Last summer our international director handed me a book by Jerry Trousdale entitled, Miraculous Movements: How Hundreds of Thousands of Muslims are Falling in love with Jesus. I read the book, of course. After all, that’s what you do when you’re accountable to someone, right?
My first reaction: Is this guy crazy? I suppose maybe it’s true, but we’ve heard supposed "great success stories" before that had no basis in reality. This guy is probably some fringe semi-lunatic with a bunch of trumped up evangelism stories who is going to make a killing off the publication off this book. There is just no way to verify the stories he is telling. After all, Trousdale doesn’t document any of his stories. He doesn't identify any of the countries, he doesn't name any specific people, nothing. So are we supposed to believe this guy? I remained skeptical.
Until I saw it happening. Well, sort of.
South Asia isn’t Africa and many of the specific things that Trousdale mentions look different where I've been assisting (mainly through teaching Bible) in the training of church leaders for the past three weeks. Nevertheless, I have witnessed firsthand Muslim background believers in South Asia who can tell similar stories to the ones I read in Trousdale's book.
There are certainly some differences. As far as I know (which admittedly isn’t much), we can’t talk about Disciple Making Movements (DMMs) in South Asia yet. A DMM is the basic element of a Church Planting Movement (CPM). Before you have a church, you have to have disciples, which is where Jesus told us to start (see Matt. 28:18-20). In this area of the world, the old paradigms of the top-down, centralized-leadership church are still very dominant even in totally unreached areas. After all, they’ve seen Christians ‘doing church,’ at least many have, or they’ve heard about it, so it can be hard to have these smaller grass-roots DMMs to take root.
Even so, God is moving in South Asia and Muslims are learning to be disciples of Jesus.
The common approach seems to be to share what the Qur’an says about Jesus as a bridge to the Gospels. Once Muslims with an open heart start listening to the Gospels, things begin to change.
The men we’ve been with for the last three weeks have led hundreds of Muslims into the path of discipleship. That's right, these 17 men have led literally hundreds of Muslims to Christ! What they struggle with, at this point, is empowering and training leaders. Up until now, they’ve been leading all these new groups themselves. In fact, the oldest and most experienced of the group we've been working with during our stay here is pastoring 15 fellowships! And he works a full time job during the day! He desperately needs more leaders to meet the demand in his community, so he asked me one afternoon, after we had broken into workgroups: ‘how do we do train new leaders?’
All I could do was show him what we at ReachAcross had worked out in our last plenum session and go over those points in detail. Thankfully our international director was with us and he has actually done this in Africa, and could give some good input on leadership training during the two last days of our conference.
All seventeen of these men are on their way home now, back to their villages, back to their jobs (hopefully), and back to their little house groups.
They are returning to their jobs as church leaders, and our job supporting them has just begun. We’ve looked at Scripture with them, raised questions, encouraged, and given them a chance to network together. We need to pray earnestly for them, and we can, visit them again and maybe help facilitate as they gradually overcome the old top-down paradigms. We can only hope and pray that the work they have already begun, and the time we spent with them over the last three weeks will bear much fruit as these brave men bring the Gospel to their Muslim communities.
As for me, I’m still working out what this time will mean for me when I go home in a few days. There is a lot to think about. In the meantime, Trousdale’s book, that I was so skeptical of before, is a very important read and I would encourage anyone to read it with an open mind. Also helpful is Trousdale's conversation with Marv Newell of MissioNexus. You can read this conversation here.
And I don’t think Jerry Trousdale is crazy anymore, I just think I have a lot to learn. But much more than that, I’m thankful to have experienced these last three weeks, and to have had a little tiny part in building God’s Kingdom.
God is good, and patient with people like me.
'Gideon'
I need to know how to get hold of this book. I have to read as much as I can about this topic, because I have a student whose mom is muslim, and the situation surrounding this student is one that baffles me profoundly. Will somebody please tell me how to obtain this book?
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