Why Muslims Are Becoming the Best Evangelists
Timothy C. Morgan ("Christianity Today," April 22, 2014)
After traveling 250,000 miles through Dar al-Islam ("House of Islam") as
Muslims call their world, career missiologist David Garrison came to a
startling conclusion:
Muslim background believers are leading Muslims to Christ in staggering
numbers, but not in the West. They are doing this primarily in Muslim-majority
nations almost completely under the radar—of everyone. In the new book, A
Wind in the House of Islam: How God is Drawing Muslims Around the World to
Faith in Jesus Christ, Garrison takes the reader on his journey through
what he describes as the nine rooms in the Muslim-majority world:
Indo-Malaysia, East Africa, North Africa, Eastern South Asia, Western South
Asia,
Persia, Turkestan, West Africa, and the Arab world. Muslims in each of those
regions have created indigenous, voluntary movements to Christ.
"What did God use to bring you to faith in Jesus Christ? Tell me your
story." This was the core question Garrison asked as he traveled and conducted
more than 1,000 face-to-face interviews. In his background research, he
documented 82 historic Muslim movements to Christ, consisting of either at
least 1,000 baptisms or 100 new church starts over a two-decade period. The
first sizable movement of Muslims toward Christianity did not occur until the
mid-19th century, nearly 1,300 years after Mohammad established Islam.
Garrison said 69 of these movements today are still in process:
• In Algeria, after 100,000 died in Muslim-on-Muslim violence, 10,000
Muslims turned their backs on Islam and were baptized as followers of Christ.
This movement has tripled since the late 1990s.
• At the time of the 1979 revolution in Iran, about 500 individual Muslims
were following Christ. Garrison projects that today there may be several
hundred thousand Christ-followers, mostly worshipping in Iranian house
churches.
• In an unnamed Arab nation, an Islamic book publisher Nasr came to Christ
through satellite broadcast evangelist Father Zakaria. Sensing a call to
evangelize, Nasr started a local ministry that in less than one year baptized
2,800 individuals.
In total, Garrison estimates that 2 to 7 million people from a Muslim
background worldwide now follow Christ. (This is a projection since a
comprehensive count is not possible.) Timothy C. Morgan, CT senior editor,
global
journalism, interviewed Garrison recently.
You've spent your professional life in missions. Why undertake 30 months of
grueling travel to remote parts of the Muslim world that you already
visited?
This really marks an unprecedented turning to Christ. I don't think it's
ever been captured in a global sweep as it has been here.
I've been involved in missions for 29 years. When my wife and I were
working with Libyan Arabs in North Africa, we learned a lot of ways not to
effectively win Muslims to Christ. But then we started seeing these movements.
The numbers began to grow over the years. We found ourselves living in India
for six years. I was director of Southern Baptist work in South Asia. We
were able to see many of these Muslims who had come to Christ, to know them
personally, and partner with them. We knew two men, one named Islam and the
other named Mohammed, doing mosque-to-mosque evangelism. They were
distributing Jesus films and New Testaments in the mosques. They saw a lot of
Muslims come to Christ.
My colleagues approached me and said, "We're hearing more and more
anecdotes of Muslim movements to Christ, and some of them we feel are
legitimate.
We need someone to go and find out."
They said, "We want Christians to see the potential that every Muslim has
to be a Christ follower and a brother or sister in Christ." That began the
process.
Your book is filled with insights about how Muslims view Jesus,
Christianity, and the church. But how did your encounters with Muslims change
you
personally?
I've traveled to 100 countries over the years. The thing that changed me,
as I look back on it, was finding that the living Christ has already been in
these places.
I was hearing from Muslim-background believers that they had met Jesus.
Sometimes we as Christians feel we take Jesus to people. What we forget
sometimes is that we're attesting to a living Christ who continues to break
into
people's lives, into their dreams, into their visions, and into their
prayers.
Jesus answers those prayers, and he meets with them, and it shakes them up.
From West Africa, North Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, Central Asia,
Indonesia, I met people whose lives had been shaken and rattled by their
encounter with Christ. They were not persuaded by logical doctrine or a
better civilization, but by that encounter with the living Son of God who
changed their life and world. They can't go back to life as usual.
That changed me. I had my own faith renewed. We serve a living God, a
living Christ, and a living Lord.
If the gospel has already taken root in these mostly Muslim nations, how
should we reshape our mission?
These things didn't happen by magic. Even Saul of Tarsus heard the
testimony of Stephen before he was struck down by a vision. People have
flickers
and glimmers of Christ—through a radio broadcast, Scripture distribution, or
overhearing some Christian.
They get haunted. They look into their Qur'an and they see references to
Jesus. In the Hadith, they hear stories about Jesus. Many people I
interviewed said, "I loved Jesus from the time I was a little child."
It didn't mean that they got the gospel. What it did mean is that they got
a predilection toward Christ. Something prepared their hearts. When they
did hear the gospel, they said, "Yes, that's for me."
I talked to an Iranian man—kind of a thug. He had been in the black market.
He was a hustler. But he said, "I was drawn to the cross." He said, "I had
a cross ring. I had a cross necklace." He had a t-shirt that said, "I did
this for you" with a big cross.
He said, "I had no clue what it meant, but I was drawn to the cross." A
friend came and started telling him about Jesus. His heart just melted and he
invited Christ into his life. He left that illicit business and eventually
became a refugee. Because of his faith, he was pushed out of the country.
Christ draws people to himself. The Holy Spirit will convict the world.
That's not the same thing as proclaiming the gospel to them. That is our role.
But it's nice to know that there's an advance card out there bringing
people to conviction. We're not alone.
Forget this idea that it's all up to us.
The truth is we are brave and courageous because we're going into the heart
of darkness. But isn't it nice to know that the light penetrated the
darkness first. When Jesus sent out the 72, he said, "I am sending you out
like
lambs among wolves. Do not take a purse or bag or sandals; and do not greet
anyone on the road. When you enter a house say, 'Peace to this house.' If
someone who promotes peace is there, your peace will rest on them; if not,
it will return to you." (Luke 10:3-6, NIV) Everywhere you go, you're going
to find persons who are waiting for you. That's true in the Muslim world as
well as other parts of the world.
How important are one-on-one relationships in Muslim outreach?
In East Africa, I talked with Elias, a wonderful cultural guide, who took
me into a number of Muslim movements. His own initiation into being a Muslim
evangelist came from Abdul-Ahad, a sheik from Mogadishu, Somalia. The
sheik had been involved in drug running, prostitution, and extortion. He ended
up as a refugee and met Elias.
One night, the sheik showed up at the home of Elias and said, "Yes or no—
Jesus' blood can wash away the sins of the world?"
Elias said, "Yes, it can."
The sheik replied, "That's a lie because he could never wash away all my
sins. I've done terrible things."
Elias said to him, "If you and I agree tonight, then God will forgive you."
He prayed with him and the sheik was saved at that moment. But before he
left, the sheik took Alias by the arm and said, "You know when you see
people like me with the beard and with the prayer-skull cap, you stay away
from
us because you're afraid of us."
He said, "The truth is we want you to be afraid of us." He said, "But when
you see people like me you need to know that we're empty and we're lost."
Elias told me, "That was my Macedonian call. From then on I never saw
Muslims the same way again."
But many American Christians have this fear response about personal
interaction with Muslims. What can be done?
I often see anger and hatred. We've had deacons and church leaders say we
ought to just bomb them to hell. The sad thing is this fear is grounded in
reality. You've got 14 centuries in which tens of millions, perhaps hundreds
of millions, of Christians have been gobbled up into the world of Islam.
It makes communism look like just a cheap parlor trick. Communism came and
went in a century.
When we Christians ignore social injustice, we invite Islam to come in.
When we imitate Islam (as we did in the Crusades) by making Christian jihad,
we strengthen Islam.
In many places, Islam was comatose until the European colonials came in.
When we came, they had something to preach against in the mosque. That
galvanized the people and expanded Islam in ways that wouldn't have been
possible
had we not given them a reason to wake up.
One reason Muslims are responding today is [their new situation]. They are
in independent nations. They don't have colonial powers occupying them. As
a result, they're turned in on themselves. They don't get along very well
with one another. Several of the big movements that we've seen across the
Muslim world coincide with Muslim-on-Muslim violence, horrible violence like
in Algeria, Bangladesh, or Indonesia.
In some cases, self-government in Muslim-majority nations has triggered
violence between Muslim factions.
When we Westerners fight, we don't do it as a holy army of God in the name
of Jesus. We just don't do that anymore. We've seen that folly. But as a
Muslim you can do that. Not only can you do that, but everybody wants to do
that. Muslims are fighting Muslims both in the name of Allah.
After a while, people say: "Can this really be Allah's will? Can this
really be his ideal for mankind? If this is Islam, I don't want any part of
it."
In Afghanistan, one man who had been an imam said, "We were killing
everybody in this village because they were a different branch of Islam than
us. I
took this little girl, one-and-a-half years old, in my arms. We had
already killed her parents. She held my finger, looked me in the eye, as I
stuck
a knife into her and killed her. That was the beginning of my conversion."
The violence and killing is just outrageous.
Put your researcher hat on for a minute. Experts believe 84,000 Muslims are
added to the world every 24 hours. How significant is it that there's this
relative handful of Muslims coming to Christ?
This is extremely significant because it's unprecedented historically. But
you've got to remember that with 1.6 billion Muslims in the world, this is
statistically insignificant. It will only be significant if you happen to
have caught the beginning of a change, a tectonic change in Islam around the
world. That we can't predict. Hopefully, if we don't do something to screw
it up, we might be able to see this wave expand.
How could these movements be nurtured?
I've got four desired outcomes for this book. The first is to capture this
moment in history. The second is to encourage these Muslims who are
considering Christ or who have come to faith in Christ, but think they're the
only
ones in the world. God has them on his front burner. He's reaching out to
them.
The third one is to do a similar thing for Christians: This is not a time
to hate, kill, and fear Muslims. This is a time to love, win, and reach
Muslims. The fourth desired outcome is that we would learn the ways that God
is
at work, and that means in some cases humbling ourselves and saying we
don't have all the answers.
In North America (what Muslims call Dar al-Harb, the House of War), where
Muslims are getting the most witness, we're seeing the fewest conversions.
But in the house of Islam, we're seeing movements breaking out in multiple
places. We need to learn how to ride the wave of what God is doing and not
find ourselves at cross purposes with it.
We've been hearing reports about Muslim dreams of Jesus for many years.
Should those be accepted at face value?
It's part of the reality of their world. Mohammad listened to dreams, and
he gave Muslims the impression that God could speak through them. So they do
listen to them, and they do talk about them.
An awful lot of them are having dreams of a living being glowing with
bright light and drawing persons to him or just exuding love or offering them
a
book to read. We can't conclude that they're getting the gospel. What we
can conclude is that they're under conviction, which the Holy Spirit said
they would be.
Kevin Greeson, author of The Camel: How Muslims Are Coming to Christ, heard
Muslims talking about this dream. He would open up to Matthew 17 and just
hand it to them and say, "Would you read these first two verses?"
He wouldn't read it to them. They would start reading. "After six days
Jesus took with him Peter, James and John the brother of James, and led them
up
a high mountain by themselves. There he was transfigured before them. His
face shone like the sun, and his clothes became as white as the light"
(Matt. 17:1-2 NIV).
Muslims read that and their eyes get big as saucers. "That's the guy.
That's the guy in my dreams. Who is this? And how do I know more about him?"
Here's the combination: their worldview, the conviction the Holy Spirit
promised they would be under, and a missionary knowing how to respond to it.
Not reading to them or preaching to them or trying to tell them.
Self-discovery is a big part of these movements. Hand them a New Testament.
Let them
read it for themselves.
A Muslim's direct encounter with the Bible seems crucial.
We've got to see how Muslims think. We need to orchestrate opportunities
for discovery and to be there as a sounding board, but not a hammer,
hammering the truth into them.
Muslims are like Baptists. I'm a Baptist. You can always tell a Baptist,
but you can't tell him much. It's that way with Muslims. They don't like to
be told they're wrong. They don't like to be told what the truth is, because
they think they know it. But when they discover it themselves, just like a
Baptist, they own it and they will die for it. When Muslims actually
discover the truth, when they find Jesus, it just grips them and holds them.
Do Muslims who become Christ-followers in general see Islam as
illegitimate?
There is a range. Some Muslims who come to Christ and seem on the surface
to be the most Islamic, hate Islam. They hate Mohammad. They would tell me:
"We will wipe this virus out from our people. It's just destroyed our
people."
And yet if you were an outsider, and you met them, you'd never even know
they were a Christian, because they continue to live in the culture. And some
of them are even imams and sheiks who stayed in their culture.
For many Muslims, Islam is central to the way their people function. It was
their mother. It was their family. It was their community. And they had no
beef with Islam. What they want to do is to follow Jesus and to love their
parents better and to draw them into faith. I found very few people who
wanted to take on Islam. They just felt like that was a secondary battle. The
real battle was to follow Jesus and to spread Jesus.
In my experience, very few local churches say, "We're doing outreach to
Muslims." Why do you think that is?
What we as the body of Christ have been trying to do for 13 centuries has
been remarkably unfruitful. Even people who have given their lives to
mission to Muslims they'll tell you this is a tough field.
My sincere desire is that the body of Christ in the West would learn from
the body of Christ in other parts of the world that has been effective. Even
some of our godliest people have not had results because they don't know
how to fish for Muslims, but they can learn.
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