The God who Answers when We Call

The skeptic won’t necessarily be convinced by answered prayer, but it’s a lot different for the person who prays to Jesus in the middle of anguish, and experiences His rescue. In their context, it is normal for Muslims to turn to ‘pirs,’ or ‘holy men’ in times of pressure. Shamans are thought to possess divine powers, and sometimes they are able to ‘accomplish’ some kind of short-term ‘good.’ More often than not, however, a person pays a fee and isn’t really helped. The Bible, however, tells us to come to God ‘without money and without price’ (Isaiah 55:1). One of our workers in South Asia sent in this report: 

An old friend of mine from our years in another part of South Asia rang me a couple of days ago. Her name is ‘Priscilla’, and she gave birth to a healthy baby boy a week ago. She knows this is a miracle made possible through Jesus. This is how she knows - this is her story: Married as a teenager to a heroin addict/pusher, had two sons, victim of violence, rescued, divorced, sons taken from her, destitute, then married to an old man whose children are older than she is. She lost her first baby with this new husband last year due to high blood pressure in the early months, but she survived. 

The doctor gave Priscilla a very strict warning to never get pregnant again or her life would be in terrible danger and the baby would die. Priscilla rang me about six months ago to tell me that nevertheless she was pregnant again and had high blood pressure once more. I prayed for her over the phone. When we talked a week later she said she felt better after our prayer. Well, she has stayed ‘better’ for the next six months and went to hospital about ten days ago. 

Priscilla was told that she would need an operation due to her blood pressure, but she refused because she was certain Jesus had answered our prayers. She went through normal labor and everything went well. She seems very happy with her new little son and rang me up to say my prayers did it. I said my prayers were nothing. It was Jesus who was the healer.  

She is doing well and I think the Lord is good to show His mercy to her and give her joy in her bleak life. I pray that the little boy will realize that Jesus gave Him life and come to know Jesus and tell his people his story. 

‘In the day of my trouble I will call to you,  for you will  answer  me’ (Psalm 86:7).

U.S. Director

Goal Zero

I was sitting with my friends on a local bus, waiting (as we do in Africa) for the driver to appear, when a truck stopped nearby. On the rear window was the bumper sticker, “Goal Zero.”

I like random questions, so I asked what situation would make achieving ‘zero’ a goal? There were six of us on the bus and answers started coming.

“Zero babies and mothers dying in childbirth, zero women and children being beaten; zero hunger; zero girls being circumcised; zero war; zero refugees; zero malnutrition; zero corruption; zero girls dropping out of school; zero child marriages; zero girls being sent to the Middle East and Asia and abused; zero malaria, zero TB, zero poverty, zero AIDS, zero rape, zero persecution...”

The answers stopped and there was a profound silence in the air. This is the world we live in. What started as a joke, challenged us all. In reality, none of these statistics are even close to zero. Can I even imagine a world where these zeros really exist? No. I lost my idealism a long time ago. It’s somewhere in another part of Africa.

After a prolonged silence, I contributed the shallow statement of “Zero mistakes in my language ability,” at which the others laughed politely and the pressure lifted. But I can’t let it go. Why shouldn’t we live in a world like this?

There’s a couple I know who have recently decided to follow Jesus. They were Muslim. Their family took away their children because of their change in faith. They say their main prayer is that their children also find Jesus. They say this new faith is worth this momentary trial and they know God is taking care of their children, even though they can’t be with them. I can’t stop thinking about this either. 

Last summer a group of people were praying and fasting for unreached people groups in the Horn of Africa. They were challenged to ask God to do something that only He could do. A woman prayed and said: “Wouldn’t it be amazing if there could be one million people praying for the Horn at the same time?”

Could you be one of these people committed to praying for the 100 million people in the Horn of Africa: Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, Djibouti?  The goal is not the numbers. The goal is more prayer. So pray and be one in a million.

By a worker on the Horn

Is this Guy Crazy or What?

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'