 
## What they said about previous books

Glenn Myers' style of writing illuminates and captivates those who want to discover the truth about specific areas of the world. This is compulsory reading for busy Christians wanting to understand what God is doing in different parts of our planet and different communities of people.

Stanley Davies, _Former Executive Director, Evangelical Missionary Alliance (now Global Connections)_

Glenn uses a vivid palette of word pictures to give one of the best and most readable presentations of the spiritual need of the world I have read for a long time.

Patrick Johnstone, _author._

This is just what our churches need \- well-researched, well-presented and well-chosen topics that present the strategic challenges to Christian mission that we cannot ignore ... Every Christian should be using this resource to inform their prayers, sharpen up their thinking, and provoke practical action.

Jonathan Lamb, _Langham Partnership_

A wonderfully readable and sympathetic introduction to a part of the world that is always likely to be in the news and should be of special concern to Christians.

Colin Chapman, _Islam scholar and author_

Understanding and coming to grips with the complicated Arab/Muslim situation may well help us to understand what is happening to OUR part of the world: economically, socially and above all spiritually... This priceless little book can help us. Read it.

Brother Andrew, _Open Doors._

...lively, readable and vivid. It is an ideal first introduction to the subject for Western Christians, giving an overview of the region from the beginning of the Christian era until the present. The focus is on Islam, Christianity and the wide diversity of peoples in the region. Myers takes an upbeat line, looking at exciting contemporary development in Christian mission arising from the roots of the ancient churches of the region.

Patrick Sookhdeo, _Servants Fellowship International._

An excellent introduction to the spiritual and physical needs of the peoples living in one of the most neglected areas of the world... stimulates and informs prayer for these peoples, and, I trust, action too, while there is still open access to them.

John Bendor-Samuel, _Wycliffe Bible Translators_.

Glenn Myers takes us to worlds most of us will never be able to visit in person and opens them up in vivid, up-to-date, easily understood snapshots. The analysis is simple but not simplistic, broad but not shallow. These highly readable briefings will help Christians not only to gain a balanced understanding and greater sensitivity of other people's worlds, but also to shed some of their own prejudices and stereotypes in the process. Such learning is the first step in intelligent prayer and responsible mission.

Dr Chris Wright, _Langham Partnership_

Thoroughly researched and well written... [it] gets to the heart of the key issues facing the church in the region.

Sam Yeghnazar, _Elam Ministries_

The Church in the Muslim World

Glenn Myers

Published by Fizz Books at Smashwords

Copyright 2011 Glenn Myers

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Paradise - a divine comedy

Smashwords Edition, Licence Notes

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## Author's note

This book is a series of popular-level glimpses into the Muslim world and the context and challenges that face the Christian Church in each place.

Most of the material originally appeared in my _Briefings_ series of books, published by Authentic Media between 1998 and 2006. I've taken the opportunity to update and re-write that material. Full footnotes for the original text appear in the original _Briefings_.

# Chapter 1: The Arab World

If you're from the Arab World, Christianity is in your blood.

It's hard to believe, but seventeen centuries ago, multitudes of Christians lived among the peoples of North Africa and the Middle East. If you had travelled around the southern Mediterranean in, say, the fourth century AD, you would have been walking through one of the great heartlands of Christianity.

By that time the Church in North Africa and the Middle East was already:

_Ancient_ : the book of Acts tells us that 'Libyans' and 'Arabs' were among those who responded to the first Christian preaching on the day of Pentecost.

_Influential_ : Carthage in Tunisia and Alexandria in Egypt were (along with Rome) the leading cities of the Christian world. They were home to the most influential writers and theologians after the apostles themselves: Clement, Tertullian, Origen, Augustine.

_Popular_ : As early as the third century AD, Tertullian, writing in defence of Christianity, could declare, 'We are a great multitude, almost a majority in each city.'

_Widespread_ : The gospel travelled deeper into North Africa and the Middle East than ever Roman rule did. Relics of church buildings, for example, have been found in North African villages too remote for Roman records

The Christian faith progressed in the Gulf, into Iraq, and down the Nile far into what are now Sudan and Ethiopia.

_Brave_ : It was a church that had produced many martyrs – for example, a young mum named Perpetua, gored by wild animals in the persecution under Emperor Severus in 203; the bishop Cyprian, beheaded in 258. (When Cyprian was sentenced to death – to give us some idea of the spirit of that early North African Church – the Christians in the crowd shouted, 'Let us go and be beheaded with him!' and had to be restrained by troops.)

***

Yet it fell from all this.

Many of the problems were self-inflicted. The North African Church, which collapsed most completely, was plagued with division. (Not for nothing has the North African Church been called 'The home of uncompromising Christianity.')

Then came the Vandals. Burning, looting, pillaging, this Germanic tribe ravaged North Africa in the early years of the fifth century. Theoretically a Christian people, Vandals subscribed to a heresy called Arianism and brutally attacked the existing Church. Some leaders were exiled or enslaved, others tortured and killed. It was a decapitation of the Church far more effective than anything attempted by the Romans.

A century later, the Byzantines, the successors to the Romans, regained North Africa and imposed on it their alien, Greek-speaking Eastern Christianity. They created some wonderful Christian North African architecture, but, evidently, not much else. By the seventh century, Christendom in North Africa was an unpleasant thing to behold: broken, dispirited, heresy-prone, at war with itself.

In the Middle East, churches survived better – partly because Christian liturgy and literature were translated into local languages (this never happened in North Africa or the Gulf), and partly because churches were spared destruction at the hands of the Vandals.

***

During the middle of the seventh century the Muslim armies famously burst from Arabia. Within a hundred years of the Prophet's death, barely pausing for a few brotherly spats, Arabs had swept all over the Middle East and Africa, to the heart of Asia (one tradition says even to China), across and deep into France. That they even turned back there was probably due to disinterest, rather than military defeat.

It was a dazzling series of military conquests, greatly helped by the divisions in the Christian world at the time. Then the Arabs followed military victory by constructing a great new civilization.

They unified into a single empire, with a single currency, an area from Central Asia to Western Europe: the first time this had ever been done. Trade between East and West flourished. Prosperity grew and with it, fine cities. Cordoba, Fez, Tunis, Cairo, Damascus, Baghdad became the great cities of the western half of the world. Innovation and new products flowed west: Indian numerals (we call them 'arabic'), cotton, rice, sugar-cane and citrus fruits. Our English names for fine fabrics date from the Muslim empire: muslin, damask, gauze, mohair, taffeta.

The Muslim empire took the best of Greek science and philosophy (getting it translated into Arabic first by Syrian Christians), and then built on it to become the leading scientific and technological power of the day: disciplines like medicine, pharmacology, astronomy and astrology thrived in Muslim hands. Paper-making arrived from China. Great buildings were erected: perhaps most audaciously of all, the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, the world's most uncompromising architectural statement.

***

Islam was at the heart of the new order. And, though it did not happen immediately, individuals, family groups and whole tribes began converting to the faith.

There are plenty of good reasons as to why this happened.

Early Islam was brash, confident and used to winning. It had good reason to be: so far (despite reverses in battle sometimes) it had always eventually come out on top.

It was open and attractive (or, at least, its open and attractive elements were ascendant). Here's al-Kindi (c. 801-66), father of Islamic philosophy:

We should not be ashamed to acknowledge truth from whatever source it comes to us, even if it is brought to us by former generations and foreign peoples. For him who seeks the truth there is nothing of higher value than truth itself.

Other Muslim writers felt free enough to argue even that reason should be given a higher place than revelation.

It was tolerant: Christians and Jews worked for the Muslims and for most part lived together well.

It was simple: as Kenneth Cragg has pointed out, here was a faith that could be expressed in fifteen syllables – much to be preferred to the dense fog that was Christian theology at the time. Even the apparatus of the new religion was simple and minimal: compare the spartan elegance of the mosque with the busy, glittering, smoke-filled, gold-inlaid Byzantine basilicas.

It was Arab and Middle Eastern, not Greek. It boasted a holy book in Arabic. It put the Arabs rather than the Jews at the centre of the theological universe. It answered Semitic problems of money, marriage, dowry, inheritance, not Greek concerns like the Nature of Being.

To many of the tribes accepting Islam, it seemed only to require a few outward changes. They could retain their animist beliefs for the really important issues in life: whom to marry, how to fend off curses, how to make your fields fertile.

(And not to be forgotten) It was a way of paying less tax, avoiding discrimination, and improving your promotion prospects.

Still it was a slow progress. By the end of the eighth century – after a hundred years of Muslim rule – fewer than 10% of people in places like Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Tunisia were Muslim. Two hundred years after that, it is not certain that Muslims were in the majority anywhere in the world outside Arabia itself.

It was slow: but the trend was clear.

***

As the centuries passed, dynasties rose and fell; Arabs lost their empire to Turkic speakers; but the Islamic colouring seeped ever deeper into the fabric of the Middle East and North Africa.

Tolerance for Christians also declined (partly in response to the Crusades and to what Christians began to do to Muslims and Jews in Spain). In North Africa, for example, in 1159 the Muslim reformer Abd el-Moumen gave what remained of the Church in Carthage the choice of conversion or death.

Much more commonly, Christians and Jews were discriminated against because of their faith. As well as paying the poll tax, they couldn't marry Muslim women; couldn't wear certain colours; weren't allowed to live in ostentatious buildings; couldn't extend their churches or synagogues. Their word in court had less weight than that of a Muslim; and they could be excluded from political power.

Islam grew stronger and stronger. Between the tenth and thirteenth centuries, for example, the Muslim empire faced enormous challenges: civil strife between the Sunni and Shi'a parts of Islam; campaigns by the western Crusaders; attacks by Mongols from the East. Sunni Muslims won all three: taming the Shi'as, crushing the Crusaders, converting and assimilating the Mongols.

By the fifteenth century, the ascendancy of Islam in North was complete. Further East, the ancient churches turned inward, grew isolated from each other, lost converts to Islam, but – despite all – endured.

It was possible as a Muslim in the sixteenth century to look across the world with quiet satisfaction. True, there had been setbacks. Spain and Sicily, for example, had been reconquered by western Christian kingdoms. The Islamic empire was split into an Arabic-speaking Sunni bit and a Shi'a bit centred on Iran (both parts were ruled by Turks). In neither part were the empires, nor their many squabbling rulers, as authentically Islamic as a purist might have liked.

To the south and east were pagans who may well turn to Islam in time. To the north and west, the Christians were a greater threat, but, again, the Islamic empire had recently captured Constantinople, Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Albania, and was working on further European expansion. Not for were contemporary European observers calling them 'the present terror of the world.'

For almost its first thousand years, on the whole, the fortunes of Islam had followed the theological script. Islam, The Straight Path, was conquering all.

Unfortunately (for them), it didn't stay that way.

## History unravelled

Somewhere in the seventeenth century the history of the Islamic lands started to come unstitched. For a thousand years the Islamic worldview had been woven together with all that was best in religion, science, and civilization. Now, as if some Old Testament prophet had spoken against it, the political and economic supremacy of the Islamic lands was challenged and overcome.

The successful challenger wasn't Christianity. It was that evolving collection of cultural elements that the peoples of Europe were shortly to dump onto the world. Perhaps we should call it 'modernity.' Europe's increasing strength in population, capital, innovation, statecraft, and economic and military power was not matched by the peoples of North Africa or the Middle East.

Here are some of the milestones:

In 1683 the Ottoman Turks, heirs to the Islamic Empire, and global superpower of the day, began a siege of Vienna that seemed to threaten the security of all Europe. Later the same year they were decisively beaten back. A peace treaty in 1699 settled the matter. The world had changed. A contemporary (Ottoman) writer recognized the hugeness of what had happened:

This was a calamitous defeat, of such magnitude that there has never been its like since the first appearance of the Ottoman state.

From that date until 1923 (when it disappeared altogether) the Ottoman Empire shrivelled in size and influence.

Sometime during the seventeenth century, it became cheaper to carry spices from the Far East to Europe by sea rather than overland through Cairo; the lucrative trade slipped from Arab to European hands.

In 1774, the Ottomans, defeated by Catherine the Great, handed over control of the Crimean Tartars to Russia, thus losing another piece of empire to European power.

Trade with the Ottomans made up 50% of all French trade in the late sixteenth century; it fell to only 5% by the eighteenth; it was 10% of all British trade in the mid-seventeenth century, 1% a hundred years later. The loss of market share reflected a technological and economic stagnation.

Europeans had the good fortune to be living amidst supplies of wood, water, and coal which they harnessed for their new industries to great advantage; North Africa and the Middle East had none of these.

European populations rose fast (for example, Britain's went from 16m to 27m in the 50 years to 1850); the population in the Middle East and North Africa remained much the same.

In 1830, the French landed on the North African coast and occupied Algiers. At first they sought only to provide a stable environment for their merchants. But soon they were running the country, and shortly after that, populating it with French settlers. A millennium earlier it had been the Arabs who were conquering and settling.

By 1850, Egypt was selling all its raw cotton to Britain for processing; Bedouin tribesman were buying shirts made in Lancashire. Valuable fabrics were now being shipped from Europe to the Arab World, not the other way. Between 1854 and 1879 the Ottomans borrowed large amounts from the Europeans and on unfavourable terms. By 1875 they could no longer keep up with payments. In 1881 foreign creditors were running large parts of the Ottoman government.

At the end of the First World War the loss was terminal. The victorious European powers, armed with maps and pencils, redrew the boundaries of the Arab World. A line was sketched across the British-mandated territory of Palestine to create Jordan. Part of Saudi Arabia was stuck onto the edge of Iraq. To make up the loss, a piece of Kuwait was cut out and sellotaped onto Saudi Arabia. The French helped themselves to Lebanon and Syria. For a people who had been 'the present terror of the world' only three centuries earlier, this was a humiliating moment.

Worse was to follow.

***

The following years promised much by way of fresh starts for the Arab World, but delivered little.

Nationalism brought independence, but resulted in a dreary succession of one-party states. The discovery of oil brought fabulous riches to some, boosted the spread of Islam around the globe, but in the end led to a greater economic dependence on the rich countries.

The stubborn fact of Israel highlights all this Arab failure like graffiti on a new state monument. A UN resolution opened the way to the creation of a Jewish state in 1948. Its presence pushed Arabs from their homes with what felt like another flourish of the colonial pencil. In the face of Arab hostility, Israel went on expanding its territory through a series of wars. The Six-Day War in 1967 saw a combined Arab attacking force humiliated dreadfully as Israel grabbed Sinai, Jerusalem, the Palestinian part of Jordan and the Golan Heights from various Arab countries.

Historian Albert Hourani says of this Arab disaster:

_The defeat of 1967 was widely regarded as being not only a military setback but a kind of moral judgement. If the Arabs had been defeated so quickly, completely and publicly, might it not be a sign that there was something rotten in their societies and in the moral system which they expressed?_ ( _A History of the Arab Peoples_ , 1991, p 422)

An Arab psychologist, R T Abed, writing in _Middle East International_ (420, p 20-21) concluded:

_The 20th century will be remembered in the collective Arab memory as a period of failure and humiliation. High hopes were raised of a great Arab revival at the turn of the century following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Hopes of a great cultural and political awakening were raised again following the discovery and exploitation of oil. But as the century ends, the Arabs find themselves as weak and dependent on outside powers as when it began, if not more so_.

It continues today. The ongoing story of Western and Israeli domination, and perceived Arab subjection, is the continuing agony of the Arabs, and one of the great fault-lines in the world.

***

Beyond the economic and political stories, modernity as a collection of ideas, or a set of symbols, is now the greatest challenge to the cultures of the Middle East and North Africa – quite as compelling as Islamization itself was to pre-Islamic cultures 1300 years ago.

This modernizing force puts a strain on Islam and the Arab World.

Ordinary Arab-world people believe their families to be more decent, more together and more honourable than their counterparts in the West. They are more God-fearing, their daughters more modest, their communities more cohesive. With good reason, ordinary Arabs are proud of their culture, its generosity, its hospitality, its honour. Yet the Western world has greater economic clout, snazzier technology, better military toys, and the decisive influence on the world stage.

It isn't right. Arabs have almost have ended up with _dhimmi_ (minority) status in their own lands – tolerated by the West but culturally, economically and politically brushed aside. This – understandably – seems like a scandal, a world upside-down.

Think of the words that are almost sacred in Arab cultures but scorned in the West:

Chastity

Decency

Shame

Respect for elders

Honour for parents

Obedience to the family

Tradition

The painful dilemma facing the Arab World is how to stay true to these values while being buffeted in the West's dehumanizing gale.

***

Historically, the Arab World has also stood out as having what Arab economists in 2005 identified as three key deficits. It was politically the least-free part of the world (this is the 'freedom deficit'). Only sub-Saharan Africa provided less opportunity for the female half of the population (the 'women's empowerment deficit'). Then there was the 'human capabilities/knowledge deficit': the Arab World had 5% of the world population, but only 0.5% of the world's internet users, it produced only a few dozen films a year, it had few novelists and translated fewer than 350 books a year into Arabic.

Similar figures confirmed the wretched state of Arab-inspired science and technology, research, and entrepreneurship. The Arab World is 'more rich than developed', with its wealth arising from the sands, not from the creativity or industriousness of its people.

***

In 2011, more than 40% of the people of the Arab world lived outside of urban areas: typically they worked as farmers, herders or craftsmen.

They share the lot of the poor around the world. Often they lack access to education, health care, decent housing, and literacy. If they survive childhood, they marry young, produce large families, and die before their time. People who happen to be female, young, or mentally or physically handicapped, suffer particularly badly.

For even a greater challenge for the Christian Church, look at the masses of young men idling in coffee shops, walking around the streets, reading newspapers, looking for work in the great cities.

Arab World populations have far outstripped the capacity of cities to accommodate them properly. One urban wage and apartment, for example, are sometimes shared between a dozen or more family members. The young urban masses of the Arab World feel the combined heat of all the smouldering troubles of the region: unemployment, population growth, poverty, the challenges and provocations of the alien Western world. Life is tough and unfair. These are people who have studied hard – done their best with what they had – and yet have nothing to show for it. Many despair of ever earning enough money to rent an apartment of their own or get married.

***

Arab responses to this over the last generation have reflected a kind of passiveness and hopelessness. Some people have emigrated physically; some 'emigrate' emotionally, adopting what they imagine to be the lifestyle of the West without actually leaving the Arab World.

Some escape into all the kinds of escapisms we're familiar with in the West, shopping, TV, drugs, mysticism.

A few become Christians.

A larger number espouse radical Islam, with its apocalyptic call for a revolution that restores Islam to its eighth-century factory-settings, and that takes all of society with it.

And of course, most people simply muddle through all this moral incoherence as best as they can.

***

Two active and collective responses have also emerged. One is the awakening of Islam as a moral and political force across many Arab lands.

The second is the 'Arab Spring' that spread through the Arab World from the early months of 2011, surprising and then toppling dictators. Each of these are collective (rather than individual) responses to the state of the Arab World. Each inspires energy and hope. They herald a new day and less stability, for good and ill. Islam and Democracy are two big ideas shaking down and taking shape in the Arab World.

***

It's possible to map three broad regions within the Arab World: the Gulf (Saudi Arabia and the surrounding countries), the Fertile Crescent (the countries from Syria and Iraq in the north to Egypt and Sudan in the south) and North Africa (everything west of Egypt). The three regions contrast sharply.

The Gulf is rich, solidly Muslim, and rather hostile to indigenous Christian witness and presence. But many expatriates, some of them Christians, also dwell here.

The Fertile Crescent is home to almost all the Arab World's Arabic-speaking Christian community. Mostly, these are the Orthodox and Catholic churches whose roots go all the way back to Day of Pentecost, though Protestant communities have also emerged. The region has long traditions of peaceful coexistence between Muslims, Christians and Jews. Recent decades of radicalism – Islamic, Jewish and Western – have brought severe strains. All these churches are declining as Christians emigrate. In 2010, Christians were less than 3% of Iraq's population but they made up 13% of Iraq's refugee population.

North Africa is more Muslim than the Fertile Crescent – Christians are isolated here – but more like the edge of the Arab World than its centre: many of its people would claim to be Berbers, not Arabs. Some are aware of a pre-Arab, Christian past.

## Christian responses

It is possible for expatriates to serve the Arab World, not as missionaries, but by being faithful witnesses to Christ in ordinary jobs. Two examples:

_1. Serving the poor._ A number of Christian-based charitable operations like hospitals and clinics perform remarkable service in the rural Arab World. These are stressful and lonely postings: some people have been murdered by extremists, others kidnapped. Workers are not allowed to use words to explain the gospel. But they are nevertheless bringing something of the fragrance of Christ to rural Arabs.

_2. Professionals in the Gulf._ The wealthy Gulf States each contain a Christian presence because of many expatriate workers. These come mostly from Asia but also from Western countries. In the United Arab Emirates, for example, nearly half the population originate from overseas.

No Gulf States allow expatriates the legal freedom to share the gospel with local Gulf Arabs, and the restrictions on their own worship vary from state to state, Saudi Arabia and Qatar being perhaps the most restrictive. In Saudi, the evil act of expatriates worshipping Christ in a home-group with other expatriates has led to beatings, imprisonment and worse. (According to the government, this shouldn't be happening; according to those suffering, it is.)

Nevertheless God has his ways, and despite the restrictions, the presence of Christian communities in the heart of Islam is a helpful factor in the growth of the Kingdom of God.

***

Westerners (especially) seeking to serve the Arab World do not arrive as neutral actors. Their crusading, colonizing history, high-handed current practice, and the immorality paraded in films and TV are quite reasonably resented. This is 'the Christian world' so far as many Arabs understand it.

To make any kind of progress, Christians need to demonstrate Christian love in a cultural language that Arabs, Muslim and Christian, understand. This calls for all kinds of unusual, un-Western choices: wearing veils, giving away possessions, being lavish with hospitality and time, assiduously paying social debts. Only then, clad in Arab World dress, will the gospel be seen for what it truly is.

We need a spirit of humility, suffering, learning and love. Christine Mallouhi drawing on long and intense cross-cultural experience, gives an illustration.

Sometimes I think Westerners are replacing grace and the Holy Spirit by a 'spirit of teaching'... It would be an interesting exercise to examine the prospectus forms submitted by candidates [for missionary service] and note how many intended coming to 'teach' or 'disciple'. They would be the majority.

_Now let me tell you about Ed. He is a successful professional family man who in mid-life decided to give his talents to sharing Christ's love in the Muslim world. Before his family left for the field he told a national Christian, 'I don't have any specialized training in theology or Islam. I don't know that I have anything to teach. I just want to be a friend to Muslims and love them for Jesus.' The national Christian, embracing him with tears in his eyes said, 'Ed, we have been looking for you for years.'_ ( _Miniskirts, Mothers and Muslims_ , 1997, pp 93-94)

## The Church in the Arab World

What then is happening to the Church and the Kingdom of God in the Arab World?

The short answer is, _something special_.

Workers who have served Christ in the Arab World for 25 or even 40 years are using such phrases as 'unprecedented openness', 'day of opportunity', 'never seen this before in my lifetime'. According to my informants, these are about the most exciting days for Christian witness in the Arab World in the whole of history.

One explained his optimism by saying, 'The present "congregation" of Arab World Christians look determined to follow Christ through whatever circumstances he allows'. Here's the perspective of one specialist Arab-World watcher:

If we compare the Arab Muslim world with a number of other mission fields in the world today, it's very unproductive. However, if we compare what is happening in the Arab Muslim world with what has happened down through history since the inception of Islam, we are in a tremendously encouraging period. We have seen an increasing tempo of conversions and feel that we are approaching more and more that place of real breakthrough in the Arab Muslim world.

These are sober people (for the most part). So what's happening? Many things.

_Prayer movements._ There seems to be a great increase in the prayerful interest of Christians in the Arab World. This is, of course, rather hard to measure. But local sources attest to it. 'Never before has so much prayer been focussed by so many people in so many diverse places onto one region,' wrote one to me. 'This is an indication of God preparing for something significant to happen.'

_Mass media._ Of 300m Arabic-speakers in North Africa and the Middle East, around half have access to satellite TV. In May 1996, broadcasts began of the first ever Arabic-language, Christian satellite TV channel, SAT-7, a channel from and for the Christians of the Arab World. Now with both a general channel and a kids' channel, SAT-7's imaginative mix of programming is watched by millions. Other groups are also providing satellite TV: Algerian Christians, for example, have founded CMA TV which broadcasts in Arabic and Berber. Slightly older forms of media ministry are also finding receptive hearts. One executive from a gospel radio station told me a few years ago, 'Twenty-five years ago, of all the letters we received, hardly one in twenty showed any sign of interest in spiritual things. Now, almost every letter does.'

The _Jesus_ film has been shown and copied widely around the Arab World. Some countries, notably Iraq, have put it on national TV – this is true of other Christian videos also. (Other countries have banned the Jesus film, thereby increasing its appeal.)

Mel Gibson's movie _The Passion of the Christ_ was shown in cinemas right across the Arab World. The similarities between Aramaic and Arabic meant that Arabs could understand some of the dialogue without subtitles.

Some websites dedicated to explaining the gospel to Arabs are seeing extraordinary responses.

***

_Visions and dreams._ Another evidence of renewal in the Arab World is the number of Arabs who are having dreams about Jesus. Year after year this goes on, common enough to be mentioned even in secular anthropology courses, quiet testimony to Jesus knocking on the door of Arab hearts.

Here is a typical story. In one North African country, a man had a disturbing vision. Later, he had a recurrent dream that a white-skinned person would explain the vision to him. One day, a white-skinned Christian rented an apartment from this man. They became friends. After a while, the landlord shared his story, and ultimately became a Christian himself.

Experienced mission leader David Lundy told me, _Our people come across examples of nationals who have had visions and dreams. So our prayer is constantly, 'Lord, keep us from spending time with people who are really not open and will never be open. We have limited time, we work 9-5, living takes more effort, so we don't have a lot of discretionary time to build friendships. Therefore Lord, lead us to seekers._

***

_The renewal of ancient churches._ The ancient churches of the Fertile Crescent are experiencing renewal and revival. It is widespread though by no means universal.

The 'Movement for Salvation of Souls', a long-established, indigenous, Biblical movement has impacted the whole Church in Egypt.

During the 1970s, again in Egypt, there was something of a revival within monasticism, centred around a reforming monk named Matthew the Poor. Out of his influence, many people began seeking God through Bible study, theology, and prayer.

These people subsequently became pioneering figures in the spiritual renewal of Orthodoxy, teaching the scriptures to congregations numbering in the thousands. A number are now bishops.

A prayer movement is gaining strength in Egypt, embracing the whole doctrinal spread of the Church, intent on seeing Muslims turn to Christ. Some people claim this is Egypt's destiny: they like to recall Egypt's history as a previous centre of intercession, in the days of the Desert Fathers, and they refer to a prophecy in Isaiah 19:19 'there will be an altar to the Lord in the heart of Egypt' (NIV).

There has been a sharp increase in the numbers of Egyptian Christians with a vision for sharing the gospel with Muslims, something that was almost unheard of generation ago.

Church groups like the Maronites (an isolated denomination that linked up with the Catholics in the sixteenth century) have experienced renewal in recent years. Taking Bibles to some Maronite communities used to result in stonings: no longer. There are now some outstanding Maronite Bible teachers and a strong and growing community of renewed Maronite Christians.

***

_People of Muslim background turning to Christ._ It is now possible to say something that it was not possible to say even ten years ago (I'm writing this in 2011). All over the Arab World, Muslims are turning to Christ.

Every city in Saudi Arabia contains Christian believers, despite their realistic fears of a death sentence if discovered. Kuwait's indigenous Church is growing and some are even worshipping Christ publicly.

In the past fifteen years, churches of local people from a Muslim background have emerged all across North Africa. Each North African nation – Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and even the remote desert state of Mauritania – is home to at least a handful of indigenous Christian congregations.

It's instructive to compare the reports on Libya from successive editions of the prayer handbook Operation World. (Of course, some of the reported changes result from better information, not changed circumstances.) The 1986 edition said, 'There is not one known group of Libyan Christians.' By 1993 it was 'There may be no more than a handful of Libyan believers'. In 2001: 'There are no more than a handful of Libyan believers' and 'Expatriate workers are seeking to reach Libyans, but are hindered by the elaborate secret police networks. There is a shared sense of despair and hopelessness.'

However by 2010, and before the political upheavals in Libya: 'The spiritual climate in Libya has changed significantly. God is doing a new work in this land ... Increasing numbers of Libyans are coming to Christ.'

In the Fertile Crescent, too, especially in Egypt, Iraq and Jordan, hundreds of people are turning to Christ from a Muslim background each year, though in Iraq especially that is somewhat overshadowed by the sectarian violence that is causing Christians to flee.

***

_The example of Algeria._ Algeria offers the most developed example: an indigenous movement to Christ there has been growing for a generation or more.

In Algeria's Kabyle mountains are a set of villages occupied by Berber tribes. As many as 75% of all Algerians would claim to be Berbers (30% speak a Berber language). They are interesting for several reasons.

For one, they were reluctant converts to Islam. An ancient Muslim historical record describes them apostasizing a dozen times before they were finally subdued. They have always resisted colonial pressures (Roman, Arab, Turkish, European) and so this is perhaps not surprising.

Second, their version of Islam has more in common with folk religion than textbook Muslim belief: a religion of charms, magic, the evil eye, and holy people and places. This folk Islam – the religion of the rural poor throughout the Arab World – is anathema to the radical Islamist. So the rise of radical Islam causes much strain.

Third, the _Jesus_ film and the New Testament have fairly recently been translated into the Kabyle Berber language – the first film and book ever produced in this language. Radio and now satellite TV broadcasts, also in Berber, are received there.

Fourth, bizarrely, Berber folk memory retains distant images of a semi-Christian past. Some examples:

1 During the Feast of Eid, when the sheep is slaughtered (an Islamic custom), women wipe up some blood from the sheep with a handful of earth and daub it on the doorposts, explaining that if evil passed that way, this would protect them.

2 When someone is very ill, it is a tradition, when everything else has been tried, to haul him through a hole in the roof: a memory, perhaps of a gospel story.

3 After dressing a baby a mother in some places makes the sign of the cross over the child with her forearms, twice, to protect him or her.

4 A newborn baby will be placed in its cot next to the animals, because it is believed that a newborn among animals is blessed.

5 Mothers will sing a lullaby using the name of Jesus, believing it to protect the child.

Every village in Kabylia has a Christian presence. If you turn to Christ, it is likely you will already know someone in your extended family who has become a Christian before you. The churches pray and fast and expect conversions and miracles; they are the kind of churches that have grown rapidly elsewhere in the world during this century. Thirteen of them, at the last count I have available, have successfully registered with the authorities – congregations of Algerian Christians.

I asked two Berber leaders what problems their Church faced. 'All of Kabylia isn't converted yet,' they replied. (They perhaps might have mentioned that the churches are short of leaders, that many of the Christians are new and young in the faith, and that the fight for political recognition has only just begun.)

## Conclusion

Let's sum up.

1. The Arab World is creaking and straining under (in its own terms) its theologically inexplicable loss of cultural supremacy, its relative powerlessness, and its lack of freedom and opportunity, compared to the rest of the world. This is the common background to many contradictory stories in the Arab World. The rise of Islam is a reaction to it; so are the political earthquakes that are known as the Arab Spring.

2. A Christian community has existed since earliest times but is now shrinking in size, because most of the Christians are from the Orthodox or Catholic confessions, and many of these are emigrating.

3. Despite some of the most hostile anti-Christian environments on earth, a new, widespread spiritual hunger is discernible in the Arab World and a community of Christ-followers from a Muslim background is emerging. Some people still practise their faith secretly; but increasingly local churches are emerging into the light and defending their right to exist.

# Chapter 2: The Sahel

Welcome to the hot house, an exuberant place that makes the so-called temperate lands like Northern Europe look dank, chilly, small and grey.

West Africa apparently orders its climate in bulk loads, buying in petawatts of sunshine that barbecue the land for months; or fat rainclouds that burst over the dry soil like end-of-season fruit.

The deep Sahara, where the sun has been known to shine every day for six years at a stretch, is about the driest part of the world. Lengths of the West African coast are some of the wettest. Between the two the landscape is divided into horizontal strips that turn greener as you move south: first, stony desert; then scrubland; then areas of savannah grass and baobab trees; and finally the West African bush and patches of rainforest. The greener the strip, the longer the rains.

You have to be clever to live here.

Most West Africans are farmers. And consider what it's like to farm, for example, a patch of one of the browner, northern strips. Starting with poor topsoil, some seeds, your own hands, no capital, and under orders from your father or husband you must:

1 Coax a year's nutrition for your family from the sand, using only millet and cassava, and with no rain whatsoever for eight months of the year

2 Build or maintain a home using only the elements you can dig up or find around you

3 Supply all your water needs

4 Find enough spare cash to buy the food that you can't grow; the medicines your children will need; the loans your family and friends will require of you; and for enough votive offerings to keep a host of hungry evil spirits, ancestors, and senior spiritual beings off your back.

Only slightly easier is foraging for wealth in the cities. Every possible way of making a living in urban areas is already mined to exhaustion.

A vanful of men will turn up on your doorstep to take one reading of the electricity meter. In the markets you will find rows of identical tables offering precisely the same stock for sale at exactly the same price: no unexploited market niches here. Outside the markets, you will find people who sell meat scraps or exercise books to anybody who doesn't fancy the walk to town.

Every shopkeeper, truck owner, building contractor or tradesman will be surrounded by a squadron of apprentices, labourers, gophers, and assorted hangers-on -- extended family members usually. These people share out the work when there is any, sit around until the shade moves when there isn't, and eat together at the end of the day, one wage stretched out among them all. Disabled and mentally handicapped family members, and widows and orphans, are also all fed from the same family pot -- a fact both remarkable and sad.

Wherever there is the faintest whisper of wealth, a large group of people will be chasing it. An education really only opens up the chance to work in government service; but there are too many educated people chasing too few jobs. An Islamic education may lead to a career in a foreign-funded Muslim school; but again, there's oversupply of scholars.

***

What you make of these hardships depends rather on whose perspective you use.

If you look through the lens of the United Nations' measures of development you will see poverty. Of 41 countries classified by the UN in 2010 as having 'low human development,' 35 are in Africa, and half of the two-dozen countries at the bottom of this list are West African.

Nearly all these indicators are going in the right direction but still the picture is of babies dying when they don't need to; people being malnourished; life choices being few.

***

It's very different if you look at the area from the viewpoint of, say, the nomadic pastoralist Fulbe. (Also known, depending where you find them, as Fula, Fulani, Peul, and by many other names).

These people walk with their herds hundreds of miles between traditional Sahelian pasture lands, tramping north in the rainy season, south in the dry, looking out for grass and avoiding the tsetse fly. Like the Israelites in the desert, they carry everything with them as they go.

For the Fulbe, the rigours of the Sahel sort out the real men (them) from everyone else. They are proud to have ruled this vast area over the centuries, conquering both its other inhabitants and its pepper-hot climate. When it comes to living rightly, they believe, nobody does it better. On the canvas of the Sahel, the Fulbe have painted every value that matters: courage, skill, steadfastness, toughness, simple living, generosity.

The principle holds throughout West Africa. An outsider cannot help being proud to belong to the same human species as West Africa's enterprising families of farmers, herders and traders. They are creating life and societies out of almost nothing, and sharing the little they have with a generosity many of us cannot fathom.

***

Into this stark world, the Church has the job of bringing the gospel.

West Africa's Christian community is stripey, like the land. The nearer you get to the desert, the fewer the Christians are. Ghana, on the coast, is 63% Christian (counting all who in the broadest sense would claim some kind of allegiance to Christ); its northern neighbour Burkina Faso is 21% Christian; Burkina's northern neighbour Mali, a Sahara-desert state, is only 3% Christian. This reflects mission history in West Africa: work has been concentrated on the animist, bush-dwelling farmers rather than the Muslim, desert- and savannah-roaming nomads.

These little-touched northern strips are home to a continent's worth of different ethnic groups. The 'Joshua Project' is a list of all the peoples on earth who are more than 10,000 in population and less than 2% evangelical or 5% total Christian. This list counts more than 400 peoples in West Africa. Mostly, these are the peoples of the northern strips, the peoples of the Sahel.

Rapid change and great stress further confuse the scene. This is a period in history in which the cultures of the Sahel are being ploughed up. Droughts are one part of the cause, the collision with the modern world is another.

Here are some observations from elderly villagers in Mali. The climate problems first:

'Nature is not as generous as it used to be,'

'Today the sky turns red from the colour of dust and sand - there is no rain.'

'Fishing yesterday and today are two different things. Yesterday you went to fish in lakes, but today you have to fish in your pocket.'

And then the cultural issues:

'Today, if you want to get married you walk around with a head full of problems.'

'In the old days your child was everybody's child.'

'In the past the whole family, from all over the village, had a say in a child's education.'

'Today only parents are responsible for their children's upbringing; before the whole community was concerned.'

'These days it seems as though the children are bringing up the adults!'

## Culture

We can't hope to understand the real issues involved in taking the gospel to the Sahel unless we spend some time looking at people's mindset, or 'worldview'.

We look at just three features of this Sahelian mindset:

1 Working with spirits

2 Sharing resources

3 Sticking to tradition

_1. Working with spirits._ In the Sahel, spiritual forces matter. Coping with them is at least as important to most people as coping with the tax and benefit systems in our own countries is to Europeans.

A Nigerian brother told me, 'You see, we Africans, we can never have an atom of doubt about spiritual powers. You understand -- we were born in it ... We can't doubt the presence of demons and their working.'

Words that for many of us belong to fairy tales -- 'sorcery', 'magic', 'spells' for example -- describe things real enough to consider having a career in them.

For example, when asked, 'Why did my daughter get malaria?' the Western doctor says a mosquito carrying the malaria parasite bit her. End of question. But the African then asks the question that really matters to him: 'Yes, but who sent the mosquito?'

Look at these questions:

Why has she fallen in love with him, and not with me?

Why have our cattle fallen sick? (and not yours)

How can I protect my child from harm?

Here, the Western worldview might offer a few simple platitudes -- and then fall silent. African worldviews will engage and tackle all this.

This leads directly to different ways of living life, different priorities for solving problems, different calls on people's cash. Pacifying, manipulating, and fending off forces from the spiritual realm is a big industry in the Sahel.

The Wolof language, spoken by most people in Senegal, for example, has at least 49 words for different spiritual specialities, for example: _Priest_ : performs regular rituals _; Prophet_ : delivers personal messages and works miracles _; Shaman_ : receives personal communication from a supernatural being, over which he has some control or mastery _; Diviner_ : makes a diagnosis of problems, for example by taking readings of cowrie shells.

Spiritual forces are carefully ranked and classified. Everyone from the smallest child will know who the local ruling spirit is. Shamans will deal with a couple of higher-order spiritual beings (often called 'divinities'), as well as with dozens of lower-order demons. Political leaders hire experts who can help them get advice from, say, the god of the Moon. Fallen angels are alive, well, and publicly active in this region.

You can invest in spells or procedures for many human conditions: love spells; sorcery to call family members home from the cities; charms to protect against spiritual attack. Anthropologist David Maranz told me that he was once offered six different spells for clearing out fishbones that stuck in the throat. Four were for on-site use, two worked remotely.

Nor is this spiritual dabbling considered 'evil' by those who use it. The spirits themselves, for the most part, are thought to be morally neutral. Some of the magic is considered evil by its practitioners; but most is not. It's the equivalent of playing the stockmarket: investors usually think it worthwhile in the long-term, but even the smartest sometimes lose their shirts (or their souls).

This spiritual activity is a tax on living. It is also a replica of the world the Bible describes in books like 1 and 2 Kings: ethnic groups mingled together, all trying out each others' gods and rituals to get ahead in life. Any gospel brought to the Sahel must take these powers seriously and demonstrate an alternative that works, in the form of an uncompromising trust in Christ and a day-by-day living experience of the Holy Spirit.

***

_2. A sharing life._ A second deep principle for many people of the Sahel is that you share your life with the rest of your extended family, and in a sense with your whole ethnic group.

You look to your family and people for social security, for employment, for a marriage partner. In return, if you do well, for example through getting a government job, it is a matter of honour that you use your position to help your own people. Outsiders may see that as nepotism; you see it as integrity and decency.

This instinctive solidarity leads to practices that seem most strange to many foreigners. In Sahel Africa, passing money and help around is the stuff of friendship and family solidarity. You must help your friends and family when they are in need, in the certainty that they will help you when you are in need. Failure to be involved materially cannot be compensated for by anything else. Keeping money in a bank, or having two radios when you need only one, is hoarding. If you are rigorous in keeping track of money, or if you budgetted, that shows a mean spirit. And you should only approach someone to pay back a loan if you now need the money more than they do.

It is pointless to ask if these principles are 'better' or 'worse' than principles derived in Western contexts. Sahelian principles are rotten at creating wealth but great for surviving calamities. Western principles may be equally strong and weak in the opposite directions.

The challenge to cultural outsiders trying to bring the gospel is obvious.

Anyone arriving in the Sahel from richer parts of the world is doomed to suffer confusing relationships with Africans of the Sahel wherever money is concerned. Your African friends will happily ask you for money, because you are their friend. How can a rich person be a true friend and not give away his money?

Yet faced with requests for money, a person from the rich world panics. He hates the sight of his friends begging him for money. He is terrified of the thought that he might be bribing people to accept the gospel. And something in his head tells him that his money is really for his own nuclear family's use.

If Christians here are to call other people effectively to follow Christ, they must be prepared to make up for everything a convert will lose. They must be prepared to offer him food and shelter, to care for him when he is sick, even to find him a wife and a job.

African families do not usually reject people for ever, even if they turn to Christ from a Muslim or animist background. But in the painful interim when the convert is new and the family hostile, the church must bridge the gap, or, humanly speaking, the convert will fall.

***

_3. Sticking to traditions._ The societies we are focussing on in this book are not naturally eager to experiment with new ideas.

This is no bad thing either. We in the West are grateful that medical teams in operating theatres, for example, are not made up of creative, moody individualists. Life and death issues, like surviving in West Africa, demand leadership, discipline, teamwork; all things that African cultures are great at.

Fathers or grandfathers rule the family with authority. Before they die, they solemnly charge the next generation to maintain the family altar and traditions. Through centuries, this has been the way that the patterns of life deemed essential for survival have been kept up. So thin are the margins between life and death, you are not encouraged to experiment.

Tradition also applies to local ideas about health care. I asked a nurse who had worked in primary health care for ten years among West African Muslims what improvements she had seen in child health practices. 'Very little,' she replied. 'People change only slowly. Ask me again after 40 years.'

In the spiritual world, marabouts and other professionals learn early in their apprenticeship to pronounce spells and work through rituals in exactly the right format, for their own spiritual protection -- a kind of health and safety at work.

The same principle of sticking to the traditional rules goes some way to explain the power of ritual throughout these cultures.

Early mission attempts to abolish certain rituals among Christianized people in West Africa only pushed the rituals underground. People would get married in the church-approved way, and then return quietly to the village for the traditional rites. Nowadays, religious movements are springing up in long-Christianized parts of the region, calling people back to the suppressed religions of the past.

All this means that anyone who wants to bring lasting change to a Sahelian culture must be prepared for a spiritual battle and maybe a long wait. You must be able to demonstrate that change is definitely for the better. You must be able to face the wrath of the local establishment. You must show spiritual authority. And your teaching must have a breadth and depth that will make change rumble through the whole society, touching even the rituals.

Miss out this transformation, and you find that innovations of whatever kind are accepted only at the surface level; at the heart level they are dismissed.

***

Can the gospel flourish in these Sahelian landscapes of the mind? The answer is a certain Yes.

Acts 2:42-46 is often quoted as an example of what the Church should be like:

They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Everyone was filled with awe, and many wonders and miraculous signs were done by the apostles. All the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need. (NIV)

This little snippet shows the gospel flourishing extraordinarily within a mindset similar in many ways to the Sahelian one. Spiritual power issues are addressed: there's prayer, awe, wonders and miracles. Sharing and security issues are addressed by fellowship, holding everything in common, and selling possessions to support each other. Internalizing-truth issues are addressed: doctrine is taught thoroughly, and new rituals developed such as breaking bread and meeting together in the temple courts.

Which brings us to Islam. Where did West African Islam come from? And what is it like?

## Islam

Over the last thousand years Islam has fused with local Sahelian cultures and is now as much a part of the scene here as ancient village parish churches are in the landscapes of Europe or Russia.

Islam in West Africa started as a religion of the rulers and in the cities.

For the past millennium, the camel-owners (merchants, nomads, herders) have ruled both the Sahel and its farmers. These camel-owning elites met Islam when they carried their gold, slaves, and salt across the desert to the Arabs and Berbers in the north.

The Islam they encountered was modern, literate, confident, and expanding. Islamized Berbers subsequently conquered and ruled West Africa's first recorded great kingdom, Ghana (which was sited, confusingly, in modern-day Mali) in the 11th century. After that, Muslims dominated each of the Sahel's empires: the Kanem-Bornu around Lake Chad (Muslims were in charge from the tenth century all the way through to its 16th century peak and subsequently), the Malian empire (13th-14th century), the Songhai (15th-16th), and the Fulbe (18th-19th).

These empires were weighty enough for their leaders to get an occasional strut on the world stage. Mansa Musa, for example, ruled the Malian empire in the 14th century and was the owner of the world's greatest gold mines. He made the pilgrimage to Mecca around 1324-25, visited Cairo as well, and spent lavishly wherever he went. He built Timbuktu, a Malian city on the shores of the Sahara, into a centre for Islamic learning and cross-desert trade.

***

Through most of its West African history, Islam has only been the faith of the aristocracy. The turning of the masses happened after the conquests of Islamic reformers and European colonizers.

The Islamic reformers were eighteenth- or nineteenth-century figures, military leaders and politicians, as well as scholars and mystics, rather in the model of the prophet Muhammad himself. Usman dan Fodio was the most famous. A Pullo scholar and marabout, he overthrew his own Islamic rulers and then waged a war across the Sahel to the Hausa empire of Northern Nigeria.

Around the same time as Europe was fighting the Napoleonic wars, Usman's cavalry were gathering year by year in the sun-bleached city of Sokoto, planning fresh incursions across West Africa. Though considered by many an Islamic hero, Usman shed blood by the bucketful and enslaved thousands. Usman's empire lasted a century and reached to the fringes of the rainforest, islamizing wherever it went.

Its echo is still heard today. Many West African peoples date their islamization to this period. And the Fulbe/Hausa people still feature largely in the politics and religious outlook of Nigeria.

Umar Tal was another Islamic reformer. A marabout like Usman, Umar Tal conquered much of Mali and parts of Senegal, often compiling a list of theological reasons for attacking his fellow Muslims before he set out.

The flow to Islam continued when the European colonists took over. The reasons for this are complex: Traditional Religion was collapsing, and people were flowing both to Islam and Christianity. In Nigeria, for example, during the 20th century, Islam moved from claiming perhaps 20-25% of the population to today's 45-50%. Senegal is now over 90% Muslim: most of its Islamic growth happened under Western rule or during the current independence in which French influence remains very strong.

***

To understand West African Islam, we do well to forget everything we learnt in religious education classes at school.

Even if Islam were ever the neat package of beliefs served up in school textbooks (which it is not) its passage over the cultural landscape of the Sahel has totally reshaped it.

In particular it's:

1 A learned behaviour

2 Blended with African Traditional Religion.

_1. A learned behaviour._ Islam as practiced in the Sahel is a set of rituals into which you are brought up. It belongs to the realm of things that you don't question. It almost needs a revelation from God for people to realize that things don't have to be this way: that you can be a Pullo or a Wolof, and yet not be a Muslim.

Further, you are not trained in most cases to think critically about your faith. The Qur'an is to be recited, not explored. You might find a Senegalese man praying a hundred times a day, with the help of beads, the lovely Sufi prayer, 'I take refuge in God ... it is You we adore', yet he is typically speaking an Arabic chant taught him by his marabout, without necessarily thinking it out.

_2. Blended with African Traditional Religion._ Islam, and especially the brand of Islam that is found throughout the Sahel, reinforces and strengthens the old African Traditional worldviews.

Like Islam, African Traditional Religion is monotheistic, not polytheistic. It believes in one, high, all-powerful God; but this God is remote. African Traditional Religions have stories as to why he is absent: our forefathers used to carry their spears upright, and they accidentally poked God and annoyed him, for example.

Again, in African Traditional Religion, the real work of celestial government is done by the spiritual beings, ancestors and other sources of power. These are the ones to apply to if you want anything done. Much of this outlook slips easily enough into Islam. In Islam, too, God has a civil service, the 'angels' and the 'jinn'. Sometimes turning from African Traditional Religion to Islam is as simple as renaming 'the river-god' 'the river-jinn'.

Islam then adds some extra spiritual value. It provides more information about the missing High God. It links your local religious practice with another high faith that is accepted all around the world, a sort of spiritual credit card, and it offers new ways of accessing power.

This last point is important. The Islam of the Sahel, just like the Traditional Religion of the Sahel, fusses over power for living. The Qur'an is not studied for its meaning so much as used for magic. How did God create life? By sowing the world with the Qur'an. How do you cure sickness? Write some Qur'anic verses on a slate, wash them off and drink them. How do you protect against evil? Carry a Qur'anic text in a little leather bag around your neck.

The confession, 'There is no god but God and Muhammad is his prophet', is a spell to protect yourself when you walk into evil-feeling places. Alms are used either to save yourself from the evil eye that a beggar might put upon you, or as cash to donate to your local marabout as spiritual life insurance. Pilgrimage becomes a way of juicing yourself up with vital life force, _baraka_.

Folk Islam, then, has grown to fit the West African context beautifully. The result is a faith that is often poorly understood but passionately defended; a faith whose rigours, such as the fast, appeal to the tough and brave peoples of the semi-desert; a faith that offers world-class spiritual power and influence as a supplement to the local deities; a faith that doesn't encourage you to think critically; and a faith that it is culturally very hard to leave behind completely.

## Bringing the gospel to the Sahel

How then to bring the gospel to these Sahelian cultures? What is the key that unlocks them? They key is the gospel itself, applied with care and faithfulness.

Larry Vanderaa, a veteran American missionary who spent many months each year living in the simplest fashion in a Fulbe village in Mali, has compiled authoritative surveys of mission activity and church growth in francophone West Africa.

According to Vanderaa, the progress of the gospel in each one of West Africa's peoples falls into one of four broad stages.

Stage 1: Missionaries arrive and begin to bear witness. Then, for a missionary lifetime or so, 20-40 years, nothing happens. Perhaps you may find a handful of converts by the end. But all through this time, Vanderaa suggests, 'the Gospel is slowly penetrating the hearts and minds of the people'.

Stage 2: 'The church begins to grow slowly until the Christians comprise about 3-5% of the ethnic group.' This is the stage when national Christians are most feeling the heat from the rest of their people, where local Christian pioneers are slowly establishing an authentic Christian life and community within their culture.

Stage 3 is that part you read about in Christian magazines. 'The church enters a period of explosive growth as the Gospel takes root in the society as a whole and the number of Christians may increase from 5% to 20%-40% of the ethnic group in 10-20 years.' This is an era of miracles, big evangelistic rallies, mass conversions to Christ, great church planting movements. The Mossi church in Burkina Faso is in this group; so are churches among some peoples in Central Nigeria, as well as Chad, Côte d'Ivoire, Senegal and Togo.

Stage 4 is the stage familiar to us all in the West, as being most like home. 'Growth begins to slow or even stops altogether. If the church has not been well taught in stages 2 and 3, nominalism creeps in followed by years (then centuries?) of recurrent cycles of backsliding and revival.'

Vanderaa backed his thesis with maps showing the different times missionaries first started working in a culture, compared with the current state of the Christian church. It's impressive stuff and it holds true over many denominations, mission organizations and strategies.

***

Vanderaa's work offers an explanation for West Africa's spiritual patchwork. The gospel-less peoples are, simply, the ones that Christ's Church has not effectively tackled yet. Only now, after twenty centuries, is a comprehensive mission effort being organized. In most of the Northern Sahel, the initial work started only between the mid-1970s and the present day.

***

The growing presence of Brazilian and Nigerian missionaries in the Sahel, along with workers from other African nations, is bringing fresh impetus to the missions movement.

By 2010, Nigeria had around 2,000 missionaries serving in other lands, mainly elsewhere in West Africa. Christians in Nigeria were calling on God to send out a total of 50,000 Nigerian cross-cultural missionaries by the year 2025.

As well as fresh personnel, African missionaries arrive with an instinctive grasp of African cultures, and they arrive from contexts, especially in Nigeria, where churches have seen thousands of Muslims turn to Christ already. This is not the usual experience of Western missionaries.

It is now rare to find a West African tribe or people who are not in the prayers and in the sights of some mission agency or another, majority world or Western. It seems likely that as the years pass, fellow Africans will increasingly have the privilege of establishing the gospel in the Sahel.

# Chapter 3: Turkey

Scroll back to the first 300 years of Christian history, and what is now Turkey dominates the story.

Tarsus in Cilicia, Paul's home, is located in modern-day Turkey. So is Antioch (called Syrian Antioch in the Bible but actually modern Antakya in S E Turkey). This Antioch church saw Christians first called 'Christians', experienced the first flowering of the gospel among the Gentiles, and sent out a rather distinguished list of missionaries: Paul, Barnabas, Mark and Silas. Much of the New Testament was first written for churches in what is now Turkey. The church in Ephesus, in Turkey, counted Paul, Timothy and John among its first few leaders – not a bad start.

The Church was still thriving after the era of the first apostles ended. Early in the second century AD, Pliny the Younger governed in Turkey. He reported to the Roman Emperor how in his province 'many of every age, every class and of both sexes' were thought to be Christians. Pagan temples had become 'well-nigh abandoned'. Pliny was failing to stop the rot.

Two hundred and fifty years further on, the Emperor Julian complained about the Christians' 'benevolence to strangers – their care for the graves of the dead, and the apparent holiness of their lives.' The Christians, he complained, 'support not only their own poor but ours as well.'

In due time Turkey became the heart of the Orthdox Christian Byzantine Empire, with Constantinople (now Istanbul) its capital.

***

How the Church fell from all that power and influence need not detain us. But about a thousand years ago, Muslim Turkic nomads began conquering modern Turkey. In 1134 a Turkic dynasty, the Seljuks, made Konya – Iconium of the book of Acts – their capital city, and inaugurated a flowering of urban civilisation and architecture. A century later came the Mongol conquests under Genghis Khan. Turkic warlords, forced westward, conquered yet more of modern Turkey and gradually gained power over the weakening Seljuks. A warlord named Osman eventually became the alpha male and founded a dynasty that lasted until modern times – the Ottomans.

The Ottomans famously conquered Constantinople in 1453 and continued to expand into Europe and Russia up to the 17th century. From a Turkish and Muslim perspective, the Ottoman Empire was a breath of clean air sweeping away the corruption and poison of the Byzantine Empire. This pure Muslim empire was then undermined from without by the scheming and immoral European Christians, and from within by secessionist Christian communities.

The equating of 'Christian' with 'Europe' and 'Muslim' with 'Turk' and a bloody, complicated history with much unrighteousness and offended pride on all sides is a massive complicating factor for the gospel in Turkey today.

***

Despite these centuries of unpromising context, a few hardy souls attempted missions to the Ottoman Empire and to Turkey. Back in the mid-16th century a Protestant officer in an army that fought the Ottomans, Freiherr Von Sonegg, spent his whole fortune on producing Christian books for the peoples of the Ottoman Empire. In the early 18th century, the Moravian Church, that most ardently missionary of Protestant denominations, sent workers.

Large scale missions had to wait until the Great Missionary Awakening (1790s onwards). In 1820, the American Mission Board sent two researchers to the Ottoman Empire. Their report led to the first major Protestant missions to what is now Turkey. These early missions saw a little fruit. Some individuals turned to Christ. Small groups of converts did appear, but were snuffed out by persecution.

The existing Christian communities, however, were receptive to the missionaries' message. This was not planned, but it is hard for zealous Christian workers to ignore spiritual hunger pangs. The result was that Protestant missions both revitalised, and split, the ancient Christian communities. At times the split was bitter. The Armenian Patriarch in 1844, overflowing with Christian charity, expressed the wish that evangelicals would be buried so deep that even the Last Trump would not raise them.

***

The death-throes of the Ottoman Empire at the turn of the 20th century were horrible times for the Christian community. The Armenian people – usually on the pretext that they were betraying the state – were massacred in 1895–1896, 1909, and 1915–1916. Well over a million are thought to have lost their lives. Virtually all the Armenians were officially Christians: many it seems had a living faith.

At the end of the First World War, Turkey was set to be carved up between the victorious allies. But then Mustapha Kemal (to whose name was later added the title _Ataturk_ , 'Father of the Turks') stepped onto the stage. A hero from Gallipoli, he got rid of the invading allies, and founded modern-day Turkey out of the Ottoman ashes. The nation today still bears his stamp.

Ataturk turned Turkey decisively away from the old ways. He called Islam 'a heavy blanket that keeps the people of Turkey asleep'. He banned the fez, the rimless hat that symbolized a Muslim's willingness to prostrate himself before God. He introduced the Roman alphabet and taught women to read. He made Turkey officially a secular nation and the army the guardian of its secular status.

He sought to build the nation around ethnic Turkishness, and part of the ideal Turkish identity remained an allegiance to Sunni Islam. This was bad news for Turkey's ethnic and religious minorities, and has caused much injustice. At the beginning of the twentieth century Turkey's population was an assortment of Turks, Kurds, Armenians, Greeks, Syrians and many others. The country was around 30% Christian. Nowadays it is officially 85% Turk and 98% Muslim, thanks to population swaps with Greece, the odd massacre and a policy of assimilation.

For decades, the Kurds, who make up between 18% and 25% of the population were called 'mountain Turks' and were forbidden to use their own language outside of their homes and communities. This oppression led directly to a Kurdish independence movement, which in turn led to armed conflict, and the deaths of around 30,000 people.

Something like 25% of Turkey's Muslims may be Alevis, belonging to a branch of Shi'a, rather than Sunni, Islam. For years the Alevis have complained of discrimination from the Sunni majority.

The traditional churches have continued their decline, despite the constitutional guarantees of freedom. While the openly Armenian community is small, old and shrinking, close observers of the scene come across many 'Turks' who in unguarded moments will admit to speaking Greek or Armenian in their villages. Officially they are Turks, and Muslims: unofficially, they are part of a large, anonymous community that is keeping its head firmly down.

***

Turkey has been a democracy for some decades, but it remains under the eye of a military who see it as their job to prevent too wild a flirtation with radical Islam. Economic and political reforms are changing the country, not least because of the often-rekindled hope of becoming a member of the EU. That may be a doomed romance, but Turkey is becoming an example of how to do a modern, democratic, Islamic state.

Life for minorities is changing for the better. The Kurds, for example, now have some limited opportunities to use their own language in the mass media. Some members of the national assembly are openly Kurdish or Alevi or both. Church properties are being restored to their original owners. This rediscovered pluralism is good news for the Christian movement in Turkey.

## Turkey's Church

The story of the past half-century is of a new Christian community very slowly establishing space for itself in the Turkish context.

Years of 20th-century neglect of Turkey by the evangelical wing of the Church came to an end in the early 1960s. Teams of young Christians began entering Turkey on tourist visas, offering gospels to people on the street and holding evangelistic meetings. Other foreign Christians began learning Turkish and taking ordinary jobs in Turkey with the aim of providing a quieter, longer-term testimony to the gospel. Gospel radio broadcasts were begun. Films, books, audio tapes and TV programmes were created. Fresh Bible translations started to replace the old Turkish Bible which had become hard to understand. Some people began writing letters almost at random to addresses in Turkey, offering information about the Christian faith. Others placed adverts in Turkish magazines and newspapers. This was all a bit hit-or-miss, but nevertheless generated responses.

***

What have been the results? Once again, people from the traditional Christian communities have been coming to a fresh personal faith for themselves. The other consequence has been the emergence of a Turkish Church made up of people who started life in the Turkish Muslim communities.

This Church is definitely growing – but you have to look over the perspective of a decade or two, rather than a year or two. In the 1960s, Christian researchers knew of only a handful of believers in Christ from a Muslim background in Turkey. Now it is possible to count perhaps 4000 Christians from a Muslim background. You would find a rather smaller number than that actually in church on Sundays. The number of congregations has increased, especially in the 1990s.

***

The Protestants, a tiny splinter of Turkey's population, a threat to no-one, have suffered disproportionate amounts of difficulty and public exposure. Part of the problem is that at its founding, Turkey only gave minority rights explicitly to Greek Orthodox and Armenian Orthodox flavours of Christianity. Other confessions now struggle to own property, get permission to use a site for worship, be exempted from Islamic education, and so on.

Similarly, Turkey's constitution accords some freedoms to worship and spread religious ideas. Establishing these rights for the Protestants, however, has involved tedious and expensive legal challenges. Ever-present Islamist pressure makes it hard for politicians and judges to act, or at least to act quickly, in dispensing justice for the Christians.

A spate of killings in 2006 and 2007 cast a deep shadow. They brought the deaths of the first Turkish Protestant martyrs of the modern era, Necati Aydin and Ugur Yuksel, who were murdered along with a German Christian named Tilmann Geske at a Christian publishing house in Malatya in eastern Turkey. (The killings may have been part of the larger narrative of the political conflict between nationalists and Islamists, with the Christians a convenient target.)

The Church and expatriate Christians are still arrested at times or featured, and perhaps slandered, in the media. This has happened before: in Polycarp's time, Christians in Turkey were accused of cannibalism; in the 21st century, media reports tend to accuse Christians of forcing minors to convert or of offering bribes.

Also, the Church suffers seemingly unnatural setbacks. For example, one Turkish city lost two of its key young Christian leaders to sudden death within a short time of each other. One was shot in a random terrorist killing; the second died of a heart attack. Other little congregations have been plagued by sectarianism and betrayal.

# Chapter 4: Central Asia

The desert, steppe and mountain ranges of Central Asia form a space as wide as an ocean, and almost as empty. Central Asia -- I mean the countries of Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgystan -- is the size of India, but home to only about 60m people.

Clustered around the shoreline of Central Asia are European, Turkish, Arab, Persian, Indian, and Chinese civilisations. Most of these have tried to control Central Asia at one time or another. All have found Central Asia too large to digest. The events of the early 1990s, when the former Soviet Union lost its Central Asian territories, were just the latest episode.

Old books refer to Central Asia as 'Turkestan'. What has endured in Central Asia through the turbulent centuries is Turkic-ness. The Turkic peoples of Central Asia speak a swatch of closely related languages. A Turkish native speaker from Ankara, in Turkey, can be understood quite well in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan and may claim to have a good idea of what is going on even in Urumqi in China's northwest.

The story of these peoples' recent response to the Lord Jesus is a story mostly of the past twenty years. But to tell it properly we need to go a long way further back, to a certain Wudi, 'the Son of Heaven', fabled Emperor of China a hundred years before Christ.

## The Silk Road

In 138 BC Chinese Emperor Han Wudi was having problems with one of China's ancient foes, an invading Turkic tribe called the Xiongnu, who were also known as 'Huns'. (Much later in history they would trouble the Romans too.) A predecessor of Wudi's had built the Great Wall of China to keep the Huns out; but Wudi had a different plan. He called for a brave official named Zhang Qian (Chang Ch'ien), gave him a hundred men, and sent him into the unknown west. He hoped that Zhang would pass through Hun territory, find some faraway enemies of the Huns, and make an alliance. Then they could attack the Huns from both sides.

Zhang Qian returned after thirteen years accompanied by only one other survivor from the original company. He brought no good news of military alliances, but he did bring fantastic tales of a new world. He spoke of great cities like Bukhara and Samarkand (both now in Uzbekistan) and the rich Ferghana Valley (now shared between Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan). He had heard intelligence of still more remote kingdoms: Persia, and 'Li-jien' or Rome.

Zhang Qian had discovered the West.

Where explorers lead, exporters follow. Within a hundred years of Zhang Qian's sensational reports, goods were creeping along an arduous network of trade routes between the Chinese and Roman empires. One of the earliest exports from China was an astonishing material, the strongest known natural fabric, light as air and almost see-through: silk. By the time of Christ it had become a must-have fashion material in Rome, despite, or perhaps because of, the disgust of some. (One author wrote how the new silk clothes 'render women naked'.)

Thus, in part because of the demand for designer clothes and exotic fabrics, Europe and China became trading partners in the last century before Christ. The 'Silk Road' was the link.

***

In ancient times no one travelled the whole length of the Silk Road: goods were bought and sold between trading hubs along the way. Nor was it a single road: like a packet of data across the Internet, a bundle of silk could travel by a variety of routes before arriving in Damascus or at a Mediterranean port.

After the explorers and the exporters came the politics of trade. The desert oasis trading hubs along the route flourished, becoming little kingdoms. Also prospering were Turkic and Tibetan nomadic raiders who preyed on the caravans and on the oasis cities. The Chinese periodically intervened to protect the route, at one time building a western extension to their Great Wall.

In the following centuries, parts of the Silk Road passed through many changes of ownership, many of them Turkic, all the while continuing as a highway between East and West.

## The Birth and Death of the Church on the Silk Road

Christianity travelled early down the Silk Road. Gospels from approximately AD 500 have been found in Far Eastern trading cities. An Assyrian missionary started work in China's capital in 635. In the tenth century, Islam followed, carried by nomadic Arabs. In its wake great Islamic civilisations developed, especially in cities like Bukhara which itself became a substantial empire.

***

Starting from 1218, a new and deadly movement of invaders set out across the short grasslands of Central Asia: the Mongols. With a ferocity honed in centuries of inter-tribal raiding, Genghis Khan and his successors became the arch-conquerors of peoples and property from the Pacific coast to the borders of Poland.

The great Mongol Khans were tolerant of all faiths and in that climate European Christians were able to travel to the East for the first time. The Venetian writer Marco Polo's 24,000km journey took place between 1275 and 1291. A few years earlier, his uncles had brought a request from the Mongol leader Kublai Khan to the Pope, asking for a hundred missionaries to teach the leading men of the Mongol Empire. This opportunity was missed. But in 1289 the Pope did send the Franciscan friar John of Montecorvino to the Mongol capital, Beijing. John apparently started a church there and had baptised 6000 people by 1305.

Around the same time, Eastern Christians were journeying west. In 1287, a Beijing-born Christian Uyghur named Sauma was welcomed in Rome. When some cardinals queried his theological soundness, Sauma replied 'The Holy Apostles ... taught us the Gospel, and to what they have delivered us we have clung until the present day'. This same emissary went on to serve Holy Communion to King Edward I of England in Bordeaux: an Uyghur Christian cleric from China sharing the Lord's Supper with an English King, back in the 13th century.

***

Despite all this contact and influence, the Christian movement in Central Asia became terminally weak during the later Mongol times. The Mongols, after laying waste to large parts of the Muslim world, increasingly often became Muslims themselves, and also less tolerant of Christians. The Church was always rather fragile – it had always been a movement among the ruling elite rather than the masses, it lacked indigenous Bible translations, and it was also theologically isolated from much of the rest of Christendom.

The last of the Central Asian conquering Khans, Tamerlane (or Timur-i-Leng, 'the Lame'), a convinced Muslim, was also the most savage of the conquerors and the most complete destroyer. His conquests began in 1358 and ended at his death in 1405. His destruction of Christian monasteries was particularly decisive. Afterwards, according to historian Stephen Neill:

_Everything of... Christian civilization [had] been swept away. East and West were more completely separated than they had ever been before; and when travel again became possible, from the Christian point of view everything had to be begun afresh._ ( _A History of Christian Missions_ , 1964 ed., p 95.)

***

A small principality named Moscow was the seed from which the next Central Asian Church grew. For four centuries, according to writer Peter Hopkirk, Russia expanded across Central Asia at a rate of 20,000 square miles a year. Russian Orthodox Christians became a Christian presence among the Central Asian peoples, who were now culturally Muslim.

Central Asia's fate was thus tied with Russia's and so the Central Asian states became Communist after the Russian revolution of 1917, and both Islam and Christianity were severely persecuted.

Under Stalin's grand schemes, millions of Central Asian people were taken out of their traditional nomadic life and herded onto giant state farms or _Kolkhozes_ \- and millions died.

Then in World War II, Stalin moved Germans, Ukrainians, Poles, Bulgarians and Moldavians from the invading German Army. He also pulled Koreans from the east into Central Asia. In these ways Stalin posted evangelicals – Russian and Ukrainian Baptists and Pentecostals, and German Lutherans and Mennonites – into a Central Asia that was lacking evangelical Christian witness. One of the 20th century's great enemies of the Christian faith, he unintentionally helped lay the foundations for the 21st century Central Asian Church.

***

In the early 1980s a small number of people around the world began to sense a call from God to serve as Christian workers among the Muslims of Central Asia.

In 1990 a networking meeting between missions interested in Central Asia attracted just 28 participants. Together, they knew of a dozen missions that supposedly wanted to serve in Central Asia. Only half a dozen of these actually were doing anything. Pooling their knowledge, they counted (on their fingers) the Turkic Christians they knew of in Russian or European churches. But they knew of no true Central Asian churches.

***

Then came the domino-like collapse of Communism between 1989 and 1991. After the crash, a number of the more Russified Central Asian people started openly attending the newly-free Russian, German or Korean churches.

The few missionaries who had been preparing, some of them for years, were quickly able to establish themselves. At the same time, Central Asia became the destination of choice for short-term volunteers of every religious stripe. The result was a sudden blooming of churches and mosques across the region, possibly at a rate of about ten mosques for every church.

***

Half a generation after those dramatic events, a more stable picture is emerging, roughly as follows.

_Corrupt governments and authoritarian rulers_. The Central Asian states took a variety of political paths after the fall of communism, mostly involving takeovers by former communist rulers. Tajikistan had a civil war that killed 50,000 people and led to a tenth of the population leaving the country. Turkmenistan's first president, who was surely exploring the borders of sanity, named the months and days of the week after his family members, and erected an enormous rotating gold-plated statue of himself.

Most of the Central Asian nations are now the kind of multi-party states that always re-elect the same president, though Kyrgystan has enjoyed its own peaceful revolution and has the most lively democracy. Kazakhstan is booming through oil wealth, but everywhere else is still poorer than they were in 1990.

_Resurgence of Islam._ This has two sides. On the one hand, many foreign-funded mosques have been built and many Muslim missionaries are diligently at work. Islam remains culturally ingrained as part of popular identity.

On the other hand, Central Asian Islam is dulled by generations of materialism, rather like the post-Christian West. It's superstitious and it's also unorthodox. It isn't hard to find Central Asian Muslims who will tell you they believe in Jesus, the old traditions, reincarnation, UFOs, and the healing power of crystals and pyramids.

_Religious repression_. Old communist habits die hard and while each of the Central Asian states theoretically has freedom of religion, all are frightened of extremist Islam. The laws designed against religious extremists trap the evangelicals also. Uzbekistan is consistently ranked as one of the world's ten worst persecutors of Christians, (see Open Doors World Watch List); Turkmenistan is not far behind it. Elsewhere, evangelical and Pentecostal Christians suffer incovenience at best, harrassment at worst.

_The shrinking, growing church._ In each country of Central Asia, the total number of Christians is shrinking, because of the emigration of ethnic Russians. However in each country the number of evangelicals and Pentecostals is growing, admittedly from a small base. Emerging, then, for the first time in a very long time, is an indigenous Central Asian church. Operation World counts around 15,000 local evangelicals in Kazakhstan, around 10,000 in Uzbekistan, and perhaps 1,000 or so in each of the smaller states.

# Chapter 5: The Persian World

There are many points of connection between Turkic Central Asia and Persian Central Asia, but Iran and its cultural sphere is a different world. Here is some of the scenery:

_Language_. People speaking the major languages of Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan (Farsi, Dari and Tajik) can understand each other. The Kurdish dialects and Pashto (also a language of Afghanistan) are close cousins. These languages are quite different from the Turkic family of languages – and incidentally, much closer to Indian and European languages.

_The Shi'a world_. Shi'ism is the smaller of the two portions into which Islam divided when there was a row over succession in its early days. Iran is the centre of Shi'ism. The Turkic world is mostly Sunni.

_The world of the Persian empires_. Persia has been a distinct empire for almost as long as the world has had empires. Wars between the Persians and the empires of the Mediterranean have been a feature of history for 2,500 years: Babylonians v Medo-Persians; Greeks v. Persians; Romans v. Parthians; Byzantines v. Sassanids; Ottomans v. Safavids. The Iraq/Iran war of the 1980s was a rumble on the same fault-line. The struggle between Saudi Arabia and Iran for leadership in the Muslim world is another.

_Sufism_. Sufism rejects the aloofness of God which is so central to Islam, and interprets the Qur'an mystically. Sufis consider their faith 'the religion of love' and 'the wine house' compared with the 'religion of law' you find in the mosque.

Muslims ought to be grateful to Sufism for its inspiration in holding Islam together in the terrible days of the Mongol invasions, and for fuelling much Islamic missionary activity.

Both Sunni and Shi'a Islam have produced forms of Sufism; but the great Sufi poets are Persian. Sufis typically have a high view of Jesus, his freedom, love, and union with God, regarding him as one of Sufism's 'perfect men'.

_One nation_. Iran, with a population of 80m, has successfully welded its ethnic groups into a united nation with a common language and an appetite for ethnic and religious tolerance. Iranians can be forgiven for thinking that they have deeper cultural roots, better poetry, a more elegant civilisation, a more settled national identity and a better spin on the Islamic traditions than any other part of the world. This same uniqueness has a flip side: a national sense of isolation and insecurity. Various peoples have taken their turn to be blamed for Iran's troubles – among them Romans, Mongols, Turks, British and Russians. The current incumbents are the Americans and Israelis.

Iran was also unique in the path it chose through the stormy waters of the 20th century. It tried broadly the Turkish route from the 1920s but then in 1979 was overwhelmed by radical Islamic revolution, one of the most dramatic changes of course for any country in the post-war period.

***

Iran's Islamic revolution brought militant Islam to the attention of the world's media in the 1980s and 1990s like nothing else. It was a story of accepted (Western) norms overthrown. Embassies were besieged. Child soldiers and women were recruited for the front lines in the Iraq/Iran war. A novelist, Salman Rushdie, famously received death threats for poking a Qur'anic sore spot. International terror groups were sponsored.

Yet the Revolution had its roots in the unjust (but pro-Western) policies of the previous Shahs. These brought oil wealth and new freedoms to an elite, but excluded everyone else.

Ayatollah Khomeini's death in 1989 removed the driver from the cab, and a revolutionary genius from the world, but the machine he built still rolls along.

***

The revolution cannot be called a success. Iran's politics is today about a religious elite clinging to power in the face of rejection and unpopularity from the masses. In 2009 fraudulent elections brought protests to the streets. Security forces killed dozens of demonstrators and arrested thousands.

Iranians have been free to leave their country, and two hundred thousand people emigrate each year. Many who remain struggle to make ends meet. One sympathetic observer described Iranians thus: 'Life is unfair, nothing good can last, one's sole obligations are to self and family. To survive and prosper you need a combination of luck, connections, sharp wits and few principles.'

Iranians have learnt to become skilful at being one thing when on public view in Iran, another when at home. Outwardly people conform. But, for example, in some parts of Tehran, when the working day is over, the Islamic dress is packed away; out of the cupboard come the illegal portable satellite dish or the DVDs.

Many Iranians today will tell you privately that the mullahs who are now in power have become as rich, corrupt and ruthless as the Shah whom they replaced. Iranians are disillusioned not just with the government but with Islam itself. One (obviously biased) Iranian Christian leader claimed that 'half of the population would desert Islam if they had the freedom to do so.'

## Iran's Church

So much for the country. What of the church?

Start with the ancient traditional churches, those found among communities like the Armenians, Syrians and Assyrians. Like so many Christian communities in the Muslim world, these churches co-exist fairly peacefully with their Muslim neighbours. They could be said to be inward looking and culturally remote from the majority community. They sometimes suffer discrimination. And they are slowly drifting into oblivion, largely through emigration. Iran's traditional Christian population was 4% at the beginning of 20th century, 0.5% at the end. It may have been 25% when the Arab invaders first arrived near the end of the first millennium.

***

Iran had been relatively open to receiving missionaries for the best part of 200 years until 1979, and it had received some illustrious ones. Henry Martyn, translator of the Persian New Testament in 1811 was one of the great missionary linguists. In the Victorian era, Protestant missionaries started institutions and churches in Iran, though, as elsewhere, relatively few Muslims signed up to the Christian faith. Victorian mission work was characterised more by causing upheavals (for good or ill) in the traditional churches.

In the 20th century, pioneering figures like the American Dr William Miller had a huge influence; even though he saw relatively few people turn to Christ, he trained them well. Christian leaders discipled by Miller became a vital part of the infrastructure for what was to follow.

Still by 1979 there had been no decisive movement to Christ among the Muslim community. The revolution ended formal missionary work in Iran, though in the few years of anarchy that followed the Shah's overthrow there was freedom, for the brave, to sell Bibles and Christian writings. Many of these printed materials still circulate in Iran today.

***

Out of the flood of refugees in the 1980s, many were welcomed and cared for by Christian humanitarian groups around the world. Thousands of these refugees have turned to Christ. Today you can find churches of Iranian former Muslims popping up in such unlikely places as Turkey, Pakistan, India as well as Western countries. Groups working among Iranian Christians estimate that 200,000 Iranians attend Persian-speaking churches outside Iran. A high proportion of these come from Muslim backgrounds.

Observers of the scene suggest a percentage of refugees fake a conversion experience, and exaggerate the religious persecution in Iran, the better to obtain asylum. That may be so. Many others have clearly found a genuine faith.

***

In the mid-1980s within Iran itself hundreds of people from Islamic backgrounds began turning to Christ. The reaction to this unprecedented leakage was brutal. In 1990, the Bible Society was closed down; church leaders were called in for questioning; restrictions were placed on church activities. The same year, Hussain Soodmand, an Assemblies of God pastor who had led many Muslims to Christ, was executed. Three years after that another prominent leader, Mehdi Dibaj, after nine years in jail, was sentenced to death for 'apostasy' from Islam. His case was given publicity through the efforts of the leader of the largest Protestant community in Iran, Haik Hovsepian-Mair. This led to a dramatic week in 1994, in which Dibaj was suddenly freed from prison and Hovsepian-Mair was kidnapped and murdered. A few months later Dibaj himself was killed. Shortly after Dibaj's death came the murder of Tateos Michaelian, a renowned scholar and translator, and a respected church leader.

This decapitation of the little Iranian Church ended the few years in which Christians could openly help interested Muslims in Iran turn to Christ. At the same time, a number of the remaining Christian leaders realized it was time to leave their country.

***

Yet the growth has continued and increased. Christian satellite TV stations broadcast to the forests of illegal satellite dishes that crowd apartment blocks in Iran. (Police recently removed 2,000 dishes in a single day.) Millions of Iranians access the internet and can find many resources. The Iranian Christian diaspora works hard to promote the gospel back home, and local Iranians are evangelizing and starting underground churches. Iran is a land of hunger and harvest for the gospel.

Operation World (2010) says that Christians of Muslim background have increased from around 500 in 1979 to at least 100,000 in 2010. This number is increasing fast, and may be too conservative.

# Chapter 6: South Asia

For a glimpse of South Asian Islamic civilization, visit the Taj Mahal, perhaps the world's most beautiful building. A tomb of white marble on a vast red sandstone plinth, flanked by two mosques, set in a marble-paved garden, it took 20,000 men and 1,000 elephants twenty years to build back in the seventeenth century. In an octagonal space at the centre, harsh sunlight is filtered and cooled like water by lattices and filigree-work studded with gems, until it splashes softly onto twin monuments to a Mughal emperor and his bride.

The Mughals, South Asia's Muslim conquerors, altered the skyline. Not just with architectural triumphs like the Taj Mahal or the palaces in Agra, Delhi and Lahore, or the gardens they built in the Vale of Kashmir. But also with poetry, the Urdu language, and a tradition of stable government that still resonates today (even if it doesn't actually happen). Many of today's Muslim communities of Pakistan, North India, Afghanistan and Bangladesh are the descendants of that empire.

***

Where did South Asia's Muslims come from? What is their story? And how did they get to be where they are today?

Islam arrived, as it usually does, by conquest and slow assimilation. A Shi'ite kingdom was established in what is now Sindh province of Pakistan in the ninth century. The region that is now Afghanistan was conquered in turn by several groups of Muslims. India suffered raids until Sultan Ghias al-Din of the Ghurid dynasty, a Turkish Muslim, seized much of North India and in 1206 established a sultanate in Delhi. This Delhi Sultanate expanded to include what is now Bangladesh.

The Mughal Empire itself dates from 1526 when Babur, a descendant of the great Mongol leaders Genghis Khan and Timur-i-Leng, captured Delhi. 'Mughal' means 'the Mongol' in both Arabic and Persian.

Babur was the first in a succession of able rulers. His grandson Akbar reorganized and extended the empire, setting the stage for the glittering rule of his son Jahangir, a noted patron of the arts, and then of his grandson Shah Jahan, the builder of the Taj Mahal, and of old Delhi, which used to be called Shah-Jahanabad.

***

The Mughal Empire was a fertile field for various religions: it is the heartland of Hinduism, and Buddhism had been born here. Akbar began looking for something beyond Islam, something in which different religious strands and insights could be united. He invited Catholic missionaries from the southern regions beyond his borders, and gave them freedom to speak to the Mughal court, even to the women in the harem. For a few years these Jesuits cherished the hope that this greatest of all Indian rulers might find his fulfilment in Christ and perhaps lead a Christian movement among his people. (Here, incidentally, was another example of Jesuit influence on Asian monarchs. Around the same time, fellow members of this elite order were expounding Catholicism to the Chinese, Japanese and Thai imperial houses.)

Akbar didn't jump. Instead, he founded his own monotheism, borrowing sacrifice from the Hindus, fire worship from the Parsees, prayer ritual from the Muslims and baptism from the Catholics. After his death, his religion was quietly abandoned by the Mughals.

***

Instead, Islam continued to flourish and spread. It happened that in Akbar's time the Ganges River, which every so often silts up and changes course, shifted east and plugged itself into one of Bangladesh's great rivers, the Padma. The land that is now Bangladesh suddenly became the recipient of billions of tonnes of free fertilizer in the form of Himalayan silt. Akbar made the most of this by tying Bengal politically much closer into the Mughal Empire, and by giving land grants to returnees from Mecca, preachers, and Sufi mystics called _pirs_. Much like the monks who had Christianized Europe in the first millennium, these pioneers brought Islam, cleared forests, taught new farming techniques, founded towns and were the source of literate civilization for the indigenous peoples.

***

Shah Jahan's son, Aurangzeb (1658-1707) was the last of the famous Mughal Emperors, the most 'Islamic' and the most ineffective. On his watch the Empire suffered rebellions and civil strife, stagnation and decline. Weakened, it was no match for the trading ambitions and incursions of the British-led East India Company (in those days, corporate raiders had their own armies). A series of battles and humiliations, starting with the Battle of Plassey in 1757 saw the carve-up of the Mughal Empire. The last trace of it disappeared in 1858.

The divide-and-conquer policies of British India tended to favour Hindus over Muslims (or so it was felt by the Muslim community). The relative powerlessness of the Sons of the Mughals led to the call for a separate Muslim South Asian state. So in 1947, the former British India regained its independence as two new countries, India and Pakistan. Twenty-four years later, the Bengalis broke away from the rest of Pakistan to form Bangladesh.

In this way the great South Asian Islamic empire suffered the same fate as the Ottomans further west: dazzling civilization, stagnation, division and loss, from ruler to ruled, rich to poor, leader to follower, within about ten generations.

Next we look at the Muslim-ruled fragments of the Mughal Empire, and the small Christian movement among them.

## Pakistan

With a 2010 headcount of 185 million people, Pakistan is the world's sixth most populated nation. Only Indonesia is home to more Muslims.

Whether in democracy or dictatorship, Pakistan has been governed poorly. Pakistan's politicians mostly come from the few thousand families of landlords who own and run Pakistan, and they have usually served themselves.

The Millennium Development statistics — UN measures of poverty — tell a terrible story. As of 2005, barely half the country's children were in primary school. 40% of the infants were underweight through poor nutrition. Half the country was illiterate. Half the people had to drink dirty water. Women's rights, especially rural women's rights, were a disaster. Air pollution had reached dangerous levels in the cities. Salt had ruined many of the fields. One child in ten died before her fifth birthday, even though each of the major causes of infant death could be cured or prevented. According to the World Health Organization, annual per capita expenditure of US$34 per year would buy a minimum package of essential health services in Pakistan. Despite being able to afford atomic weapons and to equip a vast army, the government was spending in 2005 a mere $4 per year on the health of each of its citizens.

***

Islamism, like communism in other countries and previous generations, offers a pure ideology to cure these ills and Islamists are seeking, by argument, by politics and by violence, to revolutionize Pakistan. At the time of writing hundreds of people are dying each year in attacks by radical Muslims on other Muslims and minority faiths. Government at the highest level speaks out against Islamism, but lower levels of power are characterized by endlessly-delayed court judgements from a judiciary at times afraid to make a ruling; and by violence against minorities at the hands of the police.

***

It's possible to remember a time when Islam was the cultural wallpaper of Pakistan but not a news story — more like a feature in National Geographic. Mosques and shrines were the locations for the annual round of festivals and feasts. You could observe a colourful routine of _qavvali_ music, processions, fairs, poetry, tradition and occultism, distinctively Pakistani but in essence rather similar to peasant religion around the world. Most of Pakistan's Muslims were of the rather lax _barelvi_ tradition, which frowns on Islamist political fanaticism. No longer. Today the more austere _deobandis_ and _wahabbis_ set the tone and have the ascendancy. Fasts are kept. Mosques are well-attended. Even people who, privately, would admit to being not very religious feel obliged to display their Islamic credentials.

***

This, briefly, is the context for the Church's life and witness. To pick out Pakistan's Christian community, we have to crank up the magnification a bit; perhaps the Christians are 2.5% of the population.

Zooming over the landscape, the main things we would see are Christian villages across the Punjabi plain, with names like 'Montgomerywala', named after a missionary, and 'Bethlehem', each with several tens of thousands of inhabitants. A minority of these 'Christians' are church-goers. We would see similar-sized Christian communities in some of the large urban slums.

Pakistan's cities host large church buildings in prominent places, usually owned by the Church of Pakistan or similar traditional denominations. Many schools, hospitals and colleges have Christian roots and have been run by the churches as an act of service to the people of Pakistan for nearly two centuries. (Many others, national treasures of learning and care, were nationalized in the 1960s and 1970s and are now run by Islamists.)

***

These communities and buildings are a kind of tide-mark in Pakistan, a reminder of the past. A hundred years ago, Pakistan (then part of India, of course) was seeing the rapid church growth that is nowadays more associated with nations like China.

It was largely a Protestant story, though Catholic missions had also made headway in parts of North India, around Lahore particularly. Protestant ministry began tentatively around 1834, after evangelicals in the British Parliament forced the East India Company to open their territories to missionaries. It grew in strength, and eventually saw a few people turn to Christ from an elite Muslim background.

After about a generation of this, it flowered into a movement that swept thousands into Christianity. The great turning happened among a group known as the Chuhras, who were Hindu outcastes, the sweepers and labourers at the very bottom of the pile.

Between around 1880 and 1930 the story of the gospel among the Chuhras was one of near-constant expansion, churches planted, disciples trained, and schools and clinics opened. Irrigation created new farmland and some of this was used to found villages for the new Christians — hence Montgomerywala and Bethlehem.

The start of the famous Sialkot conventions (set up first as teaching for the missionaries, later opened to everyone) belonged to this era. So did John 'Praying' Hyde, a man who was eventually trusting God that he would see four people turn to Christ each day as a result of his ministry. Hyde was an illustration of how a largely social phenomenon (the mass turning of oppressed peoples to the Christian faith) can be deepened into a movement of truly spiritual character through intercessory prayer.

So, most of Pakistan's Christian community were formerly Hindus, not Muslims. Some Muslims did turn to Christ, not least through the work of the Peshawar Mission and others, but there was never a mass movement of them. In the 1930s, the growth of the gospel among the Chuhras slowed to a halt. There hasn't been a mass-movement since.

Operation World now observes, 'Pakistan lies at the very heart of the unevangelized world ... Few countries, if any, present a greater challenge for missions.'

***

What characterizes the Christian movement today?

_Nominal._ Most of the Christian community appear to be Christians in name only.

_Dependent._ Reliance on overseas funds is a great problem in Pakistan. Perhaps something of this was inevitable in a Church that grew up among the poorest of the poor in colonial times. Church leadership can degenerate into struggles for power and prestige.

_Low status._ Perhaps half the Christians are labourers on farms, in brick-making plants, or on building sites. Another quarter are sweepers, cleaning the streets and handling dead bodies and garbage. Most of the rest also have low-caste backgrounds. Some of the children are the child-labourers for which Pakistan has become infamous.

A relatively small number of Christians have benefited from education somehow (especially the education of girls, which is more common in the Christian communities than in the Muslim), and now run small businesses or have joined a profession like engineering or medicine. They form the beginnings of a Christian middle class and they are respected in Pakistan. But they are not many.

_Persecuted._ The World Watch List for 2011 names Pakistan as the world's 11th-worst persecutor of Christians. The state is failing to protect minorities from what has become a domestic Islamist insurgency.

The religious news services like  Compass Direct serve up frequent stories of this worsening situation:

Hundreds of Muslims in Gujranwala on Saturday (April 30) attacked Christians' homes, a school and a Presbyterian church building after learning that police had released two Christians accused of "blasphemy" – amid reports of another alleged desecration of the Quran. (May 2, 2011)

Armed Muslims disrupted the worship service of a church outside Lahore on Sunday (May 29), cursing the congregation, smashing a glass altar and desecrating Bibles and a cross, Christian leaders said.

Police initially tried to protect the leader of the Muslim intruders, the nephew of a former Member of the Punjab Assembly (MPA), and instead of making arrests eventually pressured Christians to accept an apology from the accused, they said. (June 1, 2011)

At least 10 Christian families in a village in Pakistan's Punjab Province have fled their homes after a throng of ... Muslims accused a Christian of blaspheming Islam (June 10, 2011).

Pakistan's so-called blasphemy laws, introduced by the former Islamist dictator Zia ul-Haq, prescribe death for insulting the prophets of Islam, life imprisonment for defiling the Qur'an, and 10 years behind bars for offending someone's religious feelings. Even though they are not widely used (they were applied against just 47 Muslims and eight Christians in 2009) they cast a long shadow of fear.

Government at the senior level encourages religious harmony and is probably embarrassed by these laws, but is cowed by the violence of their supporters. In January 2011 the Governor of Punjab, who had publicly spoken out for a Christian victim of the blasphemy laws, was assassinated by his own bodyguard. The following March, the only Cabinet-level Christian in the government, Shabhaz Batti, a vocal critic of the blasphemy laws, was gunned down outside his mother's house, with his bodyguards nowhere to be seen. In each case the killers were extreme Muslims. Forty thousand Muslims gathered in Karachi in support of the dead governor's killer.

And even when blasphemy laws are not applied, mob violence can have the same effect as if they were.

***

There are other parts to the picture of the church in Pakistan.

Disillusionment with the excesses of radical Islam has led to a trickle of people turning to Christ and finding fulfilment in him. A number have met Christ through dreams and visions. Radio ministries, among others, note that more than half the responses come from the non-Christian majority, expressing a hunger for an encounter with God not offered by the secular West or the Islamists. Some congregations have been formed entirely from the ministry of gospel radio and have never met other Christian groups within Pakistan. I have also heard of members of the Taliban turning to Jesus. In the cities, where things are a little freer, there is a quiet movement in which people of Muslim and of Christian background meet and worship Christ together in growing, independent, urban evangelical congregations. Add all that up, however, and it is still true to say that few new believers from a Muslim background manage to become permanently part of a living Christian community.

Pakistan still gives visas to Christian missionaries and though many Western expatriates have left, some Asians have replaced them. People who work there are keen to emphasize another story beyond the headlines of lawlessness and the power of militant extremism. One told me:

So the West has heard about the persecution and the pain, and the perception of Pakistan is that it is a dangerous country ... They haven't heard that Islam means we can talk about prayer. They haven't heard all these other aspects of Muslim society ... There is a tremendous opportunity being missed, which is just to be there and make a few English-speaking friends ... I see it that God has given a tremendous opportunity ... we can become like the Daniels or the Nehemiahs, or interact with the Daniels, the Nehemiahs and Esthers.

## Bangladesh

As we've seen, East Pakistan broke away to become Bangladesh in 1971, and it's hard to imagine any nation having a worse start in life.

Just a few months before the split, a cyclone and tidal wave drowned 260,000 people. The independence war itself claimed thousands of lives. Famine followed.

Dr Toni Hagen, the Swiss chief of UN operations wrote at the time: 'Disaster relief operations in the past have no comparison with the magnitude of the task in Bangladesh. The infrastructure in transport and communications is totally wrecked, the industries are not operational.' The US Department of State under Henry Kissinger famously labelled Bangladesh an 'international basket case'.

The high-profile work of NGOs in Bangladesh dates from that time. Non-Governmental Organizations have grown in expertise over the years and have become a strong supplement to government provision. Nearly all secondary education, half the primary education, and many of the health services in Bangladesh, for example, are run by NGOs.

Among the NGOs is the famous Grameen Bank, a secular operation founded by a Muslim, Muhammed Younis, in 1983. It developed micro-loans for groups of poor women and at the last count had 2.4m members.

Many other groups have followed its example and now 12m women are involved in micro-credit schemes. The loans are enough to buy a few chickens, say, or a mobile phone that can be rented out to others in the village. Profits from these small businesses add the vital pennies to households that keep children in school and stop them dying of preventable diseases. Micro-credit also frees people from the tyranny of the traditional money-lender.

Other agencies have brought clean water, sanitation, new agricultural practices, rural electricity, appropriate technology, the manufacture of fairly traded craft goods, leadership training and much else to Bangladesh.

Economic growth also started to have a big impact. During the 1990s, Bangladesh began redeveloping its garment industry and grew rapidly. A report by the British NGO Christian Aid said:

The garment trade ... has provided more jobs for women than the country has ever previously generated. And the sector has given thousands of women not just the chance to work, but also previously inaccessible levels of self-reliance and confidence.

'As hard as it is,' says economist Jeffrey Sachs, 'this life is a step on the way to economic opportunity that was unimaginable in the countryside in generations past.'

So Kissinger's State Department was wrong. The 'basket case' now has lower child mortality than India. It has around 100% primary school enrolment. Population growth has slowed dramatically. Bangladesh is currently one of the few nations expected to meet most of its Millennium Development Goals, which specify reductions in various measures of poverty by 2015.

***

Here are some of the challenges-in-progress:

_1. The land_. Bangladesh is both blessed and cursed with water and silt. Most of the water that falls on the Himalayas, and most of the soil that leaches from the Ganges plain slops into Bangladesh. Everything grows here, and it's possible to harvest three crops a year. But each year somewhere between a quarter and two-thirds of this flat land is flooded. Every so often everything people build or plant is washed away. The land is also a happy breeding ground for malaria and water-borne diseases.

_2. Poison._ Bangladesh is the site of the largest mass-poisoning in human history. Starting in the 1970s, millions of simple wells called tube-wells were installed throughout Bangladesh, on the advice of NGOs. These vastly reduced water-borne diseases and saved the lives of many millions, especially children. Unfortunately, at least a quarter of the tube-wells extract water that is poisoned with arsenic, which occurs naturally at unsafe levels throughout Bangladesh, and can't be smelt, tasted or seen. Many millions may in the future die of arsenic poisoning, and as yet there is no universal solution to hand — filters are expensive, for example.

_3. Government._ Bangladesh's government, though democratic, is often seen as weak, bullied from without by NGOs and donor-countries, and corrupt within.

_4. Islamism._ Saudi and other Gulf-state charities between them have started as many as 60,000 Islamic schools across Bangladesh. Some of these will nurture a militant Muslim community, which has brought hostility to Christians.

## The Church in Bangladesh

The Church's obligation to Bangladesh surely includes both helping lift the yoke of poverty, and providing opportunity for people to become followers of Jesus within their own cultural setting. Here too the story is a hopeful and surprising one. A few notes first:

1. _Religion in Bangladesh doesn't follow neat categories_. This is true everywhere in the world, but especially so here. The encylopaedias will tell you that Bangladesh is something like 85% Muslim and 12% Hindu and 3% Christian (less than 0.5% evangelical). But actually the picture is more blurred than that.

One of our interviewees told us of an old man who was looking at a big idol canopy. Under this was a statue that almost any Hindu would recognize as Kali. Underneath her was another figure (perhaps Shiva). When they asked the Muslim who he thought the statue was, he explained, 'I think that's Ma Fatima and Ali.' (Fatima was Muhammad's daughter. Ali was her husband and the central figure in Shi'a Islam.) Many of the 'Muslims' have more than a hint of Hindu about them. As we will see in a moment, some of the Christians have more than a hint of Muslim about them.

2. _The land has been home to a Christian community for several centuries._ The first missionaries of modern times came along with Portuguese traders. A Portuguese church was consecrated on January 1st, 1600. The Bengali Christian community dates from then, arising mostly from intermarriage with Portuguese settlers. (Some Bangladeshis today still have Portuguese surnames like D'Silva and D'Souza.)

By 1682, the Catholic community was around 14,000-strong. The most prominent early leader of the Protestant missions movement, William Carey, arrived in Kolkata in 1793 with a call to preach Christ to the Bengali people. Of all the Bible translations he attempted, the Bengali was the one on which he lavished the most time, and it still forms the basis of one of the main Bible translations into Bengali.

***

The story of the Christian movement today can be briefly divided into three:

1. The historic denominations

2. The NGOs

3. Christian movements in the Muslim community.

_1. The historic denominations._ Bangladeshi Christianity, like Pakistani, is made up mostly of people who came from a tribal-religions or a Hindu background. For example, in the late 19th century, a mass movement in the north around Mymensingh and then among tribal peoples in Chittagong led to the formation of the Baptist Union of Bangladesh.

These traditional denominations face many challenges. There is much division, much of it along ethnic lines (30+ denominations for a Protestant community of 230,000 people seems rather too many). Dependency on foreign donors is a problem. So is a lack of full-time, godly leaders. Like many old-established denominations around the world, the churches need prayer for their renewal and fresh growth.

_2. The NGOs._ Christian groups run 500 primary schools, fifty or so secondary schools and a handful of colleges, as well as around a dozen hospitals and over thirty dispensaries. Christians run some of the Credit Unions (and claim to have invented the idea). Overall something like half the NGOs in the country are set up by, partnering with, or significantly influenced by, Christian groups.

Here's a taste of Christian ministry selected almost at random — this one is from the agency SIM International:

Some of our partner farmers own only narrow strips of land surrounding their homes — useless land if it's infertile or too wet or if the owner lacks access to good seeds or the knowledge to grow crops. All of that changes when he joins CDP [SIM's community development programme]. The Agricultural Field Worker will help him to discover the best way to turn his land into a productive garden, perhaps by filling low land, adding compost, selecting the right seeds, and spacing plants properly.

Each field worker helps 120-150 partner farmers. As the partner farmers' yield increases, they might earn enough to rent additional land. It is fantastic to watch their joy as they proudly show off a fruitful garden on land that once produced little or nothing.

_3. Christian movements in the Muslim community._ In the past thirty years, thousands of people from a Muslim background have become followers of Christ in Bangladesh. The highest estimates of their numbers (probably exaggerations) reach up to half a million. Even this figure is tiny compared with the more than 200m Bengalis in the world. But it is significant. Bangladesh's community of believers who come from a Muslim background may be second in size only to Indonesia's. Ever since 1971, compared with Muslims worldwide, Bangladeshis have been unusually receptive to the Christian gospel. In part this is surely due to the circumstances of the nation's birth, which did not set Islam in a good light. It may also owe something to the traditions of religious mixing and tolerance, and to a Sufi-inspired openness to spiritual experiences. Perhaps Bangladeshis also see something of how the Christians have given service to the nation.

Whatever the reason, for thirty years, people have been coming to Christ.

The result of these thirty years of growth is that Bangladesh now has a number of experienced, mature local believers from a Muslim background who are able to travel around the country, preaching the gospel. The availability of a good, new Bible translation has also helped.

***

Some of these local evangelists are pioneering radical new approaches to sharing the love of Christ. Use of the Qur'an is central. From several passages, but essentially from some verses in Surah Al-Imran 3:42-55, evangelists establish key themes about Jesus:

Born without inheriting Adam's evil nature

Lived a holy and sinless life

Allah gave him power over life and death

'Isa traveled the straight path ( _Tarika_ ) to Allah

'Isa is now with Allah

Having established all this, evangelists then ask:

'Can 'Isa help us get to heaven? ... Sura Al-Imran 3:42-55 is a special message from Allah. This wonderful message tells about a prophet that came from heaven, lived as a man and then went back to home in heaven. Yes ... 'Isa can help us.'

Sometimes they show the _Jesus_ film also, and while the movement starts with the Qur'an, it also shows (from the Qur'an) the need for people to read previous holy books such as the gospels.

It is a movement with a wide and welcoming front door so far as the Islamic community is concerned, but which takes people along a path to find a clear and unambiguous fulfilment in Jesus Christ — hence the names for the followers of this movement, ' _Pakka_ ' (complete) Muslims or ' _Isahi_ ' (Jesus-) Muslims.

***

It is fair to be rather cautious about the impact of the Isahi Muslim movement. Not only may the claimed numbers be flawed, but the movement itself is not without serious internal problems and divisions. However it is a fascinating and significant strand in a wider story of Bangladeshi Muslims beginning to find fulfilment in Jesus Christ.

There are places in Bangladesh where a Muslim leader or _pir_ has had an encounter with Christ and is taking the whole mosque somewhere on a journey towards trusting Christ. This is not quite the same as 'whole villages turning to Christ' (which is how it may be reported sometimes). Islamic elements, and hazy doctrine, remain.

Quite likely many of the people being influenced by the gospel in Bangladesh are somewhere in the twilight zone between what might be recognized as 'Islamic' and what might be recognized as 'trusting and following Christ'.

Bangladeshis, who see a quarter of their land flooded every year, with islands moving downstream and rivers changing course every time the floods drain, can be excused for being less bothered about neat demarcation lines than category-hungry Westerners with their statistics and charts.

Scholar Richard Eaton reckons that Islam spread through the region bit by bit: people first incorporated a few Muslim elements into their existing beliefs and practices, then a few more, and eventually were more Muslim than Hindu and came to see themselves as such. This is not a very Western idea of how to transfer the gospel into new communities. It may be how it is happening in Bangladesh, however. I think it is right to say that masses of Muslims in Bangladesh are on a journey to a radical submission to, and trust in, God through the One they know as Isa and we know as Jesus.

## Afghanistan

Afghanistan was one of the handful of countries that began the third Christian millennium without an official or visible Church. The indigenous Church that once existed died out many centuries ago. But a new Church is being born.

***

Afghanistan is far from any sea, isolated and mountainous. Its mountain valleys are easy to defend, but hard to conquer or unite.

It is an 'anthropologist's playground', on the join between South Asia and Central Asia with Middle Eastern influence thrown in. Though Pushtuns (who are Sunni Muslims) make up the largest minority, it is also home to Central Asian and Iranian peoples — Uzbek, Tajik — as well as other indigenous ethnic groups, of which the biggest are the Hazara. And two dozen smaller groups.

Afghan cultures track its landscape: deep closed-in valleys, at times amazingly luxuriant, but fundamentally inward-looking and hard to find a way into or out of. Let's look at Pushtun culture in particular.

Pushtun (like all the traditional cultures of Afghanistan) is an honour and shame culture. Your honour is your good name, your family's moral standing, everything you stand for and embody.

Honour is weighty, it demands everything; yet it is also fragile. Some scholars talk of honour as the 'glass of life', like a precious vase. Once broken, it's ruined forever and can't be mended. (Readers of Jane Austen will recognize a similar view of 'virtue' in early nineteenth-century England.)

An honour culture leads people to heights of generosity, magnanimity, bravery and sacrifice. Anthropologists often portray the Pushtuns as the most hospitable people on earth, making house-room for complete strangers, burying guests in mounds of food. At the same time they are fearsome warriors who have repelled colonial invasions for generations.

Honour is always family honour, which means Pushtuns will invariably unite in family groups, under the strict rule of the family patriarch.

Preserving honour can lead to revenge killings and bloodfeuds. Honour demands that every slight or offence must be avenged. A Pushtun proverb says, 'He is not a Pushtun who does not give a blow for a pinch.' In 2003 a news agency reported on a neighbourly dispute that started between one person's chicken and another person's dog and ended with three people being killed.

***

What does all this mean for people seeking to introduce the Christian gospel?

1. Kinship ties have been essential for survival through Afghan's turbulent history. When embracing a new faith is seen as betraying the family, trouble will follow. Fear of violent, vengeful relatives is a powerful force in Afghanistan.

2. When the head of the household embraces the gospel, it is likely to take root in the entire household. Once started, therefore, believing households may be hard to eradicate.

3. Building fellowships that transcend family and clan bonds is a major challenge for prayer.

***

Afghanistan's recent history is a replay of an often recurring Afghan story: foreign meddling, grand plans and puppet rulers _versus_ clan culture led by warlords. The country has known massive destruction and war-weariness and a grim experience of extreme Islam. A poor but self-sufficient country has been turned into an extremely poor and dependent one.

The current chaos and confusion, however, offer a unique opportunity for a Church to flicker into life before anybody notices and stamps it out.

***

Eastern Christians lived in Afghanistan for several centuries during the first millennium. For example, a bishop named Afrid, representing parts of what is now southern Afghanistan, is recorded as taking part in the Eastern Church's Council of Dadyeshu in 424AD. The Afghan city of Herat had a bishop by 500AD. But successive incursions by Muslim rulers — Saljuks, Samanids, Ghuris, Ghaznevids — eventually led to Muslim domination, and the eclipse of the Church.

In the second millennium, some Christian witness came from small communities of Eastern Christians, particularly Armenians. Along with the Jews, the Armenians were the bankers and traders in the Muslim world. By the time of British rule in India, Armenian traders were still living in Afghanistan and maintaining their Christian faith, even having their own chapel in the Afghan king's stronghold in Kabul. In 1839, Rev G Pigott, a British Army chaplain, baptized two Armenian children there, the Armenians by this time having no priest of their own.

The Armenians claimed to have once baptized an Afghan thief, who robbed the church, but kept falling back as he tried to climb out of the roof. After the third attempt, he apparently decided he was fighting against God and handed himself in.

The British Army destroyed the chapel during the Anglo-Afghan war of 1879. The Armenian community departed and the chapel was never rebuilt.

In the early 1800s a request was made for workers from the Baptist Missionary Society to go to the remote Afghan province of Nuristan. Mountaineers were especially welcome. Unfortunately they never made it and the Nuristanis, who until then had held their own local beliefs, were forcibly converted to Islam.

In 1951, J Christy Wilson, an Iranian-born American, arrived with his wife in Afghanistan. He taught English and they served in a remarkable pioneering effort for 22 years. Wilson's wife Betty established two schools for the blind, and they started a church in their home.

Wilson's church, which was mostly for expatriates, grew. President Eisenhower visited Afghanistan in 1959 and via Eisenhower's pastor, Wilson asked Eisenhower to see if a church couldn't be built for Christian diplomats in Afghanistan. (A mosque had just been constructed in Washington for Muslim diplomats, so this was a reciprocal gesture.) The King agreed, and the church was built. Various miracles were involved in its construction, including a gift of $20,000 from an American Christian who was travelling the world giving away her fortune to good causes. The church finally opened on May 17 1970, its alabaster cornerstone inscribed with the words 'To the glory of God, "Who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood".'

Around the same time, some of the people the Wilsons were working with were becoming followers of Jesus. When the government discovered this, they closed down the Institutes for the Blind and gave the Wilsons three days to leave the country. They also proposed demolishing the church. A German Christian businessman named Hans Mohr went to the Mayor of Kabul to ask that the church be spared, and boldly told the Mayor, 'If your Government touches that House of God, God will overthrow your Government.'

It was prophetic. On June 14 1973, despite the protests of Christians around the world, the government bulldozed the church. Just over a month later, the King was deposed in a coup.

***

In the violent chaos that engulfed Afghanistan for most of the following three decades, living in Afghanistan became extremely dangerous. Christian presence didn't entirely cease though. One group that stayed through this dark period was the International Assistance Mission, which is an umbrella organization for many Christian charities, and which had its origins alongside the ministry of the Wilsons. They do not prosletyze, but they serve in Christ's name. In their approximately half-century of service, IAM members have brought eye-care to perhaps 5m Afghans.

IAM members tell stories of walking through their apartments each morning, tidying up the previous night's stray bullets. Some IAM workers had their homes raided and their possessions taken by soldiers. They were threatened at gunpoint. They saw people killed by shells as they walked along the street.

In August 2010 eight foreign IAM workers and two Afghans were killed after one of their two-yearly trips to bring a portable eye-clinic to Nuristan. The killings, which were probably carried out by a roving band of gunmen rather than the Taliban, were widely mourned in Afghanistan.

***

Millions of Afghans fled the country during the years of conflict, usually going to refugee camps in Pakistan or Iran. People found Christ there. Both Pushtun-speakers and Dari-speakers were becoming Christians. For a period, Pushtun and Dari congregations met under the umbrella of existing Pakistani churches, with remarkable things happening among them — open preaching of the gospel and worship. Elements of this have survived the test of time.

Many Afghan believers who emigrated to Western countries are active in their faith and seek to spread the message to their own people. A few Afghan fellowships have developed around the world. Some of the Christian refugees have returned to Afghanistan along with millions of their compatriots.

***

The emerging Church of Afghanistan: what's it like? It's unofficial and scattered. Observers speak of hundreds of Christians, living in the main urban centres. But either they are solitary Christians, or perhaps a small household meeting together. Most of the Christians don't know each other. It's dangerous to be a Christian in Afghanistan and believers can be reluctant to meet.

In a nation that is still forming its views on religious freedom and pluralism, the status of Afghan believers in the national consciousness is yet to be determined. The second Afghan Christian church building in modern times was destroyed by its landlord in 2010 (though chapels do exist in foreign military camps).

Also in 2010, the popular private TV channel Noorin caused a stir by showing old video footage of Afghan Christians being baptized and worshipping. One politician called for the Christians' public execution and demonstrations were staged in several cities. (Other Muslims opposed these protests). Some Afghan Christians had to flee their homes.

One recent Easter Day, over 100 Afghans worshipped together in secret: an ordinary-sized congregation in most of the world, but an unprecedented event in Afghanistan. It seems the Afghan Church has started out on a long road.

# Chapter 7: _Indonesia_ and the Malay world

Think of a necklace of islands draped through the shallow tropical waters between Asia and Australia: the Malay Archipalego. It takes five hours to fly from one end to the other, further than the distance between New York and Los Angeles. History and politics has divided these volcanic islands, and the family of peoples who inhabit them, among several nations: The Philippines, Malaysia, East Timor, the rich enclaves of Singapore and Brunei – and the regional giant, Indonesia.

Geographers, presumably with a job for life, have mapped more than thirteen thousand islands that make up Indonesia's _tanah air kita_ – 'our land and water.' Six thousand of these islands have people on them; these people speak six hundred languages and dialects, more than the United Nations has delegations.

The island of Java is the pendant on the necklace, Indonesia's centrepiece, with 140m people wedged into a humid, fertile land the size of England or Alabama – twice the size of Tasmania. Like the English in Britain or the white Protestants in the USA, the Javanese set the economic, political, and cultural tone for the whole country.

Strung out either side from Java, and curled back over the top, the necklace is heavy with jewels. Irian, Kalimantan and Sumatra are three of the world's five biggest islands, until recently uncut nuggets of creation: only Brazil hosts more species of mammal than Indonesia, for example.

***

Only three nations supply more people to the world than Indonesia (China, India, and the USA): one person in every thirty on earth is Indonesian.

Free from colonial rule since 1945, the country is a tangle of sprouting life and impenetrable problems. Yet economic, political and material development (albeit subject to catastrophic setbacks like the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami) has been the dominant theme in Indonesia's recent story.

All the measures of material development have moved impressively in the right direction in the past two generations: Illiteracy rates – for example – have plunged: about 90% of the population can now read. Life expectancy has increased; child health has improved dramatically. Infrastructure for a prosperous nation has been put in place – roads and phone-lines; factories, schools and hospitals; elements of a trained and skilled workforce; a commitment to religious and cultural tolerance.

***

You can make two statements about Indonesia's majority faith and both of them are true.

1 Indonesia is home to the largest Muslim community in the world.

2 Indonesia is not a Muslim country.

I found an Invocation Card tucked next to the flight magazine when I first visited Indonesia. A sort of divine safety leaflet, it suggested prayers for believers from each of Indonesia's recognized faiths – the Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, 'Katoliks', and 'Protestans'.

Protestants were encouraged to pray the first seven verses of Psalm 108. ('Your faithfulness reaches to the skies.') The Catholic prayer roamed the Bible in search of the appropriate metaphor:

Long ago you saved the children of Israel who crossed the sea with dry feet . . .

We beg You, bless us with a safe trip, with good weather. Bless us with the guidance of your angels . . .

The Islamic prayer was pragmatic:

. _. . Oh Allah, shower us with Your blessings and protect us on this journey from any hardship or danger and protect also our family and our wealth._

***

Indonesia's unique religious laws were invented, or even, as some have claimed, 'unearthed' by the first post-colonial President, Sukarno. The principle – written into Indonesia's national ideology, Panca-Sila – is simple. The state endorses faith in God, as expressed in the major religions. Every Indonesian has to belong to one of the five prescribed faiths. And the faiths have to coexist peacefully. Indonesia is a religious country, not an Islamic one.

By law, everyone – everyone the Government has reached, that is, not counting the tens of thousands who still cut their way through the rainforests, innocent of what awaits them – must be a Muslim, a Protestant Christian, a Catholic Christian, a Hindu, or a Buddhist. One of the five leading religious global brands has to go on your ID card, your KTP.

It follows that words like 'Muslim' and 'Christian' and 'Buddhist' are none too reliable as pointers to what a person is really all about. Some who are badged as Christians or Muslims would be recognizable by fellow believers as the real thing. Others, bearing the same labels, would not.

* * *

Dispense with the labels, however, plunge into what people really believe, and you find another, exotic, spiritual world.

Many peoples have settled in Indonesia over the centuries: first animists; then Hindus and Buddhists; then Assyrian Christians; then Muslims (initially Sufi Muslims, the mystics); and finally the Europeans, who brought Catholicism, Protestantism, communism and materialism.

If you believe the KTP identifications, Muslims would be about 86% of the population, Christians perhaps 11%. In truth, neither the Qur'an nor Christ has made such a decisive impact. The earlier beliefs have the deeper roots. One Christian worker said this:

Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, materialism: all have swept through Indonesia and been absorbed like spices, adding piquancy to the sauce but not really changing the basic nature of the dish.

Another described the faith in one province, Maluku, as 'animism with a frosting of Christianity.' Nor would you guess the official religious affiliations from the treasures in the National Museum in Jakarta. There you'll find Indian gods, Buddhas, spirit-masks, and a treasure trove of golden cups, daggers and knives. Indonesian Islam has created little great art: nor has the Christian faith; magic and mysticism have.

***

If Indonesians can be generalized at all, it wouldn't be as Muslims or Christians or the rest, but as mystics or perhaps occultists.

At some Christian churches in Halmahera, worshippers will sacrifice a chicken and pour its blood around the building before the service begins.

The Bataks of Sumatra, Lutherans, are one of the world's great Protestant peoples. Yet Batak graves are sometimes sited in the middle of a rice field, echoing the traditional belief that departed spirits linger and may help boost the crops. Some Bataks will go to the _dukun_ , the spirit healer, for cures. A child may be baptized wearing good-luck charms.

In north-west Sumatra, the Acehnese people are perhaps the most strictly orthodox Muslims in all Indonesia; Aceh province has been called `the doorstep of Mecca.' Yet even there observers report:

Islam is strong [among the Acehnese] but exists alongside an 'heretical, pantheistic mysticism'; magic is significant in agricultural practice; interpretation of dreams is widespread and sickness is attributed to evil spirits and cured by magic.

What another scholar wrote concerning the Sundanese of West Java (who, with a population of 34m are the largest unreached people in the world), could be true of all: 'Islam dictates how [the Sundanese] act, not what they believe: the face of the monolith is Islam but the mind and heart is the Sundanese _adat_ [tribal custom].'

***

Central to Indonesian mysticism are dreams. Magazines run pages of advice from dream agony aunts. Dreams are taken seriously and sometimes contain important information.

This (to the West) bizarre channel sometimes carries Christian messages too and has helped spread God's kingdom in Indonesia. Two stories of people who subsequently became well-established Christians:

One girl had a dream and asked her Muslim friends to interpret it. They couldn't, so she asked a Western Christian worker whom she knew. This was the dream:

I was standing in front of a wall, and the other side of the wall was a lovely garden – indescribably lovely. I tried climbing the wall, but it was too high. Then I tried walking around the wall, first one way, then the other. Finally I came to an iron gate, but it was padlocked. I picked up a twig and tried to spring the padlock, but I couldn't. I started to cry.

Suddenly, a man in white touched me on the shoulder. 'Trust me', he said. 'I'll take you through the gate.'

She asked the missionary, 'Do you know who the man in white was?'

A second story: a village evangelist, who for years had asked God for a wife, suddenly announced to a Western friend, 'I'm going to get married!'

'Wonderful!' he replied. 'Who is she?'

'Oh, I haven't met her yet,' the evangelist replied. 'But I had a dream about her.'

In his dream, the evangelist had seen a bird alight on his shoulder (which he understood as a symbol of marriage). He then followed the bird as it fluttered through a part of the jungle he didn't know, until it stopped at a house in a clearing.

Two weeks later this evangelist found himself in the part of the bush he had dreamt about. Remembering the way from his dream, he walked through the jungle until he found the clearing and the house. He knocked on the door and asked the head of the household, a Muslim,

'Do you have any daughters?'

'Yes, I have one.'

He explained the dream and asked for permission to marry the man's daughter (a girl whom he had not yet even met).

'Yes,' replied the father. 'Would you like to meet her?'

'Yes.'

The girl was brought, and the evangelist told her the dream and asked her to marry him.

'Yes,' she replied.

'But you'll have to become a Christian,' added the evangelist.

'OK.'

. . . and she did.

***

The way Christianity developed in Indonesia reads like a compact history of Christianity in the non-Western world. You can summarize it under just four heads: Assyrian Christians; Catholic colonizers; Protestant colonizers; independence and further growth.

Arab sources tell us that Assyrian Christians could be found on Java and Sumatra from as early as 645 AD, subsequently dying out as did nearly all Assyrian Christianity. Much later came the Europeans, for whom the `East Indies' meant the `Spice Islands' and fabulous opportunities to make a fast _escudo_ or _guilder_. The Portuguese (and hence Catholicism) came first (1500 or so); the Dutch (who were Protestants) took over (1600 or so); and apart from a hiccup in the early 1800s, Dutch rule in various forms continued until the Japanese invasion during the Second World War.

Christianity came along with the colonists, though it was not until the early nineteenth century that the first full-time Protestant missionaries got going.

***

The Dutch were reluctant to let missionaries work among the tribes and regions of Indonesia that were already Muslim. The missionaries had to concentrate on the animists.

These pioneers saw spectacular movements to Christ and you could fill many a Victorian biography with their daring deeds. The brilliant Ludwig Ingwer Nommensen came to Batakland in north Sumatra in 1862, in danger of becoming a dessert: two previous missionaries to the area had ended their careers in a cooking pot. Undeterred – and typical of his age – he foresaw a day when:

Where stand now only uncultivated hills, I see fair gardens and flourishing woods, and countless well-ordered villages of Christians. I see Batak teachers and pastors standing at the desk and in the pulpit to teach and to preach.

He lived to see his vision come true. Nommensen found that, when the leaders of a longhouse converted, the rest of the tribe would often follow: 52 Batak Christians in 1866, for example, became 103,000 in 1911. This was a pattern repeated on other islands: Sulawesi, Halmahera, Ambon. The global population of Lutherans and other flavours of Reformed Christianity was greatly boosted by these nineteenth century people-movements.

***

The Indonesian Church spent most of the twentieth century becoming indigenized and indispensable. Christians played a notable part in nation-building.

The two greatest convulsions in Indonesia's recent history until the present days were, the struggle for independence at the end of the Second World War and the failed Communist coup in 1965 that brought former President Suharto to power. Indonesian Christians shone as forces for good in both these trials.

In the independence struggles (up to 1949), Christians died alongside other Indonesians fighting the Dutch, and buried for ever the idea that the Church was a colonial religion.

In 1965 an attempted Communist coup followed years of hyperinflation and poverty. Suharto, at that time an army general, led the forces that defeated the coup. An estimated 300,000 to 400,000 alleged Communists were slain in the following months. The Christians emerged from the chaos with a better reputation than other groups. Some sheltered people in danger and saved many lives.

The Church grew fast in the years following the failed coup. 1.1% of Indonesians were Protestant in 1900; this is unofficially around 16% by 2010.

At the same time – starting in West Timor somewhat before the attempted coup – was the `Indonesian revival'. It was real, though it never covered the whole of Indonesia. Nominal, syncretistic churches were transformed in dramatic seasons of repentance. Some people who experienced the revival served God all over the archipelago, strengthening churches.

Here's the testimony of one leader from Java who also experienced revival at that time:

In 1967 our Bible College experienced the visitation of the Holy Spirit. For two whole months academic work came to a standstill. Classes were cancelled as the whole student body prayed together with the staff and we experienced the convicting power of the Holy Spirit and his cleansing from sin and from occult bondages. The Holy Spirit then mightily anointed the teams going forth throughout all of Indonesia, from Sabang, North Sumatra, in the western part of Indonesia, to the Moluccas in the eastern part, and from Sangir Talaud, in the northern part, to Timor, in the southern part. The Gospel teams, consisting of two, three or five members each, one hundred in total (both staff and students), were used by the Lord to bring the fire of the Holy Spirit everywhere they went.

***

Church numbers (especially in Irian and Kalimantan) also swelled because pork is unclean in Islam but not in Christianity.

After 1965, Panca-Sila was enforced with zeal. Everyone had to have one of the Big Five religions. Persuading some of Indonesia's animist tribes to forsake pig-keeping to become Muslims was not a strategy for growth. Animists were eager to have `Christian' put on their KTP instead – regardless of whether they believed any of it (apart from the bits about pork).

Still other factors caused the churches to fill.

_Education_ : For most of the time that Indonesia has been a republic, the Christians have had the best schools.

_Image_ : The Church has had the image of being somehow the modern choice of faith: better than the animism of the jungle or the Islam of the village.

_Marriage:_ Laws promoting religious harmony in Indonesia seek to ensure that people marry within their faith community. In practice – because almost any marriage is better than no marriage in many Indonesian cultures – lots of people convert to get married. Christians have become Muslims, and Muslims have become Christians. There have even been cases like one of a Muslim marrying a Hindu and both of them becoming Christians.

***

Foreign missionaries, too, saw a huge response. One missionary team, for example, systematically evangelized an area of Java containing three-and-a-half million people between 1966 and 1970, planting churches throughout the area. Every Sunday people were responding to the gospel. It wasn't unusual to walk into a village, preach the gospel message, hand out leaflets, and establish a church in a single visit. The missionaries ran week-long training courses for new converts; some graduates of these themselves then started new churches.

Another small team of missionaries, trekking far and wide through the chirruping rainforest of West Kalimantan, saw seven-and-a-half thousand animists enter Christianity in three years, in the face of fierce occult opposition. Describing the way modernity (and especially the flirtation with Communism) had shattered their traditional beliefs the tribal folks said, `Our longhouse has been destroyed and we're out in the bush and we need teaching.' Evangelists from West Timor consolidated the work. (I told this story in the book _Thousands: A Church is Born in the Indonesian Rainforest_ , co-authored with Stewart Dinnen, ISBN 978-0-90082888-1.)

***

That's only part of the story.

From Surabaya, the sprawling, humid capital of East Java, you can take a crowded ferry to the island of Madura.

Madura is easily visible from Surabaya. All that separates them are a few miles of browny-green strait garnished with Indonesian navy ships, sail boats, rusty cargo vessels and perhaps a gleaming cruise liner bobbing in Surabaya harbour.

Disembarking the ferry at Bangkalan, Madura, you may notice a certain pushiness in the air. Minibus drivers recruit energetically for passengers. If you stand out because of your skin colour, you find beggars tugging at your arms and body ('Hello! Hello!'). In the market a crowd blocks your path, smiling, asking questions, a stockade of people.

Madura island feels like a place apart from Java: poorer, more rural, more Islamic. You're more likely to see a pony-and-trap than the smoked-glass 4x4s in which the urbanized rich of Java cruise. Its inhabitants, the Madurese, Indonesia's third largest ethnic group are said to consider themselves _santri_ or pure Muslims, compared with the _abangan_ , compromised Javanese. They are an example of where the gospel has not spread quickly.

It took, for example, 108 years between the Madurese New Testament first being translated to a translation being published, a history littered with untimely deaths, misunderstandings, and forgotten or lost manuscripts. Evangelistic efforts among the Madurese people have suffered a similar fate. Researchers still count fewer than 1000 Madurese Christians, and even that number is the highest it has ever been.

Indonesia contains many similar peoples, usually smaller in number than the Madurese, but equally lacking in an indigenous Christian presence. The Joshua Project counts 210 ethnic groups within Indonesia that have a population of 10,000 people or more and that are 5% Christian or less.

***

Indonesia's Aceh province bore the brunt of the terrible tsunami of Boxing Day 2004. The world's largest earthquake for a generation happened just 95 miles off this Indonesian province. Eighteen minutes later, waves 10 metres high reached the coastline and swept away 169,000 people. Three months after the tsunami an extremely powerful aftershock killed perhaps 1,000 people on the nearby, poor, but Christian-dominated island of Nias.

The international responses to these disasters have been well-documented. Less well-known is the part played by various NGOs and churches, rebuilding houses, re-establishing fisheries, constructing boats.

The orthodox Islamic explanation for this tragedy seems especially barren and unhelpful. One school teacher, a Muslim, reportedly said, 'We tried to encourage [the children] not to be sad any more, just to take it as God's lesson, which is what we believe... they looked so sad, and turned away from me, so I stopped telling them.'

Aceh was once largely closed to the Christian churches. (The Christian churches that did exist served other ethnic groups, such as the Bataks or the Javanese.) Whether the care and service of Indonesia's Christians will one day earn a hearing among the Acehnese for the 'God of all comfort' is an open question, but is perhaps another fruitful area of prayer.

***

A national prayer movement has spread throughout Indonesia. Outreach to Indonesia's unreached minorities is happening as never before, pioneered by Indonesians themselves.

At the same time, militant Muslims are testing the resolve of the newly democratic government by pushing Indonesia in a more Islamist direction. One current Islamist strategy in Java, for example, is a campaign to force churches to close.

Sometimes inter-communal tension can have a Christian-Muslim dimension. Indonesia's transmigration policy, moving people from crowded islands to emptier ones, can look like a kind of Islamic colonization, and has caused friction and bloodshed. As in many parts of the Muslim world, it's hard for moderate Muslims to fight their corner without seeming to be fighting God.

***

The Church's challenge throughout Indonesia is to bring a full-orbed, whole-gospel response to the society it serves. Parts of the Church are better are nation-building than others; parts of the church at better at evangelism and miracles than others. Each struggles with its own kinds of nominalism. Each is needed as Indonesia's Church grows and is built.

## Malay peoples in the Philippines

The most populous country in the region after Indonesia is the Philippines: like Indonesia, it is a huge archipelago; like Indonesia, most people belong to some official faith (in this case, Catholicism) but spiritism, magic, and mysticism are the real currency of spiritual life for most.

Many Indonesia themes recur: giddy incursions of materialism as loggers invade jungles, bulldozing both trees and cultures. There's rumbustious industrial development in the great cities; forest-dwellers (even occasionally cave-dwellers) on the small islands and in the remote interiors; urban slums as the harsh interface between them.

The Philippines is a kind of photographic negative of Indonesia: 92% Christian, 6% Muslim. You find robust evangelical church growth all over the Philippine archipelago, though it has slowed since the fast-growing 1980s and 1990s.

The Philippines' Muslim peoples' homelands are the huge southern island of Mindanao (home to 950,000 Magindanao people) and nearby islands (home to the 500,000-strong Tausug).

Outnumbered and marginalized, the Muslims have cause to complain about their treatment at the hands of past 'Christian' rulers of the Philippines. They fought bitterly against two hundred years of Spanish colonial rule. In exchange, crusader-like, the Spaniards destroyed mosques and carried off Islamic leaders. Muslims still feel the pain.

Hence it is not surprising that a violent minority in Mindanao have been fighting for independence in a quarter century of conflict that has seen perhaps 50,000 people die violently. The patient work of something like 200 Filipino missionaries, among others, is showing a more loving face of the Church and around 100 house churches have started in Mindanao.

## Malay peoples in Malaysia

Malaysia contains its own large branch of the Malay-speaking Muslim world (smaller numbers also live in Singapore, Thailand and Brunei).

The political and religious flavour here is quite different from that of Indonesia or the Philippines. Malaysia's economy is better constructed than Indonesia's. Nor does the gap between rich and poor feel so great. The Malaysian government has responded to Islamic revival by becoming more clearly pro-Islamic than Indonesia's government, even though only slightly more than half of Malaysia's population are actually Muslims.

Freedom of religion is guaranteed in the Malaysian constitution but it is curtailed in practice in certain Malaysian states. Laws and cultural pressures against conversion are great: recent government moves included setting up a centre to help Muslim apostates turn back to Islam.

There is concern about the non-Muslim use of the word 'Allah'. Malaysia and Indonesia speak much the same language and Christian literature could be shared between the two nations. Since 2005, Malay-language Bibles in Malaysia have the words 'Not for Muslims' printed in the front and may only be sold in churches and Christian bookshops. (Malaysia has a state-sponsored 'Publications and Qur'anic Text Control Division'.)

As in every Islamic country, Malaysia experiences many tensions between Islamic moderates (who are often in high government office) and Islamist extremists (who hold power lower down, or are vocal campaigners).

Few Malays in Malaysia have turned to Christ. A Muslim anti-apostasy organization claims that between 4,000 and 5,000 Malay Muslims renounced Islam between 1982 and 1998. Even that figure seems an exaggeration compared with the estimates coming from the Christian sphere.

###

# About the author

Glenn Myers is a writer with the mission agency WEC International, whose 1800 workers are planting churches and serving people in more than 50 countries around the world.

Glenn has authored around 17 books with global sales of 150,000 copies. Based in the UK, he is married with two college-aged children.

The non-fiction tells stories of the church around the world.

The comic fiction explores _much_ stranger landscapes: the heavenly places and the human soul.

www.glennmyers.info

worldchristianworkshop.wordpress.com/

(this site is an archive of articles about 'relearning Christian mission')

www.fizz-books.com

Twitter: @Glenn_Myers

## Portions of this book previously appeared in:

Briefings: The Rim of Fire (ISBN 1-85078-298-9)

Briefings: The Poorest of the Poor?

(ISBN 1-8578-299-7)

Briefings: The Arab World (ISBN 1-85078282-2)

Briefings: The Silk Road (ISBN 1-85078-376-4)

Briefings: Sons of the Mughals

(ISBN 1-85078-608-9)

## Other non-fiction by Glenn Myers

Life Lessons: Life changing stories of Christian growth (ed.) (ISBN 978-1-84550-555-4)

With Stewart Dinnen:

Thousands: A church is born in the Indonesian Rainforest (ISBN 978-0-90082-888-1)

All these non-fiction books are available from www.worldmissionbooks.com as well as the usual sources

## Fiction by Glenn Myers

Here the aim is to write something that is funny, thought-provoking, and that makes us yearn for God.

 Paradise: A divine comedy (epub: 978-1-4523-8994-3; paperback: ISBN 978-0-9565010-0-4) Jamie Smith, web-designer, is trapped in the heavenly places after a car crash. Harrassed by his memories, by demons, and by the female lawyer who crashed into him, he finds the only way to escape is the one thing he dreads the most: meeting with God.

The wheels of the world (epub: 978-0-9565010-2-8; paperback: 978-0-9565010-1-1). Jamie Smith now commutes between earth and the heavenly places, trying to fix souls. He's unhappy and completely out of his depth. When a new heavenly career opens up that involves cricket, fantastic working conditions, and a tennis-skirted line manager called Anna-Natasha, Jamie thinks he's finally reached heaven...
