The Student Volunteer Movement and global missions

It was during my time as a student that I felt a calling to share the Gospel with Muslims. I recently saw this video and wanted to share it here. It is an important chapter in global missions:

"For the Sake of the Name: a letter to new missionaries in the Arab world" by Abu Daoud

I am pleased to share with you that I have recently published this article in St Francis Magazine (Vol 11:1).

I had the privilege of being part of the training and mobilization of this couple, and shortly before they moved to the Arab world, I wrote this letter to them. I thought it was worthwhile enough to share with a wider audience.

Here are a couple of the points of advice I offer:

• learn from the ancient churches
• remember that you are Americans and don't try to hide it
• apply yourself to language acquisition above all
• learn the history of the people and the country

And others. But read the article which contains a lot of other good stuff.

Read it all. Download the PDF from St Francis or check it out on Academia.edu.

But before I get to that, let me share with you my favorite Bible verse about missionaries, and I commend this to you: “For they went out for the sake of the Name, accepting nothing from the Gentiles [that is, non-Christians]. Therefore we ought to support such men, so that we may be fellow workers with the truth” (3 John 7, 8). This might seem like the kind of verse you would use when fundraising, but I like it because it reminds us of who we are and what we do at the heart of our vocation: that we have gone out– out from our culture, from our homeland, from our language– and that this has been done for the sake of “the name”. Jews in the 1

st

 Century (as today) often did not want to pronounce the divine name (YHWH) because of its overwhelming holiness, so they would say “the Name” or “ha shem”. (May I note that the Hebrew 

shem 

 and the Arabic 

ism 

 are cognates?) But here John the elder means not God, but God as revealed in Jesus– 

Jesus 

 is now 

ha shem 

 or “the name”. There is much more one could say on these two brief verses, but let us move on to the heart and soul of this letter.

Why doesn't the American Church spend $ on non-Christians?

This is a great question, isn't it? I found these great figures at the site of Global Frontier Missions:

Basically, the world can be divided into three parts based on how people respond to two questions:

1. Do you have access to a Christian witness?
2. Are you a Christian?

People that respond “yes” to both questions are considered “World C”. These people are spread out in countries like the United States, Spain, England, Poland, Kenya, Romania, and all throughout Latin America. They have had significant access to the gospel and many people living in these areas would at least claim to be “Christian” even though they may be very nominal or cultural followers of Christ. About 10% of the world’s population is estimated to be true believers while another 23% are at least considered adherents to the Christian faith.

People that respond “yes” to the first question and “no” to the second question are considered “World B”. These people are spread throughout countries like India, Thailand, Japan, China, Nigeria, and Vietnam. These are people that for the most part have had access to the gospel but have not chosen to embrace it for a many number of reasons. They are what we would call exposed unbelievers because they have had a chance to respond to the message.

People that responded “no” to both questions are considered “World A”. These people live in countries like Iran, Bhutan, Somalia, Turkey, Afghanistan, and Algeria. Many of these people have no access to a Christian, a missionary, a church, or a Bible. These guys are virtually unreached and would need an outside witness to come and share Christ with them. We refer to them as unexposed unbelievers because they really do not have any chance of hearing about Jesus.

As of 2011, the world’s population can be divided into these three categories:
World A – 1.6 billion people 29.6% of the world’s population
World B – 2.4 billion people 40.1% of the world’s population
World C – 2.0 billion people 33.0% of the world’s population

So, where are the missionaries going?
This is the breakdown of the worldwide foreign missionary force and where they are currently deployed:
World A – 10,200 (2.4%)
World B – 103,000 (24.5%)
World C – 306,000 (73.1%)

So, basically, we only have 2.4% or 1 out of every 40 of our foreign missionaries serving among “World A” where the majority of the unreached people groups in the world live.

Charles Wesley's hymn/prayer for the salvation of Muslims

Did you know that famous hymn-writer Charles Wesley penned a hymn for the evangelization of the Mohammedans?

Here you go:

1. Sun of unclouded righteousness, With healing in thy wings arise, A sad benighted world to bless, Which now in sin and error lies, Wrapt in Egyptian night profound; With chains of hellish darkness bound.

2 The smoke of the infernal cave, Which half the Christian world o’er-spread, Disperse, thou heavenly Light, and save The souls by that Imposter led, That Arab thief, as Satan bold, Who quite destroy’d thy Asian fold.

3 O might the blood of sprinkling cry For those who spurn the sprinkled blood! Assert thy glorious Deity, Stretch out thine arm, thou triune God! The Unitarian fiend expel, And chase his doctrine back to hell.

4 Come, Father, Son and Holy Ghost, Thou Three in One, and One in Three! Resume thy own, for ages lost, Finish the dire apostasy; Thy universal claim maintain, And Lord of the creation reign!

by Charles Wesley, from Hymns for the People called Methodists (1874), 443

Why Short Term Missions are so dangerous

Here is a great new article on Short Term Missions (STM), and how they can be quite harmful and disastrous. I'm happy that someone has written this article! It really needed to be said.

Read it all at The Gospel Coalition

Here is one part I liked:

Imagine a team from France calls your church and says they want to visit. They want to put on VBS (which you have done for years), but the material is in French. They have heard about how the U.S. church has struggled and want to help you fix it. They want to send 20 people, half of them youth. Only two of them speak English. They need a place to stay for free, with cheap food and warm showers if possible. During the trip half of the group's energy will be spent on resolving tension between team members. Two people will get sick. They'd like you to arrange some sightseeing for them on their free day. Do you want them to come? Most trips I know focus on those who are going, not on those receiving the teams. We send youth so they can have an experience or so God can really grip their heart. You may want your adults to gain a larger heart for the nations. Even if research shows that short-term trips do not affect the lives of participants in the long-term, we still send teams.

New Bible Translation in Farsi (Persian)

Here is some wonderful news for our brothers and sisters in or from Iran. Elam is glad to announce a new translation of the Bible in contemporary Farsi!

The recently launched New Millennium Version of the Bible has been eagerly anticipated by the Iranian church, ever since Elam began the translation work in 1995.  Prior to the publication of the new translation, Persian Christians have been reading the Old Testament in the old standard version. This translation is over 100 years old, and uses obscure and archaic words and phrases, which render the text difficult to comprehend.

Did you know that Christian missions is the main force in the world today that helps to preserve indigenous languages? This is indeed the case, because missionaries are often the first to provide an alphabet (normally a modified version of Latin alphabet, but not always) for indigenous languages that don't have one.

Praise God! And God bless our brothers and sister in and from Iran.

Read more HERE.

Major problem for would-be missionaries: student debt

When we left for the mission field back in the day I had about $5000 of student loans to pay off, and my wife had none. I didn't mind the idea of just continuing to pay it off (I think the payment was $110 per month) but my wife felt it would better to use some of our savings to pay it off, so we did.

But I went to an inexpensive state university and lived frugally. What about students who go to private universities and maybe don't live so frugally? And what about the rising cost of higher education in the USA? They can accrue a very large amount of debt pretty easily. What then should missionary agencies do when one of these students approaches them and applies to be a missionary?

This timely article addresses some of the complexities involved and proposes a creative answer.

Check it out here.

Did the Apostles espouse insider movements?

I answer that the Biblical witness clearly leads to the answer no:

Further, the mixed churches in cities like Rome and [the region of] Galatia were likewise errors. These believers, both Jews and non-Jews, had mistakenly supposed that they in some way had come into a new oikos and a new identity, and Paul, lacking wisdom as usual, taught them these things. Indeed, a triumph of IM hermeneutics and practice would have meant that Peter should have been victorious when Paul confronted him. Indeed, Paul, in violating kashrut was stepping needlessly outside of his oikos, while Peter himself was honoring his God-given identity as a Galilean Jew. 

In the end though, it was the faith—the apostolic faith—that was victorious. A faith which understood that in Jesus a new community had come into being demanded allegiance above and beyond one’s own community of birth. Or as one African pastor put it in those early centuries: you cannot have God for your Father without having the Church for your mother.

From my recent article on insider movements.

The New issue of St Francis Magazine

Hi All,

Well, the new issue of SFM is out a few days late, but better late than never. I have not read the whole thing yet, but so far there are two articles that are noteworthy I think.

The first is Jeff Morton's harsh review of the missiology and theology of Carl Medearis. I have not personally read Medearis' book Muslims, Christians, and Jesus, but I have heard several people speak highly of it. So it is interesting to find such a critical review of his work. Here it is:


THE LYRICS OF CARL MEDEARIS: A POST-MODERN CROONS A SONG OF CULTURAL IMPERIALISM by Jeff Morton

Second, I actually put together a complete bibliography of SFM's first five years. Do check it out. I guarantee you will find some interesting articles that you will want to read. Also, you will most certainly enjoy my intelligent and penetrating insights into the journal's strengths and weaknesses ;-)

St Francis Magazine: A Complete Bibliography of the First Five Years by Abu Daoud

Or by all means, just download the entire issue if you prefer.

--Abu Daoud

Ramon Llull: Muslims honor Muhammad more than Christians honor Jesus

I recently went on a one-day retreat to spend some time in prayer and reflection, and during that time I read (most of) Ramon Llull's mystical reflections in his Book of the Lover and the Beloved, can be downloaded HERE. It is about 50 pages long and contains a short introductory essay from one of the foremost translators and scholars of Llull, E. Allison Peers.

Most of the meditations (366 of them) are on the nature of love and how the love of God is tied to grief and tribulation. From time to time he gets autobiographical and addresses missionary topic explicitly, in terms of how he has traveled far and wide to defend the honor of his beloved's name, and also his disappointment with the mediocrity of the average Christian of his medieval day.

But there is one verse that explicitly mentions Islam, and I wanted to share that with you:

The Lover (Llull) reproached Christian people, because in their letters they put not the name of his Beloved, Jesus Christ, to do Him the same honour that the Saracens do to the false prophet Mahomet, when they honour him by naming him before everything in their letters. v. 149

Presumably he is referring to a custom of writing the shahada at the beginning of any official communication, which does indeed name Muhammad.

You can find some other of my posts on Llull here, here, and here. A list of all the links is here.

Amazing resource on Anglican/Episcopal Mission in the Middle East

Hats off to anglicanhistory.org. They have a whole section of documents related to Anglican-Episcopal missions to the Middle East.

Very cool...

Edinburgh 2010: Reflection 2

Part XXI: Islam, Conversion, and Identity

Part XXI: Islam, Conversion, and Identity
by Abu Daoud
3/2010

In part X of this series I talked about reasons why Muslims are attracted to the Christian faith. This topic of conversion is very interesting, and I want to discuss it a little more.

The nature of the Gospel, and of Christian mission in general, is not to replace any given culture with ‘a Christian culture’. For a while this was indeed the strategy, to become Christian meant getting a Western name and wearing European clothing and so on. Those days are long gone though. Today we understand that every culture will have elements that need to be confronted by the Gospel, but that does not mean that the Gospel itself becomes the new culture. It is like the salt, which makes the food good, but which you don’t eat on its own. Cultures are evangelized, not just individual persons.

And here is where Islam comes into the equation: shall we understand Islam as a cluster of cultures which need to be evangelized, but not replaced? Or shall we understand Islam as rival religion, which must be replaced by the Christian religion? There are multiple heated arguments on this topic going on all over the place today among missionaries and converts as well. Let me unpack the results of each theory:

If we say that, yes, Islam is indeed a culture, then, just like we have Jewish followers of Jesus (who don’t call themselves Christians), we can also have Muslim followers of Jesus. They worship God through Jesus Christ, read the Bible and believe in it, and will tend to have a positive view of the Qur’an and Muhammad. They do not call their gatherings ‘churches’ usually, and they tend to use the Islamic vocabulary and names (like ‘issa for Jesus), rather than Christian terms (yasuu’ for Jesus). This group will focus on using concepts that overlap with the Qur’an like ‘Kingdom of God’ and ‘straight path.’

But what if, when we look at Islam, we see a rival religion? Then there is no way to reconcile Muhammad and Jesus, the Bible and the Qur’an, nor should we try to do so. This approach would generally focus on the new identity a person has in Christ, with an emphasis on being part of the Church—a different community than the Islamic umma. It would be normal for a person to take a new (non-Islamic) name, though not required. Their view of Muhammad and the Qur’an will tend to focus on short-comings and deficiencies.

Clearly, I am painting with broad strokes here. But that should not obscure the very real issue at hand here—it is not just a matter of semantics. If Islam is more of a culture to be evangelized, but we preach as if Islam were a rival religion, we may fail to communicate the Gospel in an understandable manner relating to that culture’s context. On the other hand, if we emphasize how the Gospel and Islam as a culture go together, and thus create a community of Muslim followers of Jesus, we risk compromising central beliefs (the Trinity, the incarnation) and practices (baptism) that have always defined Christian orthodoxy. These are, broadly speaking, the two paths before the churches today as they seek to relate the message of new life in Messiah to the Muslims of the world.

Edinburgh 1910 World Missions Conference

100 years ago a conference on world missions was held in the beautiful city of Edinburgh, in Scotland. These prescient words were issued by the Commission of the conference afterward:

Edinburgh 1910 in Comission I

“It is a testing time for the Church. If it neglects to meet successfully the present world crisis by failing to discharge its responsibility to the whole world, it will weaken its power both on the home and foreign fields and seriously handicap its mission to the coming generations. Nothing less than the adequacy of Christianity as a world religion is on trial.”

So was the church successful? Or did the church over the last century fail? Remember, Edinburgh had representatives from all Protestant traditions (including high-church Anglicans), but not from the Catholics or Orthodox.

Oh boy! New issues of St Francis and LWP are out

Am presently reading through both. Saint Francis Magazine and Lausanne World Pulse are two of my favorite publications that deal with questions of missions and Christian witness. LWP is lighter, all-purpose material, and SFM is more dense and focused on the Muslim World. Alas, Abu Daoud has nothing published in this SFM, which is fine because I have been busy with other stuff.

Articles I am particularly interested in are:

Bridger's article on Kenneth Cragg (one of my heroes)

Miller's article on "Cracks in the Foundation of Islam?" and

Stringer's article on the Qur'an's view of patterns in history.

And this is new: you can DL the entire journal as one PDF right HERE.

In LWP I am interested in the article on the future of Asian missions by Yung.

Raising Support: "All things come of thee O Lord..."

"All things come of thee O Lord, and of thine own we have given thee."

I have never, and God willing will never, use this blog to raise support for our mission here in the Middle East. That is not why I started it and TBTG we are well and have food and shelter and all that we need.

BUT, if you want to support a family raising support for going on mission to Dar al Islam then I have a few options for you and your church! Concerned about N Africa? Let me know. Wanting to support some folks who desire to work in Europe in a heavily-Islamized area? Let me know. These two families have been out on the road raising support for a while, they are both ALMOST there, but not quite. Your pledge of $50/month or $100/month would go a long way.

Do I sound bold? I do. But have I not earned the right to be bold? And I do not exercise this authority on my own behalf, but on behalf of my brothers who have heard the call to be a Christian witness in the Muslim world.

Look, it's simple: if you don't send, they can't go. If they don't go, they can't preach. And if they there is no preaching, then how will they hear? Sound familiar? I thought so, but it was valid in Paul's day and it is in ours.

Salamu Aleykum!
سلام عليكم

ابو داود

winterlightning [a+] safe-mail [d0t] net

History and the Beginning of Protestant Missions

The Protestants were famously willing to sit around on their duffs for centuries while the Jesuits and Franciscans (among others) were busy making converts to the ends of the earth. "That you God that I am elect and not like those filthy Catholics!" Well, that is perhaps a little strong, but perhaps not. That all started to change in the late 18th C. with on William Carey:

Around 1780, an indigent Baptist cobbler named William Carey began reading about James Cook's Polynesian journeys. His interest grew to a furious sort of "backwards homesickness", inspiring him to obtain Baptist orders, and eventually write his famous 1792 pamphlet, "An Enquiry into the Obligation of Christians to use Means for the Conversion of Heathen." Far from a dry book of theology, Carey's work used the best available geographic and ethnographic data to map and count the number of people who had never heard the Gospel. It formed a movement that has grown with increasing speed from his day to ours. (From Wikipedia, where else?)

And now, in a curious reversal, the Catholics and the old churches of the European reformations are pretty much sitting on their hands now while those creative if sometimes-reckless cousins of Protestantism--evangelicalism and Pentecostalism--have placed themselves at the forefront of the church's missio ad gentes.

Yep, that's how church history is. Crazy stuff.

--Abu Daoud

Phil Parshall on the Muslim-convert Church

This book is kinda old (1980) but really broke new ground in its day. It has been immensely influential.

If the Muslim-convert church is basically homogeneous [which Parshall advocates] and has had minimal contact with a Western type of Christianity, then it will have little or nor problem with contextualized worship. The convert is just following ritual he has known all his life. He appreciates the familiar. The church is then set up to draw and accommodate the Muslim inquirer. No new believer needs to feel culturally ashamed to invite a Muslim friend or relative to attend a service of worship.

Phil Parshall. 1980. New Paths in Muslim Evangelism. Baker House. p 235.

Muslim-background Believers and Baptism

Interesting section here on baptism and MBB's:

Baptism is the decisive turning point for an inquirer or seeker to become identified as a Muslim background believer. What we may think of as “secret baptism” is not really secret when one Muslim baptizes another Muslim and some of their family and friends are there. Those who have been baptized gather very naturally into their family or friendship groups. They protect each other and provide for each other’s physical and social needs. The timing of a Muslim background believer’s baptism should be the prerogative of the man or woman of peace who won them to the Lord and is discipling them. I know of many occasions when Barnabas told me that a person he was discipling was not ready for baptism. It often involved a lack of comprehension of the Gospel and the security issue. We have had people who join the believer’s movement to spy out other believers either for the local government security services or for the fundamentalist Muslim movements. Sometimes a Muslim’s baptism is delayed until they can lead other family members or friends to the faith and join them to establish a believers group. In most cases, baptism gives new courage to the Muslim background believer and the Holy Spirit empowers him or her to grow stronger in their faith.

R. R., Ch. 6
Discipling Middle Eastern Believers
2005, 06, Unpublished Manuscript

Abu Daoud: Mission and Sacrament II (section)

[This is part of the text of an article I wrote for St. Francis Magazine which can be found HERE. Part I can be found HERE.--AD]

[...]Take a look at the pillars of Islam. While Muslims do not use the language of sacrament, they certainly have the concept, though in an incomplete manner. (For ultimately the fullness of the sacramentality of Creation cannot be grasped without the incarnation). Because the sacramental principle is distorted but present in Islam, one ends up with the rather crude and instrumentalist language regarding forgiveness of sins: that if one does this or that then certain sins will be forgiven. Forgiveness in Islam is not the reconciliation of mercy and justice as it is in Christianity: it tends more towards a sort of randomness and, some might say, capriciousness on the part of Allah. The two are related of course. Because there is no reconciliation of justice and mercy in a body—a human body which is “sacrificed for us” and “takes away the sins of the world”—there can be nothing higher than capriciousness which oscillates between mercy and justice without really dealing with either of them in a concrete way.

Nevertheless Islam is filled with rituals and there can be no doubt that through these concrete rituals—and much attention is given to form—mercy and forgives can be earned, though one is seldom assured that they have been imparted. To bring a person from Islam into Christianity is to bring them from one set of signs and symbols into another. This is true even if we are using the phraseology of the Kingdom of God and Islamic vocabulary. Islam already has a ritual washing which is performed by devout Muslims quite frequently. Baptism is an alternate ritual washing, performed once.

The community of the Kingdom of God has a ritual meal which is celebrated on a regular basis by those who have made the required confession of faith (in baptism). It is not a sacrifice of a living animal, as is the Islamic ritual sacrifice-meal (Eid al Adha); also, it is performed more often (in Acts daily, and until the 16th C. weekly). The Islamic sacrificial meal is a memorial of a grand sacrifice provided by Allah whereby Abraham’s son was spared: it and the meal celebrate and recall filial obedience. The ritual sacrifice-meal among the subjects of the Kingdom is similar, but not identical. For one, it is always a participation, a going-back-to and a reliving of one sacrifice that was made at a specific point in time (under Pontius Pilate) in a specific way (he was crucified, dead, and buried) on a given hill near Zion. There too is a theme of filial obedience. In the Quran the son of Abraham knows ahead of time that his father will kill him, unlike in the Genesis narrative. Yet he goes with him to meet this fate. In a more dramatic and lengthier narrative we have a similar story in the Gospels. But the ultimate end of the sacrifice is not only obedience for the sake of obedience, but obedience for the sake of reconciling all Creation to God. Another way to put it is this: to preserve the justice and mercy of God through the sacrament of Jesus’ body. [...]

Abu Daoud. 'Mission and Sacrament, Part II' in Saint Francis Magazine 4:3, Dec. 2008