The Uyghur people of Western China number over 11 million, with several thousand more scattered through some other countries. Uyghurs are almost 100% Muslim, and almost entirely ‘untouched with the Gospel’ (Operation World): ‘The highly charged political and religious atmosphere, the removal of expatriate Christian workers from most of the region, and the general lack of vision by Han Chinese to evangelize these peoples are all contributing factors’ to this dire situation in Western China.
What makes this situation even more tragic is that there was once a thriving church among the Uyghur people (13th century).
Some years ago, a young Uyghur named ‘A’ was contemplating what he had learned from his study of the Qur’an: that Isa (Jesus) had never sinned. ‘Why,’ he thought, ‘do they say that Muhammad is greater, if Muhammad sinned, but Jesus did not?’ No one, not even his grandfather, nor his scholarly teachers, could answer that question for him, but many years later a foreign Christian at his university did. ‘A’ eventually came to Christ, studied in Bejing and in Turkey, and became an effective preacher of the Gospel to Muslims in Europe. God can reach them, but He uses human agents to do so!
‘A’ was a student in our Bible school in Germany back in the 90s. He as such an effective evangelist
among Turks that the mission that had sent him to our Bible school asked him to stop evangelizing in our city, because it was getting back to Ankara and making trouble for their work there!
Pray that the Uyghur people will be open to the truth of the Scriptures, and that they will have access to them, and read and study them! You can read up on the Uyghur people at the website of one of our partner missions, SIM: http://www.sim.org/index.php/content/uyghurs
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