Building Shape Discouraged Muslims From Entering

"In the early years one of our huts became the men’s gathering hut. When men came to
visit, we would drink tea there, talk about the news of the day, sometimes discuss religion
and even read the New Testament, all with no problem. Sometimes the village would hold
village meetings in the hut because it was neutral territory. After some years, the hut
seemed a bit small and so I decided to make it bigger. I basically had the hut stretched out
into a rectangle with rounded ends. But when the work was completed, none of the men
would go into the hut. They sat outside leaning against its wall, or under our nearby lean-
to. Finally I asked them what was the problem. They said, “Isn’t this a church?” I had to
calm their concerns and finally they agreed to go inside. But they still would tease each
other about who was the pastor and assistant pastor.
It was like they had a kind of allergy to anything that smacked obviously of Christian
religion."

Larry Vanderaa

Muslims Took Me In

"You need to know that this is deeply personal. I live among Muslims who have taken me in, fed me, given up their bed for me, cared for me when I wrecked my motorcycle, and have patiently listened to me massacre their language until I could communicate and be a friend."

(K. Hoch. Friend Working in a West African Country)

Your Neighbour Must Eat Before You: Said Mohamed At The Fall Of Mecca

" Meanwhile, a few weeks before I meet Faizan Peerzada in Lahore, the Muslim Salvation Organization posts the even-harder-line view of a Mufti Ebrahim Desai from www.ask-imam.com’s fatwa department who claims that “[ t] he use of the drum as a musical instrument is expressly forbidden. . . .” Apparently percussion is not permissible but an online fatwa department is.

Dancing right in his chair (Faizan Peerzada, Pakistan), and playing air duff and nay to illustrate his story, he recounts: “All these things were present at the fall of Mecca, when Prophet comes down from the camel.” From that moment in Islamic history, Faizan sketches a tolerant, humanist Islam. “The first thing the Prophet Muhammad says is, ‘The smaller jihad is over today. Now begins the biggest Jihad.’ To fight with yourself to be a good human being. Your neighbor on the right and left must eat before you, as simple as that.”

(Karima Bennoune. Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here : Untold Stories From The Fight Against Muslim Fundamentalism)

Christians Offer Charity Not Change.

"Much of the fundamentalist leadership is middle or even upper class. It is with a distinct agenda that their movements sometimes offer social services where governments fail to do so. They distribute headscarves along with health care and fatwas with the food. Like the Christian fundamentalists, they offer charity, not change in the economic status quo. They usually justify the protection of private property against measures like land reform.
According to an Algerian fundamentalist fatwa from the 1970s, prayer performed on nationalized land would not be accepted by God. In fact, Muslim fundamentalists often seek to defeat the movements most likely to be able to tackle social injustice— social democrats, the humanist Left, trade unions, human rights advocates, women’s rights defenders. These fundamentalists spend more time talking about who gets to the next life than about who gets what in this one. “I have never heard them pronounce on structural adjustment and what Islam would say about it. Not once,” Codou Bop fumes in Senegal."
(Karima Bennoune. Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here)

Islamic Radicals Punish Fellow Muslims. Those Suffering Need Us.....

"An Afghan woman having her nose cut off by the Taliban becomes a platform for saying that there is violence against women everywhere. I think when we talk about Muslim fundamentalism, we have to actually talk about it. It exists. It gravely menaces the human rights of people of Muslim heritage. It is just as deserving of critical discussion as U.S. foreign policy or the Israeli government or anti-Muslim bias. To quote one of the last articles published by left-wing Algerian educator Salah Chouaki before his assassination by the same forces he warned against, “The most dangerous and deadly illusion. . . is to underestimate fundamentalism, the mortal enemy of our people.”

The Algerian journalist Mohamed Sifaoui once told me that he often has to explain to European leftists and human rights advocates that “the Muslim fundamentalists are our extreme right.” All too often, because they are (sometimes mistakenly) assumed to be the enemies of the same Western governments criticized by the Western Left, parts of that Left confuse the Muslim fundamentalists with allies....

The people I met while writing this book deserve for us all to rethink our positions, to neither advocate violations of human rights and discrimination against Muslims in response to the actions of Muslim fundamentalists, as some on the right do, nor tolerate the fundamentalists in response, as some on the left do. Instead, these progressive opponents of Muslim fundamentalism on the ground need our principled support."

(Karima Bennoune. Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here)

Blissfully Ignorant Of Islamic Fundamentalism

"While the Western Right sometimes advocates international crimes and bigotry in response to Muslim fundamentalist violence, the Western (and global) Left often refuses to recognize the relity of that violence and the actual danger posed by its underlying ideology. Both of these positions have drastic consequences on the ground for the people......
I must admit, however, that I am more shocked by the failings of the Left and the human rights movement because I am in their camp. For example, my former employer Amnesty International, which has done so much good on many human rights issues, suspended and then forced out the head of its Gender Unit, Gita Sahgal, after she publicly criticized the organization for cozying up to a jihadi sympathizer and former Guantanamo detainee, a British Muslim named Moazzam Begg, and his pro-jihadi organization CagePrisoners. While Begg had clearly suffered at the hands of U.S. authorities, and deserved defense while detained without trial, he himself had a nasty track record of support for the Taliban, of running an extremist bookshop in the United Kingdom, and of numerous visits to jihadi training camps. Yet he was lauded as a human rights defender, brought in to judge a children’s poetry competition, depicted on Amnesty’s website reading his own poetry about “tyrants,” and repeatedly given a platform by the organization. When Gita Sahgal went public with her concerns, several of South Asia’s leading women’s rights defenders wrote an open letter to Amnesty that garnered two thousand signatures, including those of such prominent women’s rights defenders as the leading Pakistani human rights lawyer Hina Jilani, and pioneering Egyptian feminist writer Nawal El Sadaawi. In response, the acting secretary-general of Amnesty would write a letter claiming that advocacy of “jihad in self-defense” is not “antithetical to human rights," thereby actually endorsing a myth that has been used to justify fundamentalist atrocities from Iraq to Afghanistan to Algeria. Gita Sahgal was absolutely right to speak out, and she paid a high price for doing so." (Karima Bennoune. Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here)

Somethings Wrong With That Religion..... All Of Em!

"... diatribe from the Far Right in the West increasingly suggesting that all Muslims are members of one big sleeper cell and that there is something inherently wrong with this religion, and this religion only. Such views contravene basic tenets of humanism and decency. They also give a powerful weapon both to actual fundamentalists and those who apologize for them by suggesting that the extremists are just fighting an oppressive, imperialist West and defending Muslim interests. Making Muslims into victims, or making them feel like they are, plays into the hands of the fundamentalists who know just how to play that card."
(Karima Bennoune. Your Fatwa Does Not Apply here.)

How Muslim Christians Changed Me....

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. (David Garrison)

Link to Article

Jesus Is Moving Among Muslims

"The work God is doing today among Muslims is so historic and
unprecedented that I wonder if any of us can truly comprehend it. Never
before in the 1,400 years since the death of Muhammad have we seen so many Muslims coming to faith in Jesus as their Savior and Lord. And these are not just isolated individuals but whole families and communities. In our lead article for this issue, Dr. David Garrison reports on an unprecedented number of movements to Christ developing among Muslim communities all over the world.

As Garrison reports, in the first 1,300 years since Muhammad, there was only one voluntary movement to Christ among Muslims of 1,000 or more believers. In the last 20 years of the 20th Century, there were eight. In just the first 12 years of the 21st Century there have been 64. That is not a misprint. As of 2012 there were at least 64 documented movements to Christ taking place among Muslims, each with over 1,000 baptized believers and 100 worshiping fellowships. And the number of these movements is growing." (Mission Frontiers Journal. august 2013)

Simple Ways to Show Love to Muslims!

"Show sympathy in times of illness or bereavement. Perform little acts of service. Invite them to your house and accept invitations to theirs. Be scrupulously honest in all business dealings. Show that you are a Christian in the smallest details of life. If a Muslim shopkeeper has given you the wrong change, be sure to point this out to him or her. Be respectful and show honor where honor is due. Demonstrate that you love Muslims by trying to understand their point of view. Be a good listener."

("Sharing Our Faith With Muslims. Charles R. Marsh. Chapter 8 in "Encountering The World of Islam" Authenic books Atlanta 2005)

Tears Of Lady Christian Missionary Converted A Muslim!

"Si Mebarek was a young Qur’anic student who taught the boys in the mosque to recite their holy book. For many years he had attended Sunday school classes, but the teaching had left no impression on him. He hardened his heart to the gospel and mocked his teachers. When he was eighteen and very proud of his knowledge of Islam, he went to the home of a woman missionary and asked for a gospel in Arabic, saying he would very much like to read it again. The servant of God was thrilled. Here was an answer to her prayers: a young man seeking the Lord. Si Mebarek took the gospel in his hand, glanced at it, and then, with a look of defiance, tore it to shreds and threw it on the ground, trampling on the pieces. He quite expected to receive a sharp reproof for having treated the Word of God thus. Instead he saw tears come into the eyes of the servant of God. With a look of inexpressible sadness, but of genuine love, she turned away without a word, going into the house to pray for him.

Si Mebarek headed for home, but that expression of the patient love of Christ, of his meekness and gentleness, really reached his heart. Within an hour, he was back again, now a convicted sinner seeking salvation. That simple expression of the love of the One who wept over Jerusalem achieved what the years of teaching had failed to accomplish."

("Sharing Our Faith With Muslims. Charles R. Marsh. Chapter 8 in "Encountering The World of Islam" Authenic books Atlanta 2005)

Contextualizing Your T Shirt , Sandals, Short Skirts & Bare Arms in Muslim Contexts

"The most important part of contextualization is to present ourselves in such away that our lifestyles demonstrate, and even enhance, the message we want to communicate. If a single woman says she has been set free from sin but dresses and acts as would a prostitute in the target culture, no one will believe her message. If a man says he is a teacher but dresses in shorts, t-shirt, and sandals as if he were a useless young man on the streets, no one will believe he holds such an honored position."

("Contextualization and Community. Roland Muller. in Encounter the World OF Islam, Lesson 7 extra Readings online to text.)

Developing Community is the Most Crucial Muslim Contextualization Issue?

"Christian workers frequently want to make the transition to Christianity easier for converts from a Muslim background. They try to strip all the external, unnecessary trap from Christianity and flt it into the Muslim setting. They dress as Muslims, develop Jesus mosques, and place a Muslim façade on Christianity in an attempt to make it less offensive. But they seldom develop community.Theologically, the new convert is able to see and understand the gospel; he can exercise faith and experience gifts, and is able to enter into ministry. What he struggles with most is the idea of leaving his community..... I have discovered that in I have discovered that in most settings where large numbers of Muslims have turned to Christ, the common attraction is not contextualization but rather the presence of community."

("Contextualization and Community. Roland Muller. in Encounter the World OF Islam, Lesson 7 extra Readings online to text.)

Real Theological Issues of Muslim Contextualization: Avoiding Reductionism of the Issue!

"At the other end of the spectrum, missiologists sometimes advance theories as facts and simply assert that God is doing a new thing...... A prime case in point is the debate in recent years that has gone on about contextualization in Muslim contexts. Some have asserted or implied that watershed differences exist over cultural issues, when in fact those differences are primarily theological in nature.

The reality is that pretty much everyone agrees that a Muslim who becomes a follower of Christ shouldn’t have to cease being a good cultural Algerian, Nigerian, or Indonesian of whatever ethnicity into which he or she was born. The person does not have to be “extracted” from his or her roots or claim the title “Christian” in the cultural sense in which the term is often equated with perverted Western lifestyles. The individual can continue to honor his or her family and heritage, and do the things that members of his or her society do, up to a point. And that point is reached when doing something communicates falsehood about who Jesus is and what faith in him means.

Falsehood is hyped when the issue is treated as if there are only two choices—extraction or remaining a good Muslim, Hindu, or Buddhist, The fact is that the issue is a complex one. While there is an almost universal commitment to avoiding extraction and keeping new believers functioning in their home societies, there is a continuum of understanding as to where lines must be drawn in order to maintain faithfulness to Christ and the gospel. To paint the issue otherwise is to engage in a misleading reductionism, an effort that has the appearance of being intentionally confusing in order to gain acceptability for one’s views."

(A Second Look: The Audacity of Hype and Humility. Gary Corwin Editor EMQ. EMQ January 2009 Vol 45, No 1 pp 7)

Middle Eastern Culture Is Challange for Westerners To Understand

"It is not uncommon for Middle Easterners to talk as though they know something when they don’t have any idea. They do not do this to deceive, but out of a desire for a good relationship. More than once I have asked a Middle Eastern policeman for directions, only to discover that he does not have a clue! I have learned to observe closely the non-verbal communication (the confused pause before the confident statement) through which the Middle Easterner communicates that he or she does not know.

Middle Easterners will rarely admit verbally that they are wrong. Preserving honor—both one’s own and that of significant others—is very important in the Middle East, and Middle Easterners will often communicate acknowledgment of wrongdoing through a kind act rather than an apology..... pg 18

Middle Eastern society is overwhelmingly tribal and there is a great concern to look after one’s own and trust only one’s own. Consequently, in general one could expect that Middle Easterners who join Western agencies will see no obligation to seek tenders or shop around for the best deal. They will probably go to someone they know—preferably a member of their extended family—even if the family member asks two to three times the price and/or is incompetent.... pg19

(Westerner and Middle Easterners Serving Together: Potential Sources of Misunderstanding. Perry W. H. Shaw. EMQ January 2010 Vol 46, No 1, pp 18-19)

No Reserves, No Retreats, No Regrets - William Borden

William Whiting Borden - missionary to the Muslims of China, but died of spinal meningitis in Egypt during his training there at the age of 25. Samuel Zwemer conducted his funeral.

"In 1904 William Borden graduated from a Chicago high school. As heir to the Borden family fortune, he was already wealthy. For his high school graduation present, his parents gave 16-year-old Borden a trip around the world. As the young man traveled through Asia, the Middle East, and Europe, he felt a growing burden for the world's hurting people. Finally, Bill Borden wrote home about his "desire to be a missionary."

One friend expressed disbelief that Bill was "throwing himself away as a missionary."In response, Borden wrote two words in the back of his Bible: "No reserves."

Yale University in 1905 One of them wrote: "He came to college far ahead, spiritually, of any of us. He had already given his heart in full surrender to Christ and had really done it. We who were his classmates learned to lean on him and find in him a strength that was solid as a rock, just because of this settled purpose and consecration.

During his college years, Bill Borden made an entry in his personal journal that defined what his classmates were seeing in him. That entry said simply: "Say 'no' to self and 'yes' to Jesus every time."

Borden's first disappointment at Yale came when the university president spoke in a convocation about the students' need of "having a fixed purpose." After that speech, Borden wrote: "He neglected to say what our purpose should be, and where we should get the ability to persevere and the strength to resist temptations."4 Surveying the Yale faculty and much of the student body, Borden lamented what he saw as the end result of an empty, humanistic philosophy: moral weakness and sin-ruined lives.

During his first semester at Yale, Borden started A scripture & Prayer meeting with himself and one other, it grew to three. By the end of his first year, 150 freshman were meeting weekly for Bible study and prayer. By the time Bill Borden was a senior, one thousand of Yale's 1,300 students were meeting in such groups. Borden's outreach ministry was not confined to the Yale campus. He cared about widows and orphans and the disabled. He rescued drunks from the streets of New Haven.

Borden's missionary call narrowed to the Muslim Kansu people in China. Once he fixed his eyes on that goal, Borden never wavered.

Upon graduation from Yale, Borden turned down some high-paying job offers. In his Bible, he wrote two more words: "No retreats."

William Borden went on to do graduate work at Princeton Seminary in New Jersey. When he finished his studies at Princeton, he sailed for China. Because he was hoping to work with Muslims, he stopped first in Egypt to study Arabic. While there, he contracted spinal meningitis. Within a month, 25-year-old William Borden was dead.

Was Borden's untimely death a waste? Not in God's perspective. Prior to his death, Borden had written two more words in his Bible. Underneath the words "No reserves" and "No retreats," he had written: "No regrets."

Link: http://home.snu.edu/~HCULBERT/regret.htm

How Missionaries Dress is a Critical Choice!

I have been there as a former minister. You get to the mission field and are so delighted to be free from wear a suit and tie. However, there are often the equivalents in new cultures. More than that, there categories of deficiency we need to learn in the host culture. Like it or not we must adapt. Here is a great illustration

"I know a hard-working missionary who had some success in winning young college men to Christ in a small Muslim city. He is well aware of the need to apply biblical insight and sound theology to his goal of developing local leadership for the church he is planting. However, he seems completely unaware of the strange spectacle he makes of himself as he bicycles around this same town in a helmet and bright-colored spandex bike-wear. Furthermore, the sight of his mountain bike and culturally inappropriate clothing is just one facet of his lifestyle that screams of contemporary Western culture. Despite several years on the field, he seems completely unaware that his behavior is providing his Muslim neighbors with irrefutable evidence that the gospel and “offensive Western culture’ are one and the same. The real problem is not his choice of attire, but that he is unintentionally confirming the warning repeated in mosques across Central Asia that Christianity represents a horrible clash of cultures and must be avoided at all costs."
("Decoupling Missionary Advance From Western Culture",Gene Daniels, EMQ OCT 2009, pg422)

"Western Christianity? Nothing Western About Christ Anymore!

"It is heartening to see the Majority World missions enthusiastically embracing the Great Commission. Korean churches were among the first to pioneer among the peoples along the old Silk road (They wish to follow it back reaching all unreached peoples and back into Europe). Churches in China have long pursued a vision of doing their part in completing the task if world evangelization in accord with the `Back to Jerusalem' movement, focused on the remaining unreached people groups in Asia and the Middle East. Nigerian mission movements have pledged to meet the Chinese in Jerusalem as they evangelize across Islamic North Africa and the Middle East. Latin Americans are major players in Evangelizing the peoples of North Africa."

(“New Pioneers Leading the Way”, Yvonne Wood Honeycutt. Perspectives On the World Christian Movement. Editors Ralph D. Winter & Stephen Hawthorne. William Carey Library 2009, pg 281)

Supporting Nationals & The "Unspoken" Issues

"Many mission societies still hire national workers to evangelize the unreached. These men know their culture, are expert in the local language, can survive on a minimal salary, and are extremely mobile. But the credibility gap that exists between their lives and message is often severe. The non-Christian tends to regard such “agents” merely as paid employees of the foreigner. They have no more status than a medicine salesman. Preaching is looked upon as a profession, not a passion for which no sacrifice is too great. It is all too easy for the Muslim to sneer at and ridicule such paid evangelists."

(Muslim Evangelism, Phil Parshall Gabriel Publishing, 2003, pp199)

I will simply add that this is a reality in Africa where we pioneered new churches and a new grassroots leadership training program. There is this authoritarian "power pastor" mentality deeply rooted on the continent of Africa that I despise as very non-biblical. Character and integrity is questionable in many leadership training candidates.

I have often been criticized deeply by other missionaries for sharing this. They begin to questioned the "True conversion" of the men we worked with, or the methods we use. But they simply had their head in the sky. We began training 68 various men over the years, and came down to a handful to lead the 15 churches we planted. Even many of them still have issues. I will spare you. This is not the exception, this is the norm in all the churches in the country of all stripes. We simply knew the truth for our training program not at an institute, but decentralized into the bush near the people and villages. We hung in hammocks and ate with these men and we were among their people often. We knew the truth and sought to work with them with the truth of the situation. One missionary who was critical of this "situation" was simply unaware of the life of the few men he worked with. How do I know you ask? Members of his churches would come and speak to me about the conduct of their leaders because they were discouraged by it. I never bothered to share this with this fellow missionary. He simply refused to see.

Having explained the reality, this is not to suggest that there are not many godly men doing a great job. I know many. However as Leonard Sweet commented about the west;

"It is less that Western Christianity needs a course correction than a character correction." (So Beautiful, David C cook, 2009 pp38)

The same is true on the mission field where I served also in Pioneer work, not 2nd or 3rd generation works.
Every trained leader in our churches are self-supported farmers, carpenters etc.

God as Father Is Not One of 101 Islamic Names for God

"The Muslim faithful have 101 names for God. They are missing only one: Father! This is our treasure."

Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, 2003 installation address in Rome. (www.opusdei.us/art.php?p=6908)