obeying the Scriptures can change lives, even for people that I think are the most dangerous people. Just obeying the Word of God!

“It is not about condemning them for what they do, though what they [have done] might have been very violent in the past. It is not about telling them, ‘this is the wrong thing’ or ‘that is the right thing.’ It is about sharing the Word of God with them, letting them discover God. And once they want to obey it, they have no choice. It is the true freedom of God; it is the whole freedom. Just obeying Christ is the whole freedom, because you don’t struggle with ‘do this, don’t do that.’ You just teach people to obey Him, and they will then make their choices.

“These men taught me. They stopped doing what they used to do because they wanted to obey Christ, not because they wanted to be religious people.”

And that is the very definition of transformation.

DRAMATIC TRANSFORMATION: THE KEY TO RAPID MULTIPLICATION OF CHURCHES AMONG MUSLIMS

By 2007, CityTeam had been catalyzing disciple-making and church-planting movements in Africa for only a couple of years. That year, a group of senior staff were gathered for a strategy meeting in a mountainous retreat, when a call came from the field with a remarkable story. Several Muslim leaders had surrounded the leaders of one of our key ministry partners while they were having midday prayers. That team had been seeing breathtaking breakthroughs among highly resistant Muslim peoples, so they had anticipated that something like this might happen. The team was justifiably fearful, but they kept praying. Surprisingly, the Muslims just stood around them observing the proceedings and making no signs of hostile intentions.

When the Christian leaders finished praying, the group surrounding them approached. They turned out to be a delegation of Muslim civic leaders from a distant region, and they had come with their imam and with a request. “Please,” they said, “we have not come to harm you. But we have a request: please send us the storytellers!”

The Muslim leaders from this community had observed other communities in their area that had become Christian, and they had noticed a dramatic change in people’s lives—broken families now in unity, a sense of love and compassion among the people, and a breaking of old hostilities and vendettas—and they wanted the same thing in their community. The Christians told the imam, however, that they were already overstretched and understaffed, and they did not have a single disciple maker or chronological storyteller to spare.

The imam came close to the head of the ministry and spoke in an urgent tone. “Please, sir, we are begging you to help us. We are needing to have a storyteller to come stay with us.”

After some rearranging of schedules and responsibilities, the ministry was able to send out a team of storytellers to the distant village. Nobody imagined at the time that events like these would be repeated again and again, or that we would see entire mosques come to faith in Christ, en masse! It was never part of our strategic planning to make Muslims jealous to have the gospel because their neighbors had been blessed by it, yet that, in a nutshell, is just what continues to happen. Indeed, Paul wrote, “to provoke them [Israel] to jealousy, salvation has come to the Gentiles” (Romans 11:11).

We can say categorically that the powerful testimony of transformation so resonates with the discouragement and disillusionment inside Islam that it is the single most significant reason for rapid multiplication of churches among Muslims today. When Muslims observe the types of dramatic transformation that only the gospel can bring in individuals, families, and whole communities, they are often jealous to experience that same transformation.

Over the course of interviews for this book, we discovered a very long list of what transformation looks like among Muslim-background disciples. When transformation happens, there is always evidence. These are some of the most common changes seen among Muslim individuals and communities who accept Christ:

Healed Families. In families where women and children have been treated almost as slaves, wife beating becomes no longer acceptable, and love begins to heal broken marriages. Children are given permission to attend schools and are treated with new appreciation. Fighting between parents and children diminishes. Polygamy is no longer the choice of Christian men, and prostitution dies out.

A Spirit of Freedom. When people discover freedom, it affects everything in their lives. They find release from fatalism, they are willing to try new things, and they expect God to bless their lives.

A Spirit of Love. Many Muslim people report that God puts love in their hearts for the first time. In many cases, they have a new compassion for fellow Muslims who are still in the mosque.

Diminished Violence. There have been instances in which, upon becoming Christians, former Muslims refuse to participate in ongoing ethnic warfare. In one case, when the Christian men were called to account for why they no longer “supported the tribe,” they shared the message of Jesus. This caused tribal elders to rethink their reasons for fighting, and the fighting stopped. Today, the two men who stood up for their convictions are church planters.

Less Addiction. The levels of addiction to alcohol, khat, and other things that consume people’s lives are greatly diminished as these people receive prayer for deliverance.

Redemption and Hope. Historically, when lost people become obedient disciples of Jesus, they typically exchange fatalism for optimism, have new energy and initiative, and become more productive people. In addition, they abandon expensive addictions, and they see the tangible blessings of God on their family situation.

Evidences of Divine Favor. Many new Christians share with joy how, after they became followers of Jesus, and during a time of prolonged drought, the Lord caused it to rain on their farms or on the pasture where their livestock was, but not on their neighbors’ land. And it became so obvious that the Muslim neighbors came to them to find out why these Christians had such favor. Farmers in every region that we have interviewed report that, since they have become Christians, they have begun praying over their fields and have ceased using Muslim or spiritist blessings on their land, and their harvests have dramatically increased.

Grace in Persecution. Many new Christians in Muslim areas face harsh persecution. But these believers, though persecuted in cruel ways, have been transformed so deeply that they find the courage to speak a blessing on their persecutors. This forgiveness in the face of persecution can, over time, be the way that God gets into a persecutor’s heart to transform it as well. Numerous Muslims who formerly persecuted the Muslim-background Christians in their areas have come to faith as a result of those whom they persecuted responding with grace and kindness to the evil things done to them.

Freedom from Demonic Oppression. Many Muslims have experienced years of torment from demonic powers. But when they repent of sins and receive Jesus as Lord, those spirits are successfully cast out. These deliverances are very tangible witnesses of the power of the gospel in Muslim families.

The Power of Individual Prayer. Common people discover that they can pray and God moves. Even the Muslims see this and thank God for the changes in the communities, as many who used to disturb them are now peaceful Christians.

CHAPTER

8

DREAMS, VISIONS, AND MIRACLES AMONG MUSLIMS

You see, according to the Bible, when we go to reach the nations, to tell people about Jesus, miracles will follow. It is a biblical principle.

—Wajeeh, a regional Christian leader

YOU WILL BE A MARABOUT (MUSLIM PRIEST)

Here is a prominent Christian leader named Yusuf sharing his own story.

This is what my father told me concerning my future: “You will be a successful cattle man, the father of nine children, and above all, a devoted Muslim.” My father could not imagine a more honorable life!

I was born and raised in a strong Muslim family. When my people define themselves, having cows and being a Muslim are major parts of our identity, so my father took very seriously the religious education of his children. After my primary school years, I had to leave my family to go into the city for junior high school. From that time, I tried to advance my religious education by studying with Islamic teachers at the mosque, learning from informed Muslim friends, and through my own readings. During that time, I became very militant. In high school and university, I was a leader of the Students’ Muslim Association. This zeal for my religion gave me the esteem of my parents when I visited them during school holidays.

In secondary school, I had one friend who was a Christian. One day, he asked me to come with him to his church. He said that if I would go to his church, my life would change. I told him that I didn’t see his life being better than mine, so I didn’t see any need to go to his church.

A few years after that, I was in university, and one day I had a discussion about Jesus Christ with another student, a Christian. This student was saying that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. How could Jesus be the “Son of God”? In my thinking, those words were blasphemous. My Muslim training taught me that I must not even discuss this with him, but I was so angry that I wanted to fight with him. When I confronted him, he said to me, “I know someone who can answer your questions. He was a Muslim and now he is a Christian. He will know how to explain these things to you.”

I still can’t explain exactly why I decided to meet this man. Certainly not because I wanted to understand his ideas! I really wanted to show him that he had made a huge mistake by leaving Islam and becoming Christian. I wanted him to know that he should come back to Islam, but our discussion did not last long enough to get around to that.

I told this man that I came to see him because I was told that he was a Muslim and now he is a Christian, and I had some questions for him. He replied by saying, “Young man, don’t ask your questions, because I will not answer them. Not now. But I’ll tell you one thing: God said if anyone searches for Him because he wants to do His will, God will reveal Himself to that person.”

I sat there, very angry, looking at this man. He stood up and went in his house, then came back with a book and two booklets. He handed them to me and said, “Take this. Go and read them. If you have questions about what you read here, then come back and we will talk.” I took the book and the booklets, but I was still very angry. I was thinking inside me, “This man is refusing to talk with me and not giving me the opportunity to show him that he has made a mistake by becoming Christian.”

Then he asked me if he could pray for me. I did not want this at all, but I could not find any answer except “If you want.” Then he bowed down his head and started talking. He was saying something like this: “Lord God, you know this young man and you know his heart. I ask you to help him discover you and know you. Reveal yourself to him, please. Show him your love for him. In the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.”

I was sitting there looking at this man pretending that he was praying. He had his shoes on, he was seated in a chair, he didn’t do the wudu (the Muslim ritual purification before prayer), and he was speaking to God in French! For me, this man was insulting God. As he had his head bowed down and his eyes closed, I thought, “I will hit him and run away.” But he was a very big man, and when I evaluated the distance between where we were sitting and the gates, I was not sure I could get away before he caught me. So I abandoned my scheme.

When he finished what he called “prayer,” he told me, “I would like to ask you something.” I said, “Yes?” He said, “Each time you do your Muslim prayers and finish, I would like you to ask God to reveal Himself to you, to show you the truth. But do it in your mother tongue, not in Arabic.” I agreed and I left.

When I arrived home, I threw the book and booklets somewhere in my bedroom and forgot them. A few days after that, one afternoon, I came back from school very tired. Because I was having exams, I wanted to sleep a few hours and then review my courses during the night. I went to bed and was looking for a book to read, because reading in bed puts me to sleep very quickly. I saw the book that the man gave me a few days before. I thought, “Oh, this will do it; this will make me fall asleep.” I started browsing through the book, and I found myself reading the whole thing, and the two booklets besides. These booklets and the book contained testimonies. What shocked me was the assurance that these men and women expressed. They were sure that they had been saved by Jesus Christ, and that intrigued me.

As a Muslim, I believed that my salvation depended on my works, and also on predestination: it was absolutely impossible for me to know what God would decide for me concerning paradise. I could have no assurance concerning eternity. So I decided that I would search the Qur’an and find verses that would allow me to express the same assurance that these Christians had, but I could not find any verse in the Qur’an that gave me assurance of salvation. On the contrary, I was discovering what the Qur’an says about Jesus. I was not only disappointed, but disturbed by what I was finding. For example, I realized that the Qur’an says that Jesus is the Word of God, the Messiah, and held in honor in this world and the hereafter. And that “Jesus is a sign for people and a mercy from God” and without sin.[18]

So I decided to look for help from the elders at the mosque I was attending. But these elders and Qur’anic teachers became angry and asked why I was asking these questions. I just wanted them to help me find some verses in the Qur’an that tell me that, because I am a Muslim, I will be with God when I die. Also, I wanted them to explain to me a verse in the Qur’an that says: “Allah said: O Jesus! Lo! I am gathering thee and causing thee to ascend unto Me, and . . . am setting those who follow thee above those who disbelieve until the Day of Resurrection.”[19] But I got no answer from these elders and Qur’anic teachers. And it was the first time I noticed what the Qur’an says about Jesus, so I was confused, but I was not going to become a Christian. I decided to stop asking questions or doing any research. My conclusion was “I am a Muslim, and I will die a Muslim.”

A Voice Spoke to Me

A few days after I made the decision to stop my inquiries, a strange thing happened to me. This was during the time of Ramadan, when Muslims fast during daylight hours. I woke up early one morning and wanted to eat before the sun rose because, once it’s light enough to tell the difference between a black thread and a white thread, Muslims cannot eat anything. So I got up, and suddenly I was under an awful anguish. I had the great impression that I was lost, and that I would go to hell if I died. This impression lasted a few minutes. Then it was replaced by a voice. I was hearing the voice clearly, as if someone was in the living room and speaking to me, but I was not seeing anyone. It seemed that the voice was from outside and inside me. What I was hearing was this: “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.”

At first, I thought that I must be losing my mind. I worried that, if this continued, maybe people would find me later today walking in the middle of the road and acting strange. I did not understand what was happening. But as these words continued to resonate in my heart, I realized that I had read them when I still was in high school, and that it was Jesus Christ who said these words. A Christian roommate in high school made me read them in the Bible. For a long moment, I resisted; I did not want to become Christian. I recalled that my father used to warn us, his children, against Christian writings. He used to say that we should never touch a Bible or these Christian books because they had some deceptive powers, and if we did, it would change our minds. I thought, “Oh, I have disobeyed my father and now I am having problems.”

But there was in this voice such authority and such softness that finally I yielded and said, “I accept.” Three days after, I went and explained what happened to the man who gave me the book and booklets. With his help, I understood that I am a sinner and separated from God. My works and religiosity cannot save me. I then decided to give my life to Jesus Christ and to follow Him.

I discovered the verse that I had longed to read, but it was not in the Qur’an. It was in the Bible: “And this is the testimony: that God has given us eternal life, and this life is in His Son. He who has the Son has life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have life. These things I have written to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, that you may know that you have eternal life, and that you may continue to believe in the name of the Son of God” (1 John 5:11–13). I knew now that Jesus Christ was the guarantor of my salvation. I had the assurance to have eternal life. If I died, I would not be lost, but I would be forever with my Savior. I not only read the words, but I felt assurance and joy in my heart.

I started sharing my new faith with friends. I wanted everyone to know the truth about Jesus. A few years after that, I got involved in church planting among Muslims. With the team I was working with, we were able to plant one Muslim-background believer church of about forty members. But this church had so many problems that we closed it. I was disappointed, frustrated, and discouraged.

I decided to develop partnerships between missions and churches working among Muslims for more effectiveness. There were many frustrations and discouragements in my early years of trying to share Jesus with Muslims, until I discovered Disciple Making Movements. Now God has helped me see in the Bible Jesus’ own instructions on how to make disciples among Muslims. And since then, we have seen many hundreds of new churches being planted.

THEY SEE HIM IN THEIR DREAMS

From Genesis to Revelation, the Bible has many accounts of God using dreams, visions, a burning bush, an audible voice, and angelic visitations to communicate directly to people by way of introducing Himself, revealing the future, giving warning or rebuke, commanding obedience, issuing instructions, giving encouragement, and even envisioning the future. What is remarkable today is that, in a world where unnumbered Muslims have no access to the good news—no Bibles in their language, no churches, no known Christians, few or no Christian radio or television options in their language—they are living and dying without any exposure to Christ. So God introduces Himself personally and gives birth to something in a Muslim man or woman’s heart that causes him or her to begin a journey of discovering and obeying God, seeking to find followers of Jesus to help them complete that journey.

In the last seven years, we have had a chance to hear hundreds of stories like Yusuf’s, and we have learned much about the dreams that God is using to reach Muslim people:

Of the former Muslim leaders who are now making disciples and planting churches, about 40 percent reported a dream or vision of Jesus that prompted them to begin a search to know more about Isa al Masih (Jesus the Messiah). And the remarkable thing is that all of those dreams were unique to them. Even if many of the dreams include similar themes, the context and message are always different and relevant to each person having the dream. We have not recorded exactly the same dream twice.

Many of the dreams were visions of Jesus appearing and encouraging the person to follow Him.

Some of the dreams compared the Qur’an with the Bible in very stark and powerfully contrasting images. Some of the dreams were pictures of heaven and hell, with a warning that the dreamer’s life was going in the wrong direction.

God also uses dreams to reach Christians. In one case, a Christian reported a dream in which he saw Muslim people living in worn-out tents, lined up to get dirty water to drink. A mighty wind came along and blew away the tents, replacing them with a pure-white tent from which pure water flowed. This dream was a vivid calling for the Christian to go out to serve Muslims.

These dreams are dramatic evidence that the missionary God of the Bible is doing dramatic things to rescue Muslims from Islam. They often create questions in the heart of the dreamer, and Christians are needed to be there when the opportunity comes, to help the dreamer understand their meaning.

SIGNS AND WONDERS

CityTeam, and our partner organizations continue to refine what we are learning from one another’s experiences and from biblical understandings of how disciple making and church planting most effectively happen. As you have read, the Discovery Bible Study process leading to obedience-based disciples is a centerpiece of this process. In 2008, about three years into our ministry efforts in Africa, much data and many leaders’ observations, plus hundreds of stories, had come in, and we began to see some trends. Additional data and in-depth interviews from late 2010 until mid-2011 confirmed and clarified our preliminary conclusions.

The reports indicated that, depending on the region, a minimum of 50 percent (in the most extreme and violent Muslim areas) and a maximum of 70 percent of all the new churches planted among Muslims happened in part because of signs and wonders (typically miracles of healing and deliverance) that accelerated and facilitated the process of disciple making. Sometimes, the divine interventions have unexpectedly happened the first day that pioneer teams entered a community; often, during the first weeks of a Discovery Bible Study; sometimes just before baptisms; and sometimes not at all.

The clear conclusion for the workers in the field, regardless of their theological backgrounds or assumptions, is that God is moving dramatically and creatively to display His love and glory among Muslim peoples today. But the miracles that accelerate the disciple-making process don’t happen in a vacuum. They are a result of intercessors and of pioneer missionaries who are prepared to spend a lot of time engaging people, finding people of peace, and then investing additional weeks or months coaching leaders of Discovery Bible Studies. Disciple making is a time-consuming process of relationships. Miracles, of course, are not a replacement for people in the field working consistently and putting in the time, prayer, and effort needed to make disciples, but they are a jet-propelled boost for the process when they happen.

A compelling example of God overriding our strategies and accelerating the process of engaging Muslims with the gospel is the story of Desta, told here in his own words.

I had been a church planter for some years when I received training in how to make disciples the way Jesus did. We really did not know how it might work, but we wanted to try and see. My friend Samuel—a very smart guy, Samuel is—had planned to go with me to a certain Muslim village. In my strategy, I had taken a map and made a note for my team to avoid one community because it was too harshly Islamic and a very dangerous place for Christians.

So Samuel and I headed out on my motorcycle to our distant destination. We had been riding all day, very hot and uncomfortable, and we were looking forward to getting there because, besides being tired, we were riding through some areas that are hostile to Christians—the very town that I had warned others to avoid at all costs, in fact.

And that was when the motorcycle broke down.

I started to groan. “Why should I have a motorcycle breakdown?” I said out loud, to nobody. Samuel wasn’t listening anyway. “You can’t even ask someone from this village for water, because they are Muslims. They will see me coming and think they will defile themselves just by speaking to me. So why?” I guess I was speaking to God, but it didn’t feel much like prayer.

So I tried to use my own ideas to fix the bike. I tried to start it by pushing it. Then I had Samuel ask people nearby, but there was no mechanic in the village and it was getting late. We stood there, thinking what to do. It was too far to walk, pushing the bike. We were out of ideas. And that’s when we heard the loud crying.

It was more like wailing, actually. Many people were moaning in the village nearby. It was getting dark now, and the sound made goose bumps on my arms. But I felt like something was telling me to go and find out what was happening. Samuel asked someone who was walking past, and he said that the chief’s wife had died that afternoon. It was too late to bury her; they would do that in the morning. But now they were wailing for her.

A voice kept telling me, “Go up and see what is happening here.” So I told Samuel, “Wait here. I’m going to find out what it’s all about.” I still felt frightened. “Or you can come with me,” I added. So we went together into the village, feeling very nervous and confused. I didn’t even speak their dialect, though Samuel understood it. But my conscience kept saying, “Go and see; don’t stand back.” So we obeyed and went.

All the men in the village, they moved into our way as we walked in, because they wanted to do their ceremonies and wanted us to leave. But I kept walking, pushing my way through, and Samuel was behind me. Then I saw the corpse, and something told me to start praying. I had never done this before, praying for a dead person. I’ve prayed for the sick, but never for those already dead. But something was battling within myself. I couldn’t see any urgency to pray for this woman; she was already dead!

Then Samuel pulled my sleeve. “They are making announcements,” he said in my ear. “They are calling the village back together. They want to get on with the ceremonies. We should leave, now!”

By then, I was really struggling. “If I pray and nothing happens,” I wondered, “how can we get out of this place? What will they do to us?” But something kept saying, “Go and pray.” The urgency was so strong on me that I had to obey, so I told the people that I wanted to pray for the chief’s dead wife. They made some comments, but I couldn’t understand them anyway, so I just went up to the body and started to pray.

It was a loud and violent prayer! God filled me with extraordinary strength to pray, and continue praying. So I prayed, I prayed, I prayed! People around me were commenting, but I just kept praying. I prayed very loud for one hour. I called her by name, asking God to send her back to her people. I called upon the name of Jesus; I asked Him to revive the life of this person as He did when He was on earth. I prayed for an hour and a half.

And then I started to feel warmth in her hand. Then I started to feel a heartbeat. So I continued praying and praying, and the crowd started to get angry. “Let’s remove this man,” someone said. “He is wasting our time.” But others pushed in and said, “No! Let him continue. It is Allah who has sent him.”

And then, the woman opened her eyes. Everybody started shouting; the women screamed. “She has opened her eyes! She has opened her eyes!” The mourners stopped wailing; even the women stopped crying. I could hardly stand up because everybody was pushing against me, trying to see the dead woman coming back alive. But I kept praying.

Then she sat up and asked, “May I have some water?” She sat there and asked for water! What could we do? Someone ran up with a bottle, and we gave her water! Then everyone stopped making noise; it became very quiet. Everyone was speechless, watching the dead woman drinking.

Then the crowd moved back, and everyone stopped staring at the chief’s wife. Now they were staring at me! “These people are wonderful men,” someone shouted. “They have raised the dead!” And the Spirit of God told me, “Tell them who Jesus is.”

I said, “Chief, elders of this village, I thank you all for thinking that we are great men. That is very nice. But I want you to know something: the greatness that you are seeing is not because of us. We are just ordinary people. But there is a man named Jesus. . . .” And then I told them the truth about God’s free gift of salvation, and I prayed for them.

And when I finished praying, I was thinking about leaving. Quickly. I was thinking, “What if this is not permanent? Maybe she will die again! If she just dies again, then . . .” But the people would not let us leave; they compelled us; they said, “Oh, no! You are not leaving!” Maybe they were thinking the same thing.

So they helped her walk to her house and she got into bed because she was very weak and tired. Then they brought sleeping mats for us, and they put us in the next room beside the chief’s bedroom, and that is where we spent the night. We spent the night there, but we did not sleep much there. What would happen in the morning? But the next morning, she was still alive! And she is still alive to this day.

So in the morning, the chief came to us and said, “I want to thank God for you. I am a born Muslim, and I am not going to renounce that faith. But from today, by God’s grace, I believe your Jesus!” This was a little confusing, but then he continued. “Listen,” he said, “there has been a law here that nothing like Christianity, like the name of Jesus—nobody can say it, nobody can even hear it. But because your Jesus has raised this woman, my wife—because he has raised her from being dead, today I am lifting the ban. Anyone in this village who wants to become a Christian can become a Christian! This woman whom you have raised . . . her children . . . whoever! Anyone who wants to can become a Christian.”

Then he pointed to a wide building down the road. “That is a community school,” he said. “If you want to start praying there, you can start coming there and praying for our people.”

And the Spirit of God spoke to me again. “It was I who stopped you from leaving this place,” He said. “And the reason for that is for you to have a time of prayer.” So I asked the chief to gather the people of the village, but he didn’t have to do much; everyone was already there to see if his wife was still alive.

We stood out in front, and Samuel called, “We want to pray for everybody. If you are sick, if you have any problems, come to the community school, and we will pray for you.” Many people came there, and we prayed for them, praying for many different needs. Then I told them about Jesus again, and Samuel translated, and at the end of that day seventy-six people gave their lives to Jesus: men, women, and children. And that is how the church was planted in that community.

And then, when we went to check on our motorcycle, it started right away!

And today that whole region is filled with many churches.

CHAPTER

9

“OF WHOM THE WORLD IS NOT WORTHY”

Learning from Heroes and Heroines of Faith

If any Muslim is going to follow Christ, he will suffer. I will advise him to depend on the Lord, not on men. I will tell him to pray much. He has to be strong in his faith because eternal life is awaiting him. The lions are awaiting, but you must love them.

—a leader of pioneer teams among Muslims

THE MIRACLE AT THE IMAM’S HOUSE

In one community, an imam named Sa’id became a Christ follower and began sharing his new faith in the community. Neighboring Muslims demanded that he abandon this new religion, but he refused. So the threats began.

Sa’id had heard that his life was at risk and began to pray about whether or not to abandon his home and escape to a safe place. He finally decided to make preparations to leave. But the night before he planned to leave, a group of Muslims surrounded his home and set fire to the thatched roof. The flames began to spread rapidly, and the noise of the animals staying near the house alerted Sa’id to what was happening. Sa’id and his family were nearly trapped by the flames, but they narrowly escaped and rushed to rescue the animals near the house.

Sa’id looked up. Half of his roof was gone, and the rest of the house was being enveloped by the flames. He had seconds to to get a safe distance away from the burning house, but before he did, he remembered the stories of God rescuing His people from trouble, so Sa’id prayed, “Holy God, I don’t have anyone to come and help me now. So please help me!” Within seconds, the fire extinguished itself, leaving only half of the roof destroyed and the house still standing. Amazed and in shock, Sa’id brought his family back inside and spent the balance of the night there.

At first light, the neighbors saw the destruction and were sure that the family must have died in the fire. But Sa’id and his family emerged unharmed, and the neighbors realized in amazement that, miraculously, the fire had stopped in the middle of a thatched (and very flammable) roof. When Sa’id shared what had happened, how God had spared his family, animals, and home, the community knew that the God of Sa’id was able to save them too. Many of the community became Christ followers after that, and the persecution of Christians in the area stopped completely.

THEY GAVE SEVEN ANSWERS TO “WHY RISK YOUR LIFE?”

I had the privilege recently of meeting some courageous men whose lives were in danger for spreading the gospel in a particularly volatile Muslim region. I knew from the first minutes with them that they would do whatever Jesus asked them to do. They were all former imams, and they came to be Christ followers by questioning some of the things they read in the Qur’an. When they turned to the Bible for more information, their lives changed forever. Later, when these men discovered the principles of Disciple Making Movements, their own movement began to accelerate.

Today, you would see no sign that there is a single Christian in their people group, as the men have chosen to avoid drawing attention to their faith in Christ in order to have more opportunities of safely sharing the gospel with Muslims in their community, but thousands of underground Christ followers faithfully worship God there in secret meetings. These intrepid leaders have already begun the process of taking the gospel of Jesus into different regions of the Islamic world that we would not think possible.

All of these men have been in prison at one time or another for following Jesus, some of them for long periods of time. Some of their colleagues are still in prison after many years. Those who were with us on that day face high risks of being arrested every day, yet they persist and are not discouraged.

We asked these men why they remain in that dangerous region, putting their lives at risk by continuing to frequent their mosques to find new people of peace, facilitating hundreds of illegal, underground assemblies of Christians, when they could easily move to a safer area and live openly for Christ. Here are their answers, in their own words:

We could leave the Muslim community and live comfortably amidst other Christians, but we would not be fulfilling the Great Commission if we did that. By putting our lives at risk, we can reach out to our fellow Muslims. And this is an unfinished task! There are more than two billion Muslims who need to hear the gospel. But more important, we have a command from God. We know that we put our lives in danger, but we accept that. For the sake of obeying the command of God, we pursue this vision.

Mankind is created in God’s image, and we are very precious in God’s eyes. The soul of one man is very precious to Him. If by putting our lives in danger, we can rescue a soul made in His image, then it is worth that cost.

We have a unique love for these people, because we all came from them. It is we who can understand them, and we know that Muslim people have a great unsatisfied hunger for salvation.

Every day their daily prayers open with, “Show us the right path,” from the first chapter of the Qur’an. We are the answer to that prayer! We want to be there to show them the right path.

Those people who accepted Christ before us lost everything. They changed their names, their dress, their tribes, their people, and much more. And that is genuine suffering, being alienated from their own people and losing their own identities. Those people are persecuted, not just for the cross of Christ, but also for changing their culture. God’s Word does not tell us to do this, and we only bring suffering on ourselves and on others by doing something that God did not command.

In prison, we get a double blessing. First, we get to stand and tell others that we are followers of Isa, and we get to tell them the truth of God’s Word. Second, we see many leaders of violent Muslim groups in prison, and we get to share the gospel with them. Then they get released and become committed leaders for Isa, sharing the gospel with people we couldn’t reach otherwise. So now many Muslim leaders are saying, “Keep them out of prison, because they just multiply there!”

THE BIBLE AND PERSECUTION

The Bible clearly teaches that persecution is an integral part of being a follower of Jesus Christ. In fact, the New Testament actually addresses the subject of persecution more than it addresses the subject of love. Christians living in the West have been tremendously blessed for centuries with the freedom to follow Christ without suffering any dramatic persecution or hardship, but that blessing has perhaps come at a price. Persecution tends to refine and strengthen faith, and even create an environment of greater growth. And, in many cases, Christians’ responses to persecution can result in the salvation of others, often including the perpetrators.

Of course, no one wants to suffer. A healthy Christian does not go around looking for trouble, trying to get himself martyred. However, it is not possible to describe the amazing willingness of those who have suffered grievously for the gospel to again and again put themselves in situations where they suffer for the privilege of rescuing a few more Muslims from their despair to freedom in Jesus.

We have documented story after story of firsthand experiences in such suffering: people who have lost homes, loved ones, and personal freedom in exchange for souls. We have known many who have endured severe beatings and imprisonment for the sake of the gospel, many more who accept the fact that their lives might end tomorrow. These men and women have learned to imitate Christ, “who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. For consider Him who endured such hostility from sinners against Himself, lest you become weary and discouraged in your souls” (Hebrews 12:2–3).

In one case, we have seen a Christian leader in a country with less than one thousand known Christians tormented to the point that he reverted to Islam and thus damaged the cause of the gospel greatly. But unlike that one tragic case, we observe awe-inspiring courage of many thousands of new Christians enduring very difficult persecutions for the sake of their Lord. Believers whom we interviewed have watched as their homes were burned to the ground by angry Muslim mobs. One leader’s family had hands severed, many had their spouses and children taken away, and others have been thrown in prison without a trial and left there for many months or years.

In some very challenging Muslim areas of Africa, many Christ followers are martyred every year. And as this chapter was being written, several new Christ followers who hosted a low-profile Disciple Making Movement training were tragically martyred after the event. For our brothers and sisters, most of them former Muslims, who are taking the good news of God’s love to more Islamic communities, there is often an enormous sacrifice required for that privilege.

THE CHURCH THAT WAS SUDDENLY THERE

At about the time that Sa’id’s story (with which we opened this chapter) was taking place, another Muslim community in that same region discovered that four people among them were telling the stories of the Bible and speaking of Jesus. A leader of the community had become a Christ follower, along with his family, and he had shared the gospel with another man, who in turn took the gospel to his sons, who then went to another family, and soon there were many people sharing their faith in the town.

And that’s when the local officials decided to stop this movement. The four men were arrested and forced to stand in an area of the town center for ten days awaiting their public punishment for abandoning Islam. The homes of these men were damaged and some were burned, and the men were forced to stand all day for many days in the sun. When the day of punishment came, the whole town assembled. Some people had urged the local officials to have mercy on the accused, and the leaders feared that there might be more people in the community who were secret Christ followers, so they said, “Today these men will receive their judgment for leaving Islam. But if there are any of you who are also following Isa al Masih, then you should let that be known and join their punishment. We will discover who you are, either way.”

No one moved. A hush had fallen over the crowd, as people shifted uneasily on their feet, some impatient to get on with the spectacle, others fearful and undecided. The seconds ticked away . . . then a hand was raised in the middle of the crowd. A collective gasp was heard as an elderly man pushed his way to the front.

“I also am a follower of Isa al Masih!” he declared boldly.

The officials gnashed their teeth in fury, but before they could speak, a young man on the other side of the crowd raised his hand. Then two women raised their hands, then a young married couple. And almost instantly, hands shot up throughout the crowd. The leaders stood aghast: half the community were secret believers in Jesus Christ!

The officials stared at one another, not knowing what to do or say. One of the bolder officials finally put on a stern expression and challenged the crowd: “Are all of you with these four?” He pointed to the doomed men.

“Yes!” was the unanimous chorus.

The leader looked around in consternation as half the village stepped forward, their hands still raised. “How is this possible?” he cried. He turned to his fellow leaders, hoping for guidance on what to do. “There have been no outsiders here to bring this about,” he said.

“Well,” answered one of his fellow leaders, “we cannot do anything now . . . can we?”

The perplexed officials separated the people and said to the Christians, “Since you have made your choice, you can no longer attend the mosque. But no one will harm you. You can have your own mosque, and you are now free to practice your religion in a mosque of Isa al Masih.” And that is what the Christ followers call the place where they now openly worship God.

THE SHEIKH WHO ARGUED WITH JESUS

Jamil was an influential Muslim sheikh in an urban area of Africa. His specialty was working with teenage boys, teaching from the Qur’an and training them in the countless daily rituals required by Islam. But he also taught them more practical things, such as how to persecute the infidels who preach Christianity. He would frequently gather a select group of boys late at night, and they would travel through the sections of the city where Christians lived, throwing rocks through their windows and vandalizing their homes. “If you attack a Christian,” he would tell the boys, “you will go straight to Allah when you die.” And the next morning, he would rejoin his teenaged followers and resume teaching them from the Muslim holy books.

One day, Jamil was scheduled to meet a large group of men in the middle of the night in order to go burn down a Christian church. That afternoon, he had been training teenagers in the ways of Islam at the mosque, and he decided to take a nap until it was time to burn the church. But a deep sleep came over him, and with it came a dream.

In Jamil’s dream, he saw a huge stone sitting by itself. As he watched, that stone began to change shape and grow taller, until it took on the form of a man, a very handsome man who seemed to radiate light. This man was looking straight into Jamil’s eyes as though he could see his very soul.

“Do you know the Qur’an?” the man suddenly asked in a loud voice.

“Yes,” said Jamil with some pride. “I know the Qur’an.”

“Then answer me this: who is Isa?” the man demanded.

“Isa is a man.”

“Can you show me where in the Qur’an it says that Isa is a man?”

Jamil dreamed that he began turning page after page in the Qur’an, but he could not find any passage saying that Isa is a man. It seemed as though he searched for a long time, but somehow, as is common in dreams, none of the words made any sense. Then the glowing man spoke again.

“So . . . you think you know the Qur’an?”

“Yes,” Jamil answered, but defensively this time. “Yes, I do know the Qur’an!”

“Then who is Mohammed? Is Mohammed the way, or no? Who is he?”

“Yes,” Jamil cried, delighted at knowing such an easy question. “Our prophet is the way! We go to heaven by his teaching!”

“Then show me in the Qur’an where it says that Mohammed is the way.”

“Yes, I can show you that,” answered Jamil. But once again he searched in vain.

This dream went on for some time with Jamil’s confusion regarding the Qur’an growing. Finally, Jamil awoke in the darkness. He found a flashlight and began to read the Qur’an to see if what he had dreamed was true, and to his astonishment, all the verses quoted by the man in the dream were accurate, even though he had no memory of reading them before. To shorten our story, God led a disciple of Christ, a man who himself had once been a sheikh, into contact with Jamil, and this man explained the Scriptures to him and led him to salvation.

But like Paul on the road to Damascus, Jamil’s story didn’t end with his salvation. The man who had persecuted Christians for their faith, who had threatened the very lives of believers, began to understand the principle of suffering for one’s obedience to Christ. He had been a very influential sheikh in his Muslim community, and word spread quickly that he had become a Christ follower. Wherever he went in his city, people recognized him as “the sheikh who betrayed Islam,” and he found himself shunned and avoided, if he was fortunate.

There were many times when Jamil went out in public and a group of angry Muslims would begin to follow him, waiting for an opportunity to do violence. On more than one occasion, he had to flee for his life under a shower of rocks and broken bottles. Two or three times, his family were awakened in terror to the sound of their windows being smashed. “But the more they persecuted me,” he observed, “the stronger my faith grew in Christ.”

As time passed, Jamil became convicted over the many teens whom he had led toward darkness when he’d been a sheikh, and he began a ministry of preaching the gospel to those same young men. Over a period of a few short months, more than half of those teenagers became Christ followers themselves. This alarmed the Muslim leaders in Jamil’s city, and they began making announcements in the mosque of five thousand people to harm or even kill Jamil for his “betrayal.” “If you find this man,” they would cry, “kill him! He is misleading our women and children. Wherever you find him, destroy him!”

Late one night, Jamil stepped out of the home of another Christian where he’d been attending prayer meeting, and he stopped short. There were many people—hundreds, as it turned out—milling about on the streets and in alleyways, waiting for him to come out. He was very frightened, but he decided that it was better to make his way home than to go back inside, lest the mob burn down the house and kill his fellow believers. So he prayed, “Lord, let your will be done in my life,” and started walking toward home.

He did not get far. Another knot of angry men emerged in front of him, brandishing sticks and clubs and blocking his path. Jamil immediately found himself surrounded, as his enemies began picking up rocks. There was a tense moment of silence, very brief but long enough for Jamil to recognize a man that he’d known for many years. Their eyes met, and the other man looked ashamed. Then the circle tightened as people got ready for the stoning.

“Wait!” someone shouted. It was an old friend of Jamil’s, a man whom we will call Mohammed. “We do not need to kill him. Why should we kill him? Let’s just talk with him and tell him the truth about Allah. He is a good man inside; we can make him come back to Islam!”

A murmur of dissent rippled through the crowd. A burly man facing Jamil could see the fear in his eyes. “No!” he shouted. “This man deserves to die! He has betrayed Islam.” Some of the people nearest him chorused in agreement, hefting their rocks and encouraging the speaker. The crowd was becoming divided in its intentions, which only made the situation all the more volatile. The burly man added one more incentive to violence. “We have been commanded by the imams to kill him! He will not return home tonight alive!”

And with that last thought still on his lips, the burly man threw his stone at Jamil with all his strength.

But Jamil ducked.

The stone flew over his head and struck someone full in the face on the other side of the circle. It was none other than Mohammed, the very man who had urged mercy for Jamil. His knees buckled and he crumpled to the ground, blood pouring from his forehead. Instantly, the hostile circle surrounding Jamil divided itself into a second circle surrounding the injured man and another who knelt beside him: Mohammed’s brother Ali.

“What have you done?” Ali screamed at the crowd, leaping to his feet. “Instead of correcting this man [pointing at Jamil], you end up attacking my family!” And he lunged forward, charging enraged at the man who threw the stone. Instantly, Jamil’s persecutors forgot about him and turned on one another. Pandemonium ensued, with men and women shoving, swinging, cursing, shouting, trying to get away, and trying to strike out.

And in the confusion, Jamil fled. “The LORD is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer,” he later quoted, “My God, my strength, in whom I will trust; my shield and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold. . . . He delivered me from my strong enemy, from those who hated me, for they were too strong for me.”[20]

THE COURAGE OF MUSLIM-BACKGROUND BELIEVERS TODAY

The narratives in this chapter give evidence to a simple truth: new Muslim-background Christ followers in Africa are giving the Christians of the world a standard of courage to strive for. Their acts of courage are so many, it was difficult to choose which stories to share. In one region of Africa, extreme persecution of Christians is almost a daily affair. In recent years, more than fifty different ministries adopted Disciple Making Movement principles and began to target that area, and today there are more than three hundred new underground churches in that region. Tragically, some of these new Christians have lost their lives, but that has only served to increase the determination of their brothers and sisters in Christ. These sorts of men and women are described by Scripture as those “of whom the world was not worthy” (Hebrews 11:38).

When Muslims discover that God really loves them, no power in the world will stop them from sharing it with other Muslims. I do not know any men and women of faith today who are more courageous than my former-Muslim brothers and sisters in Africa. They are facing down persecution on a daily basis with a commitment to do whatever it takes to achieve the goal of seeing God glorified among their brothers and sisters who are still in the mosque.

CHAPTER

10

THE HARDEST PEOPLE YIELD THE GREATEST RESULTS

My first aim, when I finished learning the Qur’an, was to destroy the Christian faith and attack all who follow it. Before I came to the Lord, I was in darkness, and only now do I know that I was in darkness then. We need to try to show the Muslims the truth with sympathy and love.

—Sheikh Riyad

THE BULLETPROOF MAN

Zuti was a very frightening man. He was not tall or particularly muscular, but he still had a very commanding presence, and if you had met him walking down the street, you would have quickly gone the other way. He was a member of a group of fighters within his African country who are known for their devotion to the occult, what Africans refer to as “traditional religions.” This group prepares for their activities by performing a variety of occultic rites, and they are renowned for their fearlessness in battle. During a war in the region, these men fought as mercenaries, and they were prized by their chosen faction as being the “special forces” of their operation.

These fighters are terrible to face in battle. They charge into conflict in a berserk rage, shooting and slashing and clubbing and killing indiscriminately. They are not selective in their weaponry, happily wielding a mix of modern arms such as AK-47s, rocket-propelled grenades, and high explosives, supplemented with old British bolt-action rifles and single-action Colt pistols. Sticks, rocks, spears, machetes, anything will serve as a killing tool. Nor are they particular about their membership, as they frequently conscript boys as young as twelve, sending them into war with their minds numbed by khat and their souls deadened by demonism.

And Zuti was more than merely a member of this group; he was a leader, looked upon by his fellow fighters as a model to emulate. He would lead a charge into battle, running naked with only a strange patchwork assortment of animal skins sewn together and draped over his head, reminiscent of Davy Crockett’s coonskin cap, but with occultic overtones. What made him so frightening, though, was the zealot’s gleam in his eye, the fixed snarling grin that he habitually wore, the sheer lack of humanity in his glare. Had you met him on the street, you would have walked the other way because you would have felt that you’d met a man who had no soul.

Zuti was famous among his people for having never lost a battle. He fought naked, it is true, yet he boasted that he needed no body armor, for bullets merely bounced off him. He openly declared that his bizarre powers were drawn from the world of the dead, and he would perform horrible rituals to gain those powers.

Zuti was also a Muslim. His family had a long history, dating back many generations, of being involved in “folk Islam,” a syncretistic mix of Islam and animism, and they would all declare emphatically that they served Allah. Zuti followed the daily practices of all Muslims, saying his prayers and reading his Qur’an, but he also had a large house filled with a wide variety of occult items: totems, masks, statues, and talismans of power. (Many Westerners will bring home such articles when they travel abroad, proudly displaying them on their walls as souvenirs, not understanding the danger of owning things that have been dedicated to the evil one.) He was devoted to God, he would say, but his meaning was not what most of us would think.

As far as Zuti was concerned, not even God could kill him. He was devoted to God in the sense that he kept God under control; he manipulated God—or the gods, in his thinking—to do his bidding, effectively setting himself above God. He had protected himself, he thought, with every kind of power, and nothing could have harmed him. If you had wanted to shoot him, he wouldn’t have minded; he would have said to go ahead and shoot; aim anyplace you want.

People understandably feared this man. Women would cross the street if they saw him coming, fearing that merely passing him on the sidewalk would make them barren. Pregnant women were regularly warned to keep a wary eye out for him, lest his shadow fall upon them as he passed and they have a sudden miscarriage. “He can just speak,” men would warn their sons, “and things happen!” He ruled his region through fear, and there was no one who dared to challenge him.

Until the Christians arrived.

A man whom we’ll call James moved to town with several coworkers one summer, and they were seeking a person of peace to act as a bridge for the gospel into that area. They prayed extensively, did their research, got to know many people, began ministering to the needs of the Muslims living there and, as they did so, they continually encountered the name Zuti. “The Lord is leading us to this man Zuti,” James told his brothers, “so to Zuti we must go.”

It wasn’t long before the men met with the fearsome warrior. With all his boasts of secret powers and invincibility, he had no qualms about appearing publicly, nor did he seem averse to meeting with the Christians. But as soon as they began telling him stories from Scripture, his hackles rose.

“Man, what are you telling me?” he shouted, rising from the table where James and his friends were sharing coffee with him and two other fighters. “You have nothing to tell me! I can perform anything you can perform! If God heals, I heal. If God shouts and there is thunder, I will shout and you will hear thunder.” And these things were allegedly true, at least as far as popular folklore was concerned. “And so, there is nothing you can tell me—no ‘what of this, what about that, come to see some other thing’—nothing!” He glared at the men as though his gaze could melt them. It didn’t, so he added, “I have eaten human beings!”

The men sat looking at one another while Zuti stood above them in a towering rage. “Do you know who I am?” he cried. “I am a leader in [a group whose name was widely feared]! I am a leader of battles! To be what I am, you must have no fear! To go as deep as I am, you must have power! I say to the devil, ‘Come!’ and he comes! You cannot come where I am, you cannot come in a little and say, ‘Oh, I am afraid.’ You must have power. I have power. I can do anything!”

This was hardly a propitious beginning, but James and the other Christians were not disheartened. They continued to stay in touch with Zuti over the coming weeks and months, continued to have coffee with him, continued to attempt to tell him Bible stories, continued to pray. And Zuti continued to rant whenever they met.

“There is nothing you can tell me about God, I tell you! I have God on my back! I can say anything here, and this thing will happen. God is at my beck and call. So what are you going to tell me about God?”

Yet despite all Zuti’s blasphemies and outrageous arrogance, the believers noticed that he continued to talk with them, and that was enough reason for them to continue trying and praying. And then one day, in the coffeehouse where they had first met, the Lord revealed something to James. They were seated listening to yet another rant when suddenly Zuti gritted his teeth and gripped his right leg. He had pain. This “bulletproof” madman was indeed made of mortal human flesh.

“What is wrong with your leg?” James asked nonchalantly.

“Oh, it is nothing,” said Zuti with a casual wave of the hand. “Just an old wound.”

“What have you done about it?”

“Oh,” he said with another dismissive gesture, “I have tried it all; all the Muslim herbs and potions, and the traditional stuff too. Nothing works.” He glanced at the men warily, suddenly aware that he had revealed a weakness. A tense moment followed, Zuti fearing that the men would find a way to take advantage of his careless revelation; James silently praying for God’s guidance.

“Would you like us to pray for your leg,” James asked, “in the name of our God Jesus?”

“I don’t want to know about your God!” Zuti shouted, leaping up from the table as usual. “I don’t want to hear about your God! I don’t want to have any business with your God!” He stood over the Christians with his eyes narrowed to glowing slits and fists clenched defiantly by his side, but breathing hard, visibly in pain.

Zuti had reached a crossroad, and something inside him became aware that he was faced with an important choice, a choice that might have consequences stretching into eternity. The believers watched in silence as his countenance slowly softened, and his hands unclenched. “But,” he added, wiping sweat from his brow, “if you want to pray, go ahead and pray.”

Immediately, James arose and grabbed Zuti’s leg with both hands; then he began to pray in a loud voice, his brothers silently supporting him. “Oh, Lord,” he cried, “have mercy upon this man! Show him your great power, you who created both heaven and earth! Lord Jesus, you are the source of all life; you are Life! We ask you in your mercy to show this man that Life has already defeated death. Heal him, Lord! Heal this man’s leg!”

Zuti stood frozen, like a man turned to stone. “It is gone,” he whispered. “It is gone!” He gazed in awe on the Christians before him, turning from face to face with his eyes wide. “The pain, it never stopped; for years, it has never stopped. But suddenly, it is gone!” He collapsed into his chair, still looking in wonder at James and his coworkers. “You didn’t give me anything to drink,” he cried out. “You didn’t rub any ointment! No talismans, no wands!” He turned in amazement to the men who had come with him, men who were equally astonished at the inexplicable change in their chief. “I have never seen power like that,” Zuti said. “He laid his hand on my leg, he spoke healing, and it happened!”

He turned back to James, then lowered his eyes. “Okay,” he said, “you can tell me more about your God.”

Eventually, Zuti gave his life to Christ. He was baptized in the local river; then he went home and began a house cleaning. He emptied his home of all his demonic artifacts, piling them in the street outside—and a sizable pile it was—and then he called his neighbors together.

“This day,” he cried, “I renounce and condemn all that I did and was in the past. This day, I turn my back on the devil!” The people gasped in amazement. “I was a partner with the devil,” he shouted, “but now I will have no allegiance except to Jesus! I have given my life to Jesus, and I vow that I will never turn back!” And with that, he set fire to the pile and threw the ashes into the river.

This act was costly to Zuti. The village, which had tolerated and even been complicit in Zuti’s crimes by embracing him into their midst, now responded with open hostility and even violence. Zuti was forced to flee to a distant town, though he eventually returned and planted a church in that village. He has never lost his zeal for the gospel of Christ. His gentle spirit and quiet modesty make it very difficult to imagine him as the ruthless warrior he was before. Today, he is a key church planter, and he continues to disciple many young men from his own region toward Christ, men who might otherwise be lured into the ways of darkness from which he had been rescued.

SOMETIMES GOD CALLS US TO ENGAGE UNLIKELY PEOPLE

Elsewhere in this book, we described an important principle of Disciple Making Movements that involves seeking out the person whom we refer to as “the person of peace.” But there is another principle that, on the surface, almost sounds contradictory: sometimes the most difficult person to reach with the gospel will become the most dedicated follower of Christ. Such people may seem, at first glance, to be the opposite of a person of peace, openly hostile to God’s Word and frequently hostile to those who follow Christ. Yet when God leads disciple makers to engage these people, they can often be brought into God’s kingdom, and they channel their zeal into winning others to follow Jesus.

Jesus chose some very unlikely apostles. Consider Matthew (also called Levi) the tax collector. Matthew essentially had a franchise to collect taxes, some of which he undoubtedly kept for himself, the rest of which supported the pagan system of the Roman Empire. By rabbinic custom, Matthew could never enter the temple, never give testimony in court, and never be forgiven for his sins. That is why he was seen hanging out with the “sinners’ crowd.” No God-fearing Jews would have anything to do with him. Yet Jesus chose him, an outcast among Jews, as one of His twelve disciples, and Matthew eventually wrote a book that helps us understand Jesus’ focus on the gospel of the kingdom of God.

We could say the same thing about Simon the Zealot, who was once probably a member of a radical nationalist group with a very bloody record. And then there is Paul, who participated in the martyrdom of Stephen, but later became the Apostle to the Gentiles in the first century and an author of New Testament books.

If Jesus would pick these unlikely folks to be His closest associates and would bestow upon them trust for helping launch God’s eternal plan for the nations, is it surprising that He chooses some of the most unexpected Muslim people to extend His love and proclaim His kingdom to the Islamic peoples of the world?

THE BOMB MAKER

Riyad was a Muslim imam, the man who called people to prayer at four local mosques. He was a respected man in his community, one whose counsel was regularly sought out in all sorts of community disputes. He was personally responsible for teaching the Qur’an to nearly fifteen hundred people, but this was not where his zeal lay. He had committed himself to one overall task in life: to rid his town of all Christians and to do his utmost to destroy the Christian church in his native land.

Riyad used his official capacity as an imam to further his private agenda. He would collect alms from his followers, but he would not turn the money over to his four mosques; instead, he used it to purchase supplies for making bombs. He would secretly lead raids on Christian churches and private homes, sometimes burning them to the ground, sometimes detonating bombs, sometimes simply vandalizing and intimidating. He was a very bold man, afraid of nothing, and he had a great capacity for hate, all of it directed toward the message and followers of Jesus Christ.

He did not openly commit these acts of violence, but such matters are not easily concealed, and the people of his region knew full well who was responsible for the ongoing reign of terror. Government officials, however, turned a blind eye on the matter because of Riyad’s powerful influence among Muslims in his area. And his Muslim followers didn’t see anything particularly reprehensible in his acts; extremism in the cause of Allah was hardly a vice in their eyes. The only people who openly responded to Riyad’s deeds were his victims, the Christians.

And here is what the Christians did: they prayed for him. They organized prayer campaigns throughout the region, holding all-night prayer meetings to ask God to either change Riyad’s heart or remove him from the area. They made no secret of this, but openly told others how they were praying.

“If something of yours gets stolen and you don’t know who took it,” Riyad told us recently, “you call your neighbors and family together and collectively curse the thief. You ask Allah to bring punishment on the thief’s head and send plagues and disease and death upon him. But while I was burning and destroying and killing against the Christians, the Christians were praying for me. ‘Oh Lord,’ they’d say, ‘please call this man to your kingdom,’ crying for me and praying. I would hear them as they walked on the road, praying aloud! ‘Ah, these people are crazy,’ I said. ‘I am going to destroy them again and again! Why are they praying for me? Instead of defending themselves or casting curses on me, they bless me!’”

Then one day, Riyad met some Christians who asked him to study the Qur’an with them. Riyad was always interested in studying the Qur’an, especially if he thought that he could persuade Christians to become Muslims. But these new friends began to gently ask Riyad to explain the many passages in the Qur’an that speak of people mentioned in the Bible, including Jesus. They talked for hours and hours about Abraham, Noah, Moses, and also about Jesus, but the one who was learning was the one who thought he was teaching. Gradually, over a period of time, Riyad began to change.

“I began to realize,” he now says, “that these men could never have understood about God unless He had revealed truth to them, and as a result, I started to change my ways. Then I began to discover verses from the Qur’an, showing how Jesus is the gift from God, He is the sign. I knew those verses already, but I had never understood them. But now I began to see: it says that God will ‘make of him [Jesus] a revelation for mankind and a mercy from Us [God].’”[21]

Eventually, his friends begin to help bridge Riyad from the Qur’an to the Bible, and everything became clear. He turned his life over to Jesus Christ, but he did not lose his zeal; the Lord merely redirected it. Soon after becoming a Christ follower, he went to one of his mosques as he had always done. Hundreds of people were gathered there, waiting for him to come and lead them in their prayers. He stood in front of them and said, “Listen, Jesus is the grace and the truth from God! Unless we follow Him, we cannot go to Jannah [heaven]. So you must come after Jesus if you want to inherit God’s kingdom.”

The people, needless to say, were shocked to hear such words from their imam. The moment he finished speaking, the people leaped up, surrounded him, and forced him to the ground. They tied his hands behind his back with scarves, then began to collectively beat him and kick him where he lay. Some ran into the street and screamed, “Our imam has become crazy! He has gone mad!” Those beating him shouted, “Who made you leave Islam? Why have you become a Christian? Did they bribe you? Drug you?”

The crowd held him prisoner until three in the morning, but they finally let him leave rather than killing him. Riyad fled the village, and the next day a crowd swarmed his house, stealing whatever they could carry and destroying the rest, including the house itself. But Riyad grew in his faith and understanding, and the Lord used him in powerful ways to lead many sheikhs to Christ. Again, like Paul, the man who violently persecuted the people of Christ became a committed follower of Christ, all because some Christ followers were willing to take the risk of reaching out to a difficult and dangerous person.

We asked Riyad how Christians ought to respond to Muslims, and here is how he answered:

1. Never hate Muslims. My message to Christian brothers and sisters is first to choose to love Muslims. Even though they persecute us, hate us, and harm us, we should love.

2. We must pray for them. Pray for Muslims with love, because they don’t understand what they do.

3. Demonstrate genuine compassion. Serve them, even to the point of sharing what we have with Muslims, even though we may previously have seen them as our enemies.

4. Share the gospel. Christians need to understand the issues of darkness and help Muslims discover for themselves the truth and the light.

5. Always remember that Muslims are in darkness. Before I was a believer, I was in darkness, but now I’m in the light. Unless God opens people’s hearts to what they do, they can’t understand the light. They don’t even know what they are doing, because of their darkness. Only God can show them. We collect the harvest, but it is Jesus who brings Muslims to Himself.

CHAPTER

11

ORDINARY PEOPLE ACHIEVING THE IMPOSSIBLE

She was an ordinary village woman; she was in a newly planted church. She started teaching them the stories, especially the women, with songs, and the most important thing she taught them to do was to obey the truth.

—a Christian pastor whose church makes hundreds of disciples among Muslims

A WOMAN IN THE MARKETPLACE

When Faiza heard her pastor invite the members of his African congregation to attend a seminar to learn how to make disciples and plant churches, she knew instantly that this was exactly what she had been waiting for. Ever since she had become a Christian, she knew that the Father had something very special in store for her life. At only twenty-two years of age, a former Muslim who had become a Christian just two years before, Faiza knew the joy of meaningful, emotion-filled prayer. She loved being an intercessor, and she could pray for hours, knowing that God Himself was responding to her prayers.

Faiza did not have the chance for the education she wanted, but that did not keep her from developing a shrewd business sense. She easily outsold every other palm oil merchant in the market. She knew how to judge the product, measure the competition, provide simple value-added elements, and win trust with customers, the result of which was an adequate income to meet her needs and share some with others.

Until this moment, she had never had any desire to leave town. The pastor had spoken the words, but it was God whose voice she heard: “Six weeks of intensive training to become a disciple maker and church planter.” What a wonderful thought! It was the moment she had waited for. As soon as the service was over, she headed directly to see the pastor and told him that she wanted to participate in the disciple-making training. Pastor Joseph knew Faiza well and was her friend, so his hesitant response to her was a surprise.

“Faiza,” he said, “are you sure this is something you can do?”

“Yes,” she replied brightly, “of course I can.”

The pastor stood in thought for several moments; then he finally said, “I want you to go home this week and fast and pray about this. This is a big decision, and it will not be easy for someone who does not read and write. But if God tells you to take this training, then come Thursday for the first day and you may start.”

When Faiza left, the pastor worried that he had wounded his friend. He was so proud of all that Faiza had accomplished, but she had never taken a course that required reading the Bible, writing Scriptures, and studying intensely. How could she manage that? But Joseph knew that Faiza was a faithful woman of prayer, and certainly God would give her the answer that he himself did not have the heart to speak.

Pastor Joseph arrived early at the church the next Thursday and found Faiza waiting for someone to open the door. He had never seen her so happy. It turned out that God had given her great encouragement when she prayed, and He had even told her where her assignment would be when she finished her training. It seemed like an incredible opportunity for her to learn and obey. This was the moment when she would begin what God had promised her years ago.

Six weeks later, she completed the training, and she could hardly wait to tell Pastor Joseph where she was headed. “What?” he cried when she told him. “You can’t go there! They will kill you, and I can’t have your blood on my conscience. Just keep praying; seek God some more. This can’t be His will.”

“Dear brother,” she patiently responded, “God spoke this to me that day in the church, and I only have joy when I think about taking the gospel to Jumvulu. God would not lead me to a place that He does not want me.”

Eventually, Joseph relented, and the church prayed for Faiza and dispatched her to Jumvulu, a place where Islam mixed with a poisonous, unspeakable evil of demonic deeds, practices so vile that people guarded the graves of their deceased for a week or more to protect against desecration. As the church said good-bye to Faiza, some people shed tears, for they were sure that they would never see her again due to the danger she faced.

Within two weeks, Faiza had found her place in a new market, making friends, selling palm oil, and looking for a person of peace. And within another two weeks, Faiza found that person of peace and started a Discovery Bible Study with ten people. Within three months of that, Faiza’s group had become a small church. After six months, there were three growing churches in Jumvulu and more Discovery Bible Studies happening. And at that point, Faiza knew that she had done what God had asked her to do. It was time to head for another challenging place.

Joseph sent a team to follow up on the miraculous beachhead that had been established by Faiza’s courageous obedience to God. Today, there are twenty-five churches in that area, and the dark partnership has been broken between the secret orders and Islam; it has been publicly exposed and outlawed. Now other ministries that had been afraid to work in Jumvulu have also joined the efforts, and the gospel message is being spread even more rapidly.

And these ministry leaders aren’t the only people who changed their minds and hearts about something; Pastor Joseph did too. He realized that people who do not read should be welcomed and accommodated at every level of discipleship training and leadership development, and today people who are unable to read carry responsibility for a high percentage of the dramatic growth happening in more than a thousand churches throughout that ministry. And Faiza? At twenty-seven, she became a national leader of intercessory prayer in her ministry and still sells palm oil and gives away the gospel.

THE EARLY CHURCH AND ORDINARY PEOPLE

A cursory look at the book of Acts demonstrates that the work of ministry was largely done by nonprofessional Christians. Several of Jesus’ disciples were humble fishermen. Even Paul appears to have been primarily self-supporting as a tent maker. It is possible that one of the reasons why the Western church of the twenty-first century struggles to grow is that the DNA has been lost that made up the original disciple making movement, that of ordinary people achieving the impossible in the name of God. Well, that DNA is being recaptured in today’s Disciple Making Movements that are based on empowering every member, regardless of background, as a disciple maker, taking very seriously the final instruction of Jesus to His disciples.

After the death and resurrection of Christ, the Jewish rulers were startled by the boldness and spiritual authority of those who followed Jesus, a band of ordinary people: “Now when they saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived that they were uneducated and untrained men, they marveled. And they realized that they had been with Jesus. And seeing the man who had been healed standing with them, they could say nothing against it.” (Acts 4:13–14)

One of the surprises when you see Disciple Making Movements from the inside is that the people you will meet are extraordinary in the impression that they make on you, yet they come from very ordinary backgrounds and often are employed as farmers, weavers, office workers, carpenters, herdsmen, fishermen, tailors, agriculturalists, health-care workers, city officials, soldiers, domestics, food service workers, builders, masons, schoolteachers, barbers, drivers, clerks, janitors, merchants, midwives, police officers, singers, tanners, hunters, security guards, and many other ordinary professions. You may ride with a driver, and he’ll tell you that he planted a church this year. A policeman will tell you how he makes disciples among the civilian populations.

It would seem, from the witness of Jesus’ ministry and the makeup of the earliest church, that God meant all along for disciple making and church planting to be the domain of ordinary Christians. We will always need godly people whose training and biblical integrity will provide leadership, training, coaching, and mentoring for ordinary people doing impossible things by the power of God.

A SEED PLANTED BY RADIO

One day, a man named Tazeem was listening to a radio, and he heard a Christian talking about the gospel, in Tazeem’s own language. Like most people he knew, Tazeem had never heard anything about Jesus before, and he found what he was hearing on the radio to be very encouraging and comforting. The message spoke about forgiveness in Jesus’ sacrifice, about the salvation of souls, and about God’s love for people and the power of prayer. It was a wonderful thing to hear such thoughts. Tazeem wanted to know more, but he never again found that program on his radio.

All the same, Tazeem began to think that he would like to tell other people about this message, so he tried to remember every word he had heard. He began to tell others in his village about the man named Jesus, and how He could give people forgiveness for sins. Tazeem’s gospel message was very basic, since it was all he knew from that radio broadcast, yet God was using it for His glory all the same.

There was an elderly woman in Tazeem’s village who sometimes would sing praise songs to God. In a Muslim community, this was very strange, and people often talked about it. One day, Tazeem visited her and began to speak to her of what he had heard on the radio. She smiled broadly and said, “So now there are two of us here, and you can worship God together with me. From now on, you are my son!” Neither Tazeem nor his new friend owned a Bible, but the woman (whom Tazeem affectionately referred to as “Old Mother”) had learned some of the chronological storytelling from a brief exposure to church planters in another community, and so the two of them immediately began working together to share what they knew of God’s Word with their friends and neighbors. They had a very simple message: “Come to Jesus. This is the right way. Just come!”

One day, the mother of the sheikh in the town began to manifest demonic spirits. She was taken to the witch doctors, and then to the Muslim marabouts who read the Qur’an to her. The sheikh tried everything he could think of to set his mother free from the demonic influence that was gripping her, body and soul, but he could find no answers and nobody to help. But suddenly, one afternoon, the mother (in a brief moment of lucidity) announced the right answer: “I must go to the home of Old Mother and her boy!” she cried out. And with that one brief sentence, she ran from the sheikh’s home straight to the Christian woman’s house.

The demonized woman, however, was deeply in the clutches of the enemy. The moment she crossed the threshold of the Christian’s home, her body froze and she collapsed helpless on the floor. For eight days, she lay on a sleeping mat, unable to move. She did not eat, she did not speak, she did not use the latrine—she did not move from that fixed position—and for eight days, Tazeem and “Old Mother” prayed. Then suddenly, on the eighth day, the evil spirits left her, she stood up and spoke, and the faithful Christians began to minister to her needs.

Word went throughout the village instantaneously: “The sheikh’s mother is healed! The spirits have been defeated!” The sheikh heard the news and came running. When he saw his mother eating and in her right mind, he immediately collapsed to his knees and begged Tazeem to teach him about his God. And that day, both the sheikh and his mother became followers of Jesus.

If news spread quickly about the demons leaving, the news of the sheikh becoming a Christian spread even faster. That very evening, people from the village began to flood the Christian woman’s home, seeking healings and deliverance from evil influences through the power of her God. In the coming days, that little hut looked like an outpatient clinic, a hospital for body and soul, as many were healed of ailments both physical and spiritual.

But the Muslim leaders in the area had also heard about the sheikh’s “betrayal of Islam,” and they quickly brought together a committee to deal with him. They sat together in the mosque and plotted how they would kill him. They armed themselves with spears, knives, and guns, and they set out to find the Christian sheikh. What they didn’t notice, however, was a young boy sitting nearby who had listened to their deliberations. That boy outran the men, found the sheikh, and warned him: “These people,” he cried breathlessly, “they desire evil to you!”

The former sheikh ran to the police department for sanctuary, and the police in alarm said that they would arrest the murderous party and take them to court. But the new Christ follower immediately demonstrated his understanding of God’s Word. “No,” he said quickly, “please do not arrest them. I have already forgiven them! As long as they do me no harm, I do not want to take them before the magistrates. Just let them go free, for I have forgiven them.”

Now that former sheikh is planting churches, and those churches are multiplying. In that area of seventy villages, there are now seventeen small churches with about 125 new Christians. Persecution is still strong, but there is a foothold of the gospel in a challenging place. And it is the work of ordinary people achieving the extraordinary!

THE CHRISTIAN BUSINESSMAN AND THE DONKEY CART DRIVER

Christopher is a Christian businessman who had a dream ten years ago in which he saw himself speaking words of life to dead people who returned to life at the name of Jesus. Immediately, Christopher began praying about the meaning of the dream, and God led him to pray for missionaries and church planters who would bring millions to Jesus. Then Christopher asked God to show him how to do this thing.

The counsel of God was clear: “Start in your house and, when the time is right, I will give you more direction.” So Christopher did that and began to disciple a man by the name of Phillip. Between the two of them, they eventually planted eleven churches in four years. At that time, Christopher and Phillip received training in Disciple Making Movements. In the five years that followed, they have facilitated the planting of 102 new churches with 113 new leaders. Every year, Christopher invests profits from his business to fund pioneer church planting teams, and he has also helped sixty different church planters become self-supporting.

One day, Christopher and Phillip decided to travel about for a week to visit various new churches, so they hired a man named Namir to carry them in his donkey cart. Over the course of their time traveling together, Christopher and Phillip had the opportunity to share the gospel with Namir, and, remarkably, within just a few days, Namir had found peace with God and assurance of salvation through the Word of God.[22]

Phillip continued to disciple Namir for some time after this, but Namir wasted no time in sharing the gospel with others, using his donkey cart as a pulpit. Namir tells this story in his own words:

While working on the cart, taking people from one place to another, I mention about Jesus and tell them the gospel. So I can get access to them easily. They don’t take me as a minister or evangelist; they take me as a cart driver. They will hear me better like that, so I have a chance of sharing Jesus with sixty people in a day.

If you start being serious, they don’t listen to you. They may even attack you physically. So I start by telling them a joke and making them laugh and being friendly to them. Then I tell them that I used to be a Muslim. I used to drink alcohol; I was addicted to khat. I didn’t have peace. So I tell them that I studied the religion I used to hate—that is, Christianity—then I ended up accepting it. And now I have peace and satisfaction.

I will start the conversation with a topic that draws their attention. For example, “Did you hear that so-and-so got arrested because he was drunk and fought with someone?” That usually draws people into conversation. Then I turn it toward them: “Do you drink too?” That means I start by a story that is familiar to them so that they can listen to me.

A lady told me that her husband beats her. He gives cattle as a sacrifice for an evil spirit, and they are getting poor. She asked me what to do. I told her that there is a solution. I told her about Jesus, and she said, “If he is going to be a solution, I am willing to follow him.” She accepted the Lord as her Savior. Now she is a Christian and she has peace and joy in the Lord.

I still work as a cart driver. But I am also a church planter, so I don’t work full time. I didn’t stop driving because I am more effective when I am in my cart. I get to talk to many people when I am driving my cart. . . . So I share the gospel with countless people, and more than three hundred have become Christ followers. I have planted four churches when I was working as a cart driver. Including the second-generation churches, there are eight churches in all. All of the churches are in Muslim regions.

I set a day for fasting and prayer every week. I climb a mountain and fast and pray every Wednesday. I didn’t miss a single Wednesday these three years. I go there whether I am sick or not. I am praying and fasting now. Later today, I will go back and pray for five days there.

I pray for the people who are in different bondages, like evil spirit, addiction, and so on, so that they get saved. I pray for the ministers around the world. I pray for the mission agency. I pray for the needy peoples. They give me their written requests. I pray for the church planting in this area. I pray for those people who give what they have so that the gospel is shared. I pray that God will bless them with all that they need. I have got all the requests and answered prayers recorded. I have 904 answered prayers written down in this book.

And when God speaks to me, I write that down in this book.

Namir showed us his prayer journal, a painstakingly handwritten book with hundreds of pages, every page covered with names and prayer requests, and answers! He carries that book with him whenever he is driving his cart, and today many people will wait at the marketplace for his cart, bypassing other, more modern taxis so that they can ask “the praying cart man” to add their names to his book.

THE ISLAMIC CLERIC WITH THE UPSIDE-DOWN BIBLE

When Mustapha walks into a room, one might not notice him at first. He would have been more noticeable a few years ago, when he dressed in the full attire of an Islamic teacher and imam who led prayers in the mosque. But a few years ago, Mustapha had a dream of Jesus who clearly spoke to him, saying that He wanted him to “follow Me, for I am the Son of God—I am the Truth and the Life.” Mustapha awoke, terrified and screaming. Neighbors came, and he told them of the dream. They all agreed that God could have no Son, and if Mustapha followed that dream he would be a dead man.

But Mustapha could not forget the strange vision, and it launched a search for truth that eventually led him to a Christian leader who began to disciple him. Mustapha’s first efforts at studying the Bible resulted in his holding it upside down, trying to read this strange language it was printed in. But in time, his Christian friend helped him learn to read the Bible, and that new ability freed him for a life of meditating on God’s Word.

Now Mustapha is a lecturer in a Bible college and a pastor of a church. But his real passion is planting churches. And by taking with him almost every day a new person whom he is discipling, he has planted thirty-nine churches in the last six months, and more than a hundred since he became a Christ follower. Mustapha says that there are two secrets to his remarkable success:

First, people see how he has changed for the better since becoming a Christ follower. The people in Mustapha’s region knew him well as an imam, and now they see a very different man as a Christian. “It is my life,” he explains. “The way I am living is a testimony to others, because they know what I was like before. They see the change and they want it also.”

Second, Mustapha says that it is not hard to find ways into a community if you just love people. “Sometimes I help people be better farmers; sometimes I share food with people in need; sometimes I bring simple medical help or take people to a clinic for care.”

Ordinary people, transformed lives, genuine love, remarkable courage, and extraordinary outcomes: this is the power of God’s Word.

CHAPTER

12

SEVEN PARADIGM SHIFTS

My wife, Gayle, and I have had the great privilege of spending much of our lives in one or another function of the world Christian enterprise: training to be missionaries, working as missionaries in Africa, pastoring two mission-sending churches, and cofounding a ministry for unreached peoples in Africa. We considered these experiences to be great gifts from God that we did not deserve. I had been motivated since my teens by the words of Oswald Smith, spoken decades ago: “Why should anyone hear the gospel twice before everyone has heard it once?”

But at one point thirty years ago, I lost faith that the church had the tools necessary to fulfill the Great Commission in this generation, so I began to invest more of my life in other aspects of ministry. And so it remained, until fourteen years ago, when God began awakening me in the mornings with thoughts about the lost peoples of Africa, our first love. Finally, we had to reengage with no clear idea how to proceed. Eventually, we discovered the radical, hidden-in-plain-sight, disciple-making principles described in this book, and those changed everything, including my thoughts about what God might do and how fast He might do it.

What I experienced was a series of “paradigm shifts,” a radical reassessment of my own preconceptions about evangelism and a change of priorities for my ministry, bringing my priorities more in line with God’s priorities. Let’s consider some paradigm shifts that these changing priorities might require for you as well.

1. Make Intercessory Prayer the Highest Priority

In the process of engaging lostness among Muslims, we all need a God-sized vision, a thoughtfully biblical strategy, a good plan, and a willingness to work diligently to achieve the goals God has put in our hearts. But make intercessory prayer support a higher priority than anything else, because it is the only possible way to see many Muslims becoming fully-devoted followers of Jesus.

2. Make Disciples Who Make Disciples

People pay attention when someone speaks his last earthly words, and Jesus’ last words are among His most significant:

All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age. (Matthew 28:18–20 NIV)

Making disciples is very different from making converts. Disciple making requires time and relationship. Disciple making does not typically depend on formulas of salvation or on strangers leading strangers in a quick decision regarding personal destiny. Disciple makers are prepared to invest weeks, months, and maybe years developing genuine friendships, facilitating someone’s discovery of and obedience to God’s story from creation to Christ, and eventually giving Jesus his life allegiance. Modern shortcuts to making quick converts seem to fall short of Jesus’ final instructions on earth.

Today’s Typical Practices

Contrary to Jesus’ three-year discipleship program for the Twelve, our goal today is sometimes a quick conversion based on an easy-to-remember collection of major doctrines and a “sinner’s prayer” to conclude the transaction. The goal is to get people saved and then take them through discipleship training. But that training often involves a class, not a relationship. The measure of how well the church makes disciples is how transformed the people of God are and how successful they are in changing their communities.

Converts may ultimately become highly committed disciples of Jesus, but it is in spite of the process, not because of it. Disciples are made when someone is willing to walk with them, teaching them by example what it means to make Jesus Lord of their lives. It takes much more time to guide them this way than it does to make converts, but taking this time tends to result in a much higher rate of life-changing success.

Jesus’ Example

Jesus is recorded as asking one wealthy young man to sacrifice his wealth in order to become one of His disciples (Matthew 19:16–22). The young man went away sorrowful because he just could not make that sacrifice. Why did Jesus do that? Could it be that, in order to follow Jesus for three years, one had to be willing to walk away from a Roman tax collector’s franchise or from one’s boat and nets in order to be with Him, in order to go where He went and do what He did, watching Him and learning from him? That young man seemed to have a lot of potential, maybe more than Simon the Zealot (who came to Jesus from a semi-terrorist group), but he would not pay the price of beginning to follow Jesus.

Jesus essentially discipled the Twelve from the days that they left their former lives to be with Him in order to shape their lives in His image, until the day came when they understood the cost and essentially declared “we are all in!” Twelve started that journey; eleven eventually discovered who Jesus was and worshipped Him. And they changed the whole Roman world in seventy years.

3. Invest Time in the Right Person

As Henry Blackaby wrote, the secret of all Christian ministry is to “watch to see where God is at work and join Him!”[23] We should not be surprised at that, since our God is a missionary God. He is already far ahead of us in His strategy and tactics. And as we pray, He goes before us to prepare people among the world’s most difficult people groups to bridge the gospel to their community. Remarkably, when Christians begin to apply those principles that Jesus used in sending the twelve disciples and the seventy into the field, they typically begin to see immediate and dramatic changes in their ministry, because they are joining God where He is already at work.

Resist the Urge to Default to Mass Marketing

Many contemporary evangelistic techniques are based on modern marketing research and practices: identify your likely demographic, tailor a church’s program to meet that type of person, cast a wide net, and hope that a good percentage of people get saved. As many have written before, the focus is on attractional evangelism instead of what some refer to as missional engagement, which we simply call disciple making. And the focus is on “come to the church” instead of “create a new community of Christ in your circle of influence.”

Jesus certainly taught in a few public venues, but when He sent the seventy out before Him, He quite specifically instructed them, “Do not go from house to house” (Luke 10:7). Instead, He taught them to find the person whom God had prepared in advance—the “person of peace” (Matthew 10; Luke 10)—and to engage that person and his family in order to bridge the gospel into that community. The Gospels and Acts have many examples of these people, as do the stories that you have been reading in this book about Muslim people of peace.

Interestingly, Jesus’ command was for the disciples to engage in acts of mercy and also in proclamation of the kingdom of God. And if the community “[does] not receive you,” Jesus’ instruction includes the sobering words, “The very dust of your city which clings to us we wipe off against you” (Luke 10:10, 11), presumably said as they left to find another place where they might find the person or family of peace. Similarly, Jesus trained, coached, and mentored just a handful of people to help them become people with the capacity to shape the destinies of nations and generations to come. Spirit-led decisions to deeply invest our lives in others is a secret of a fruitful life.

4. Don’t Tell People What to Believe and Do

Many of us are not conditioned to trust that the Word and the Spirit are really “enough” without trained professional Christians in every new community of faith. Trust that God’s Word and the Holy Spirit are enough for people seeking to know and obey God.

5. Never Settle for Revealing Just One Dimension of Jesus’ Life

Today’s Typical Practices

Usually, Christians are sent into unchurched communities as pastors or missionaries. Those identities do not always make the process easy. A high percentage of lost people will go to surprising lengths to avoid “religious” people. As a result, much ministry today focuses on either compassion or evangelism; rarely are the two connected in a way that imitates Jesus’ ministry. In some restricted countries, Christian compassion ministries feel compelled to minimize evangelism, especially church planting, in order to maintain their presence and valuable service there. Likewise, around the globe, many evangelistic ministries often assume that compassion ministries are nonessential distractions to the more important task of winning souls. The tragedy is that very few ministries model their mission on Jesus’ own example of coming as a compassionate friend who, with high intentionality, also introduced the good news regarding the kingdom of God.

Jesus’ Example

Jesus often engaged people at a point of need: five thousand hungry people, a chronically ill woman who was also ritually unclean, the grieving mother of a dead boy, a social outcast at a well, ten people who were outcasts because of leprosy, a chained victim of demonic oppression, and even a humiliated wedding couple who had run out of refreshments. Jesus met needs, but He never separated His compassionate service from appropriate evangelism. In any biblical context, it is impossible to define transformation as just a simple act of service that does not include redemption of the whole person, body, soul, and spirit.

6. Never Substitute Knowledge About God for an Obedience-Based Relationship with God

Today’s Typical Practices

From the time children have their first Sunday school lesson, churches build curricula that emphasize a sound survey of Scripture plus the biblical values and practices that produce a fruitful life. But historically, the church has been much better at feeding information than facilitating consistent obedience to the Word of God. This may be one reason why research into lifestyles of North American church members does not always demonstrate the qualitative differences that we would hope to see between their life choices and non-Christians’ behaviors.

Jesus’ Example

Jesus consistently spoke of pleasing God, not in terms of knowledge, but in terms of obedience. Again and again, in direct statements and vivid parables, He warned of the great danger of hearing without obeying. Much of his teaching focused on this one issue.

7. Understand That Jesus Does Impossible Things Through the Most Ordinary People

Today’s Typical Practices

Most Christian communities affirm “the priesthood of all believers” but do not really expect ordinary people without formal ministry credentials to achieve extraordinary Kingdom outcomes.

Jesus’ Example

Jesus picked ordinary people without religious, professional, political, or academic credentials to be His disciples. He counted on them to write much of what would become the New Testament. He expected that they would successfully launch a global movement that would eventually give witness to His gospel in thousands of people groups, and do all this before He returns (Matthew 24:14).

Disciple making is a mandate for every Christian and, when it is done well, it often facilitates the planting of a church—in the context of this book, a “simple church” regularly meeting to discover God’s will together and obeying it. Fortunately, planting new churches is often easier for ordinary Christians than for professional Christian workers, because they are living their Christian witness among the very people with whom they are sharing the gospel.

CONCLUSION

When ordinary Christians choose to align their thinking and their actions with the Word of God (Romans 12:1–2), even if that requires a radical paradigm shift, God will bless their efforts “exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that works in us, to Him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus” (Ephesians 3:20–21).

CHAPTER

13

GETTING STARTED

Biblical Practices for Engaging Lostness

After having read all the things that God is doing in other places, you may wonder if the same thing can happen where you live. Let me tell you that all you have read about in this book, and even more, can happen where you live and anywhere else. We have been focusing on how God is working in the lives of Muslims around the world, but the principles which we’ve been considering are all drawn from Scripture, and they apply equally well to sharing the gospel in any setting. God is doing all these things wherever these simple biblical principles are implemented—not just in the Muslim world—and He is using ordinary people to do it. Let me guide you through the process.

This should not be a program that you create; instead, it is a way of life to live out in a community that you want to reach for Christ. Don’t start a program; develop a lifestyle of caring relationships. When people are a target of your program or a trophy that you want to get, they will know it in your way of dealing with them. Genuine love and friendship are what touch the hearts of people.

Start with the end in mind. Design the kind of church that you want to see in the community before you start. In so doing, you will identify the essential elements of a process that will develop a strong foundation, the church’s DNA. The kind of church being planted should be simple, locally led, biblically and culturally relevant, and reproductive.

Let’s review the biblical processes that lead to this type of church.

PRAY ABUNDANTLY

This is God’s work. You should take your place as a servant in the process. A servant learns to know his Master’s will, and he obeys it. Ask God what He is doing in the community and join Him. You should also realize that, no matter how eloquent you are, you cannot produce in the heart of people the kind of conviction that leads to repentance and salvation in Christ. Only the Holy Spirit can convince people “of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment” (John 16:8). The Bible says that when we expose people to the gospel, the enemy comes and veils their spirit so that they will not understand what they are hearing (2 Corinthians 4:3–4). Only God can open the minds of people so that they understand the gospel and accept it (Acts 16:14).

Bringing people to the knowledge of Christ for their salvation is spiritual warfare; we need to bind the strong man before we can plunder his house (Matthew 12:29). In this process, prayer is critical throughout: before you engage, during the process, and after it launches. Prayer never ceases.

Pray for families and individuals who have influence in the community.

Pray that the persons of peace will reveal themselves.

Have a regular and focused time of praying as you walk through the community.

Learn to do spiritual warfare for a community: discover and engage the spiritual powers that must be prayed against and bound by God’s power; proclaim the promises and blessings of God’s Word over the people; and invite God’s Spirit to break all the evil bondages that keep people from being able to hear, believe, and obey.

GAIN ACCESS TO THE COMMUNITY

Living in the same neighborhood with a group of people doesn’t necessarily mean that you have access to that community. Questions need to be asked: Do the members of that community know you as someone they can trust, someone who loves them, someone who wants their well-being? Are you accepted in the community? The hearts of the members of the community are the way to their souls. Touch their hearts, and their lives will be opened to your influence.

Show practical and genuine love and concern for them. Render services that meet their needs. Most of the time, it will not require money, but it will require your time, patience, and willingness to listen and counsel. It might involve finding a way to help their kids to do better at school; helping them use their free time efficiently (sport, games, etc.); or providing them with skill training or some advice about dealing with the local culture, medical concerns, or government officials, for example. Ask God, and you will see the needs and how to help meet them. Ask the community members what their needs are and help them think through solutions.

Develop friendships in the community and let people see in you what it means to be an obedient Christian. You must be intentional in developing friendships that lead to a discipleship process, but at the same time be ready to have good friends who might never come to Christ. You should be ready to go out of your comfort zone in order to meet people in their comfort zone. Allow people to visit you without advance notice, and do the same in return. Demonstrate your humanity by expressing some personal need. Ask God to make you a person who brings peace and blessings in the Muslim community.

FIND THE PERSON OF PEACE

As you show genuine and practical love and concern, have a conspicuous personal relationship with God, which does not necessarily mean being “religious.” Your language should show people that you trust God, that you have a genuine relationship with Him, that He speaks to you, and that you obey Him. Remember, the heart leads to the soul. Let them see that God is at work in your life.

Simple greetings can be a powerful way to show people that you are a Christian. When you are asked, “How are you?” instead of replying, “I am fine, thank you. And you?” you can answer by saying, “I am grateful to God. He is keeping me well and providing for me every day.” This way, you let the person know that you believe in God, that God is at work in your life, and that you trust Him for all things.

Find ways to let people know that you are an obedient disciple of Christ and that God blesses you in different ways. Don’t make anything up. Just tell your story as it is happening every day. Many things in our lives that we take for granted are blessings from God. Countless Muslims are longing for a deep relationship with God and blessings from Him. Let them see those qualities in your daily life. Faith is a private matter, for sure. But God specifically invites us to let our manner of life give glory to Him publicly.

The Islamic cultures are cultures of shame and guilt. Talking about sin will not touch them. But talking about what causes shame or guilt will have an effect. So try to find out the things in the community that are bringing shame and guilt and that are also seen as sin in the Bible. For example, deception in business may not be a source of shame, but deceiving your home community would be very embarrassing and shameful. Then ask questions about how they deal with these things when they happen. Then share how, as a Christian, the Bible helps you deal with the same kind of issues. The goal here is to lead the person to the point where he would want to know more about what the Bible has to say about solving these shame and guilt issues.

Don’t hesitate to pray for people if they ask for it. Offer to pray when you see a need and the person doesn’t ask you to pray. When praying in front of people, you don’t need to use all the formulas that you use in church. Keep it simple. By so doing, the persons of peace in the community will find you and show themselves. These are people in whom God is working; you will find them as spiritual seekers. They are hungry and have questions; they are people who are empty inside and disillusioned with Islam.

People of peace are typically hospitable, ready to receive the message, willing to introduce you to the community, and able to invite their families or friends into a process of discovering God in the Bible. Your loving friendship and your genuine relationship with God should increase their discouragement and disillusionment with Islam, and it will help the persons of peace to reveal themselves. There are exceptions, of course, as we have already addressed with stories of some people who are initially hostile before they become a bridge into the community. In general, however, the person of peace will be someone who is receptive to discovering God.

START A DISCOVERY BIBLE STUDY WITH THE PERSON OF PEACE AND THE MEMBERS OF HIS NETWORK

When you have identified a person of peace, it is time to start a discipleship process. Don’t start with the person of peace alone unless it is absolutely necessary. Start with families and groups. Encourage the person of peace to invite the members of his family and others he knows in the community who will benefit from the process. Keep in mind that you want to disciple people to conversion, not vice versa. The best way to do that is through a Discovery Bible Study (DBS). Don’t preach or teach. Help the group to discover by themselves and to obey the truths in the Bible.

The process of the Discovery Bible Study should be simple enough that everyone can follow, literate or not. Remember that we have designed the type of church that we want to see started: simple, obedient, biblical, culturally relevant, and reproductive. The DNA that we want to see developed is this: obedience, prayer, reproduction, genuine concern for the community, and outward focus on the lost. From the first day you should sow the seed of each element that you want to see characterized in the church later.

There are four sections to keep in mind when doing a Discovery Bible Study.

Section 1: Opening

Ask the following questions to determine how to minister to the person:

What are you thankful for this week? (This will lead to gratitude to God and worship.)

What has worried you this week? What do you need to make the situation better? (This will lead to prayer and an opportunity to serve one another.)

What are the needs of the people in your community? (This will lead to prayer, compassionate service, and opportunities to make disciples.)

How can we help one another with the needs we expressed? (This will become koinonea fellowship, a close community of relationship and meeting one another’s needs.)

Section 2: Review

This section starts with the second DBS meeting. Ask the following questions:

What did we talk about last week? (accountability)

What changed in your life as a result of last week’s story and the point of obedience you discovered? (accountability for obedience)

How did it go when you shared the story with someone else? (accountability for evangelism and reproduction)

We identified several needs last week and planned to meet those needs. How did it go? (accountability for meeting one another’s needs)

Section 3: DBS: Three Columns

When we do DBS, we follow a process that can easily be put into three columns. Each participant creates his own workbook with three columns that he fills out himself: “What does the Scripture passage say?” (which is a literal transcription of the verses being studied); “What does it say in my own words?”; and “If this is true, what must I do to obey?” You don’t necessarily need to have the three-column format in your studies; just use the following format to study the Bible together:

Say, “Let’s see what the Bible teaches us this week.” Read this week’s passage. (Scripture)

Read or listen to the verses; don’t explain or teach. You will start with creation and work through the Bible to Christ, focusing on the attributes of God. Later, when people have become Christ followers, you will do the same with the commands of Christ.

Focus on the Scriptures, not human opinion.

Ask for someone to retell the passage in their own words, as if he was telling a friend who wasn’t there. (understanding Scripture, accountability, evangelism)

Ask the group, “Do you agree with this retelling? Is there something he added or left out that he shouldn’t have?” As long as the group doesn’t miss a key component of the passage, continue. If they miss something, read the passage again. If someone states something that isn’t in the passage, ask, “Where did you find [what he said] in this passage?” Reread the passage, if necessary. (group correction, focus on the one passage)

Your intention is for the group to start asking these questions as they go further in the process (group correction). Make sure that you develop this; otherwise, you won’t establish the process that keeps from going into heresy. You will get answers such as “My imam says this,” or “My friend said that.” When that happens, keep bringing it back by asking, “What does this passage of Scripture say?”

Ask, “What does this passage teach us about God?” (discovery and Scripture)

Ask, “What does this passage teach us about humanity?” (discovery and Scripture)

Ask, “If we believe that this passage is from God, how must we change?” (discovery, Scripture, obedience)

Ask group members to formulate their personal responses to this passage by starting with, “I will . . .”

Section 4: Go and Live It Out

Help your DBS group to apply the Scriptures in their lives through obedience to God’s Word.

Ask, “Who are you going to share this passage with before we meet again?” (evangelism and replication)

Say, “From now on, let’s practice what we have seen today. It is the truth from the Creator, and we all should live according to that truth.”

Ask, “When do you want to meet again?” This is a practical question. You will never get people to commit to many weeks of study, but you can give them the option to meet again next week. If they are really seeking, and if the meeting is filling a need, they will tell you that they want to meet again.

If there was a need in section 1 to visit someone or a family in the community, go with two or three people from the group to visit.

A session of Discovery Bible Study should take between thirty and forty-five minutes. Help the group to be focused. You can chat about other things later. But during the DBS, help the group to focus on the lessons God is teaching them in His Word.

BAPTIZE AND START A CHURCH

In the process of Discovery Bible Study sessions, group members will make decisions to follow Christ. (Oftentimes, most of the people, sometimes all of them, will make a collective decision to do so.)

Unfortunately, around the world, most traditional churches have fears and distrust of Muslims, and they are typically not the ideal place to entrust new Muslim-background Christians. Most churches will have great intentions to receive them, but they almost always create many unintentional barriers to Muslim-background Christians feeling accepted, loved, and welcomed. And some traditional Christian practices may even seem immoral and ungodly to someone coming from a Muslim background. However, most churches are not even aware that practices and preferences of a typical Sunday morning worship assembly may be shocking to a new Muslim-background disciple.

Therefore, a new Muslim-background Christian’s first experience of church should not be a traditional church. Baptize those who make decisions to follow Christ and organize them into a simple church—a local group of believers baptized in the Lord Jesus Christ who gather regularly for worship, nurture, and fellowship, and who endeavor to obey all His commands in their families and the community.

Don’t decide what this newly formed church should look like. Help the group to discover what a church is, its nature, its functions, and so forth. Let the members decide when, where, and how they should meet. Over time, this group will mature and understand more about the varieties of Christian cultures, and they will find healthy ways to relate to the traditional churches around them.

DEVELOP LEADERS

Teach potential leaders the following important concepts of leadership:

Training is done “on the job.”

Make sure the things you teach local leaders can be reproduced by them.

Use unpaid local leaders to start new groups.

Persecution is part of being a Christian.

Discipleship and training are continuous and primarily done through coaching and mentoring.

Model leadership, equip for leadership, watch new leaders, and then leave them to reproduce the same process in another region.

CONCLUSION

These are the basic steps to starting your own ministry to Muslims in your community:

Pray abundantly.

Gain access to the Muslim community through service and prayer.

Wait for the Lord to lead you to the person of peace.

Start a Discovery Bible Study.

Coach the leaders who emerge in the group.

Help them to focus on engaging other families and networks, not individuals.

Coach and mentor leaders as they baptize new believers and organize them into a simple church.

Encourage leaders to repeat the process among another Muslim family or community.

This way of making disciples results in:

rooting the gospel in any context,

developing disciples who are obedient to Jesus, and

creating disciples who make disciples, leaders who reproduce leaders, and churches that plant churches.

A FINAL WORD

I was about fifteen years old when I sensed that God had called me to serve unreached peoples of the world. By the time I was forty, my wife and I had spent twenty extraordinary years preparing for this task, serving among a Muslim-majority people group, and pastoring a missionary-sending church. My dream was simple—that our generation would see the fulfillment of Jesus’ promise: “And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in all the world as a witness to all the nations, and then the end will come” (Matthew 24:14).

But eventually I began to doubt that this promise could happen in our lifetime. Somehow, it seemed as though we were missing some “spiritual technologies” needed to overcome intimidating barriers that effectively kept billions of people in darkness, such as:

Only Professionals Need Apply: the church’s predominant dependence on institutionally trained Christian leaders, to the exclusion of ordinary Christ followers

One-Dimensional Ministry: either evangelism or compassion, but rarely a strategic marriage of both

Cultural Suicide Required: Christian culture, when overlaid with Western culture, proves to be an obstacle course with a thousand unnecessary barriers

No Answers for the Impossible Places: highly restricted regions of the world where there have been few beachheads to celebrate, despite many generations of brave Christian pioneers

Empire Building: when ministry is about our empire, and not God’s kingdom

Christians Who Are Not Different: when faith does not change behavior

It is my great joy to tell you that God is allowing the twenty-first-century church to experience some things that look like the first-century church. In many places, barriers are beginning to be dismantled, as ordinary Christians, empowered by the Spirit of God, are discovering and obeying God’s Word, making disciples, and trusting that the missionary God is preparing the hearts of lost people everywhere. And these principles of disciple-making apply to all areas of sharing God’s Word, not just to Muslims. We have focused on Muslims in the applications of this book, but the principles are all drawn from Scripture and have application in all types of evangelism. Perhaps God is also preparing you to join with Him to achieve the impossible, right where you live!

APPENDIX 1

LIST OF STUDIES FOR NON-CHRISTIANS

SCRIPTURE PASSAGE

STORY

Genesis 1:1–25

The Creation Story: God Created the World

Genesis 2:4–24

The Creation Story: The Creation of Man

Genesis 3:1–13

The Fall: The First Sin and Judgment

Genesis 3:14–24

The Fall: Judgment of a Sinful World

Genesis 6:1–9:17

The Fall: The Flood

Genesis 12:1–8; 15:1–6

Redemption: God’s Promise to Abram

Genesis 22:1–19

Redemption: Abraham offers Isaac as a Sacrifice

Exodus 12:1–28

Redemption: The Promise of Passover

Exodus 20:1–21

Redemption: The Ten Commandments

Leviticus 4:1–35

Redemption: The Sacrificial System

Isaiah 53

Redemption: Isaiah Foreshadows the Coming Promise

Luke 1:26–38; 2:1–20

Redemption: The Birth of Jesus

Matthew 3; John 1:29–34

Redemption: Jesus Is Baptized

Matthew 4:1–11

Redemption: The Temptation of Christ

John 3:1–21

Redemption: Jesus and Nicodemus

John 4:1–26, 39–42

Redemption: Jesus and the Woman at the Well

Luke 5:17–26

Redemption: Jesus Forgives and Heals

Mark 4:35–41

Redemption: Jesus Calms the Storm

Mark 5:1–20

Redemption: Jesus Casts Out Evil Spirits

John 11:1–44

Redemption: Jesus Raises Lazarus from the Dead

Matthew 26:26–30

Redemption: The First Lord’s Supper

John 18:1–19:16

Redemption: Jesus Is Betrayed and Condemned

Luke 23:32–56

Redemption: Jesus Is Crucified

Luke 24:1–35

Redemption: Jesus Conquers Death

Luke 24:36–53

Redemption: Jesus Appears and Ascends

John 3:1–21

Redemption: We Have a Choice

APPENDIX 2

ABOUT CITYTEAM INTERNATIONAL

CityTeam’s mission is the heartbeat of Jesus’ words in the Great Commandment and the Great Commission:

In obedience to Christ, passionately transforming individuals, their families, and communities throughout the world. To glorify God:

by establishing self-replicating communities of believers who will serve people in need, proclaim the gospel, and make disciples in the cities and among the peoples of the world;

by mobilizing, training, and equipping local believers to meet needs, engage families with the Bible, and establish communities of baptized believers who, in radical obedience to the Word of God, are being transformed by Christ, are transforming their communities, and are going to other communities to do the same; and

by actively partnering with others to catalyze these Kingdom outcomes worldwide.

CityTeam started simply as the San Jose Rescue Mission, when God moved the heart of Lester Meyers, a recovering alcoholic, and his new bride, Pauline, to serve the needs of the homeless and poor. Since 1957, the organization now known as CityTeam has provided for the physical, emotional, and spiritual needs of millions of people in San Jose, Oakland, and San Francisco, California; Portland, Oregon; and Chester, Pennsylvania.

Through the years, God has transformed the lives of individuals, as well as their families and communities, who are suffering from poverty, homelessness, and addiction. Besides providing compassion ministries, God has led CityTeam to focus also on making obedient disciples of Jesus Christ. By God’s remarkable grace, a simple rescue mission that was willing to listen and obey God’s instructions is training, equipping, coaching, and mentoring thousands of leaders in hundreds of ministries, serving unreached peoples worldwide.

CityTeam is especially focused in the “10/40 window,” that part of the world where the majority of people are living and dying without a chance to respond to the good news of God’s love. A large majority of these families are the poorest of the world’s poor.

God has given CityTeam a heart for everyone, everywhere. Through investors, thousands of volunteers, and a small dedicated staff, God has blessed CityTeam to plant more than eighteen thousand churches around the world, with over 600,000 new believers. And those numbers are still growing. More than a third of those new believers are former Muslims who found the answers to their prayers in Jesus the Messiah.

GOD’S VISION FOR YOU

If God touched your heart through reading this book and you want to let God use you, then consider partnering with CityTeam. It is God, not us, who speaks to your heart and calls you to become His faithful and fruitful disciples. We are all called to pray, to listen to His Word, to obey Him, and to invest our lives strategically among those who are lost in sin without knowing the God who loves them.

Pray with us that God will speak to more and more people living in darkness through visions and dreams, and that they will be drawn to discover and obey God. Pray that the disciple-making teams will find the people of peace whom God is calling them to disciple. Pray also for the safety of these teams, as they minister in high-risk and sometimes hostile areas. Consider investing with CityTeam, so that you can be a part of seeing hundreds of thousands of new Christ followers becoming trained, equipped, coached, and mentored to disciple the millions of people who have never heard the gospel even once.

If God is calling you to be a part of His miraculous movement in your community, please visit our CityTeam Web site (www.CityTeam.org) to tell us your personal story, to review our resource materials, or to find a schedule of trainings around the world. You can also e-mail CityTeam at info@cityteam.org.

Our CityTeam staff and prayer partners want to pray for you. If you are planting a church or discipling a community, please visit our prayer Web site at www.cityteam.org.

Remember that God chooses to use ordinary people to do extraordinary things. May God also do in you that which is “exceedingly, abundantly beyond all you can ask or even imagine.” He loves you that much!

NOTES

1 In much of sub-Saharan Africa, the terms sheikh and imam are used somewhat interchangeably, depending on regional preferences. Generally speaking, a sheikh is a political and religious leader in a Muslim community, and an imam is the person who provides leadership of a mosque. A sheikh can be an imam, but an imam is not necessarily a sheikh. Both sheikhs and imams are typically recognized as being qualified teachers of the Qur’an.

2 The term sharia refers to a stricter implementation of the Islamic codes of law developed from the Qur’an and the examples and teachings of Mohammed, which govern personal, moral, and religious conduct.

3 We will define and discuss Discovery Bible Studies in chapter 6.

4 We will discuss the biblical principle of “people of peace” in chapter 5.

5 Animism is a belief system that sees everything as possessing a spirit, including inanimate objects. In the animistic worldview, much of life is spent trying to balance, manipulate, and appease the spirit world. Animism is widespread in indigenous populations, and it also is in the fabric of several world religions, even influencing some contemporary Western philosophies.

6 Read Father Glorified (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, forthcoming), the next book in this series, for the rest of Ali’s story.

7 Mishkat al-Masabih, Volume I, Chapter IV, Book I.

8 Sura 4:150–52.

9 Sura 3:52–57.

10 “Jihad” refers to a Muslim religious duty that can be translated by the words fight or struggle. It has three meanings: (1) an internal struggle for an individual to keep the Islamic faith, (2) a struggle to improve the Islamic community, or (3) a fight to defend Islam. Islamic fundamentalists are teaching that when Muslims die defending Islam, they are martyrs and thus guaranteed paradise for themselves and their families.

11 The Five Pillars of Islam are the five obligatory actions for all Muslims: shahada, professing that Allah is one and Mohammed is His messenger; salat, prayer (the five obligatory times of prayer every day); sawm, fasting (thirty days during Ramadan); zakat, almsgiving; hajj, pilgrimage to Mecca.

12 Hadith Bukhari, Vol. 4, Book 51, Number 16.

13 Hadith Bukhari, Vol. 5, Book 58, Number 266.

14 John 14:2–4, 28.

15 Paul Watson, “Guest Post—Small Groups That Have the DNA of a Gospel Planting Movement,” TouchPoint (blog), October 11, 2010, http://www.davidlwatson.org/2010/10/11/guest-post-small-groups-that-have-the-dna-of-a-gospel-planting-movement/.

16 Ibid.

17 Matthew 5:38–42.

18 Sura 3:45, 49; 4:171; 19:19; 37:171.

19 Sura 3:55.

20 Psalm 18:2, 17.

21 Sura 19:21.

22 See Father Glorified for the full story of Namir.

23 Henry Blackaby, Richard Blackaby, and Claude King, Experiencing God: Knowing and Doing the Will of God (Nashville: Lifeway, 2007), 16.

Table of Contents

About the Team and Author

Introduction

1. Unprecedented!

2. Jesus’ Counterintuitive Disciple-Making Strategy

3. Pray the Lord of the Harvest

4. Inside Islam Disillusionment and Discontentment

5. Engaging Lostness

6. Discovery Bible Studies and Obedience-Based Discipleship

7. Simple Churches, Dramatic Transformation, Rapid Replication

8. Dreams, Visions, and Miracles Among Muslims

9. “Of Whom the World Is Not Worthy” Learning from Heroes and Heroines of Faith

10. The Hardest People Yield the Greatest Results

11. Ordinary People Achieving the Impossible

12. Seven Paradigm Shifts

13. Getting Started Biblical Practices for Engaging Lostness

Appendix 1

Appendix 2

Notes