Epicenter 2.0

by Joel C. Rosenberg

  “Why didn’t you take the watch for yourself?” Farahat asked.

  “My Christ told me to be honest until death,” replied the man, dressed in filthy rags.

  “You are a Christian?” Farahat asked.

  The garbageman said he was.

  “I didn’t know Christ at the time,” Farahat would later tell a reporter, “but I told him that I saw Christ in him. I told the garbage collector, ‘Because of what you have done and your great example, I will worship the Christ you are worshiping.’”318

  Over the next few years, Farahat began to study the Bible and grow in his faith, but when the garbageman asked Farahat to help him reach his fellow garbage collectors for Christ, Farahat always said he was too busy. For the next two years, in fact, the man begged him to come and start a church among his friends, but Farahat resisted.

  Finally, in 1974, Farahat visited the garbage village outside of Cairo and couldn’t believe what he found. He had never seen (or smelled) anything like it before—a series of rickety concrete tenement buildings built over massive dumps where men, women, and even the smallest children sift through thousands of tons of trash, sorting bottles, cans, glassware, and other goods for recycling and looking for items of even miniscule value to be sold for cash or bartered for food or clothing. There was no running water, no electricity, and no hope. Many turned to alcohol, drugs, gambling, and prostitution to find some meager escape from the deeply depressing environment. But even more appalling to Farahat were the numbers. Somewhere between 15,000 and 30,000 people were living amid the most gut-wrenching squalor he could possibly imagine.

  The more Farahat and his wife, Su’aad, saw, the more they found themselves gripped by the words of Jesus in Matthew 5:3: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (NASB), and the words of the apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 4:13, “We have become as the scum of the world, the dregs of all things” (NASB). Soon a small ministry was born. Farahat and his wife began preaching the gospel in the garbage village and caring for people’s spiritual and material needs, and people started turning to Christ in droves.

  In 1978, Farahat was officially ordained by the Coptic (Orthodox) Church, and he became known as Father Sama’an. The congregation met in a cave in the Muqattam Mountains beside the garbage village. By 1993, they had to expand the cave to fit all the new believers and seekers who wanted to attend. What they have now is an amazing testimony to God’s grace in a region where many believe Christianity is dying.

  My wife and kids and I visited the garbage village. We also toured the cave that houses the church facilities with a man who told us how he had been an alcoholic and hashish user until he heard Father Sama’an preach. He gave his life to Christ in 1992. You should have heard the passion in his voice and seen the gleam in his eyes. He had been at the bottom of the barrel, and now he was on top of the world. And he was the first to tell us: only the love and power of Jesus Christ had made the difference.

  Such stories of lives transformed are spreading throughout Egypt and North Africa. Despite government restrictions and Muslim attacks against churches and believers, Christianity there is growing like wildfire. “I’ve never seen such hunger for God’s Word and the message of Jesus as I do today,” one North African Arab Christian leader told me.

  In 1996 the Egyptian Bible Society sold just 3,000 video copies of the JESUS film, based on the Gospel of Luke and produced in the late 1970s by Warner Brothers and Campus Crusade for Christ. In 1997 the Bible Society decided to sell the videos at the famed Cairo International Book Fair. Sales surged to 35,000 in just a few weeks. In 2000 the group sold 600,000 copies of the JESUS film and a children’s version of the video. Today annual sales top 750,000 copies of the Bible on audiocassette, 200,000 to 300,000 full Bibles, and between 300,000 and 500,000 New Testaments.319

  “We don’t give these away,” one Bible Society leader told me. “We don’t charge a lot, but we charge something, and many, many people are buying them. Think about what that means. . . . Egyptians certainly don’t have the money or the interest to buy a Bible or a JESUS film or any other piece of Christian literature unless they are really serious about finding God. I believe these sales are leading indicators of growing spiritual interest throughout this country, and particularly among Coptic Christians, of which there are some ten million. . . . There is a revival going on among Orthodox Christians.”

  CHRISTIANITY SURGING ACROSS NORTH AFRICA

  Egypt is not alone.

  When I was in Casablanca and Rabat in 2005, I found the Moroccan media up in arms about the “phenomenon of Moroccans converting to Christianity.” Newspaper and magazine articles estimated that 25,000 to 40,000 Muslims have become followers of Jesus Christ in recent years. These numbers are overstated, church leaders in the country tell me, but the fact that they are being published and widely discussed says a lot about the dynamic that is at work and how rapidly the church is growing there.320

  The government of Morocco—which has long worked to prevent missionaries and Bibles, JESUS films, and other Christian materials from entering the country—has begun taking a series of small but important steps to reach out to evangelicals and to project an image of religious openness. In 2004, for example, top officials began an ongoing dialogue with Richard Cizik of the National Association of Evangelicals and Rob Schenck of the National Clergy Council, among others. In 2005, King Mohammed VI invited American evangelist Josh McDowell and other Christian leaders and musicians for a series of high-level talks, public-speaking events, and even a Christian concert in Marrakech. The concert alone attracted more than 80,000 Moroccan young people, and a similar event was held in May of 2006.

  When I visited with Ahmed Kostas, an aide to the king, in his office at the Ministry of Islamic Affairs in Rabat, he insisted that the kingdom was opening up and becoming more friendly to Christians. “You can buy The Passion of the Christ in shops all over Morocco. Moroccans can watch Christian television on their satellite dishes. We don’t care what people watch. They can see whatever they want. They can choose whatever they want. . . . [In the past] the West has tried to force Christianity on us—it’s the feeling of force that is the real tension.”321

  “What about efforts by Arab and Western Christians to get more Bibles and Christian literature into Morocco?” I asked.

  “Officially, it’s not a concern,” he said. “But the way it is done is. . . . The big concern is any activities that cause unrest.”

  “You’re worried that public, visible efforts to promote Christianity in Morocco will infuriate radical fundamentalists, who could cause trouble for the regime?” I pressed.

  “We don’t want anything that causes unrest.”

  A few months later I met with Mr. Kostas’s boss, Dr. Ahmed Abaddi, who was appointed by the king to serve as Morocco’s director of Islamic affairs, responsible for overseeing the country’s 33,000 mosques. Abaddi, a soft-spoken, gentle-mannered former professor of comparative religion, told me that the king wants to build bridges of friendship with evangelical Christians in the United States because he knows the “real” America is not Hollywood and the pornography industry but people of faith. “Historically, it has been the Christians who have held America together,” Abaddi said. “Anyone who traces the history of America knows that evangelicals are behind it.”322

  The king also wants all Moroccans—and particularly his country’s Islamic leaders—to develop more friendly relations with Christians, Abaddi explained. “We need our people to know the real West, to understand that the West ain’t no angel, but it ain’t no demon either.”

  Why would Morocco reach out to evangelicals, though, when one of the central goals of such Christians is to evangelize, a practice frowned upon in his country? Abaddi said evangelicals are “gentlemen” whom you can trust. “We are trying to reach out to the real America. . . . Evangelicals are serious people, helpful people.”

  Abaddi acknowledged that the idea of Muslims converting to Christianity i
s a very sensitive subject in his country. But he also told me that he had recently published a book in Lebanon about the importance of encouraging religious freedom within Islam and even suggested that “Muslims have the right to change their religion,” if they so desire.

  Unfortunately, not all leaders in the region are as open as Dr. Abaddi and his colleagues. The church is growing as never before all across North Africa, and most Muslim leaders are up in arms.

  In neighboring Algeria—the birthplace of St. Augustine but for many centuries almost devoid of a Christian presence—more than 80,000 Muslims have become followers of Christ in recent years.323 The situation has become so alarming to Islamic clerics that in March of 2006, Algerian officials passed a law banning Muslims from becoming Christians or even learning about Christianity. Christians trying to share their faith with Muslims face two to five years in jail and fines of 5,000 to 10,000 euros for “trying to call on a Muslim to embrace another religion.” In a move to stamp out the rapidly growing house-church movement, the law also forbids Christians from meeting together in any building without a license from the government.324

  In Sudan, meanwhile, one of the biggest stories in modern Christendom is unfolding—a spiritual awakening of almost unimaginable proportions amid civil war, radical Islam, rampant persecution, and outright genocide. More than one million Sudanese have turned to Christ just since the year 2000—and not in spite of persecution, war, and genocide but because of them. “People see what radical Islam is like,” one Sudanese Christian leader told me, “and they want Jesus instead.”325

  When Sudan received independence in 1956, there were only five or six born-again Anglican priests in the entire country. Today there are some 3,500, caring for more than 5 million followers of Christ affiliated with the Anglican Church alone. Other denominations are also growing rapidly. “The growth of the church is really tremendous,” says Daniel Bul, bishop of the Episcopal Church of Sudan. “We hope . . . in the southern Sudan . . . everybody is going to be a Christian.”326

  Muslim clerics throughout the region have been watching this dramatic movement toward Christianity for some time and have been horrified. Now the trend is rapidly accelerating.

  In 1993, a Saudi sheikh by the name of Salman Al-Odeh delivered a sermon entitled “Christian Missionaries Sweeping the Islamic World.” He argued that “in Spain [Christians] have the biggest center of missionaries to Africa. They are trained really well and their efforts lead many Moroccans to convert.” He then cited the World Christian Encyclopedia—which he described as a “dangerous survey”—and warned his fellow Muslims that “the number of Christians in Africa was 9 million only in 1900 A.D., or 9 percent of the whole population. In the year 1980 they became 200 million! They jumped from 9 to 200 million in 80 years [and the survey’s authors] expected them to reach 390 million in the year 2000, or 48 percent of the whole population of Africa.”327

  Eight years later, in December 2001, Sheikh Ahmad Al Qataani, another leading Saudi cleric, appeared on a live interview on Aljazeera satellite television to confirm that, sure enough, Muslims were turning to Jesus in alarming numbers. “In every hour, 667 Muslims convert to Christianity,” Al Qataani warned. “Every day, 16,000 Muslims convert to Christianity. Every year, 6 million Muslims convert to Christianity.”

  Stunned, the interviewer interrupted the cleric. “Hold on! Let me clarify. Do we have 6 million converting from Islam to Christianity or converting from Islam and other religions?”

  Al Qataani repeated his assertion.

  “So 6 million Muslims a year convert?” said the interviewer.

  “Every year,” the cleric confirmed, adding, “a tragedy has happened.”328

  GOD AT WORK IN CENTRAL ASIA

  God is also on the move in central Asia, and Muslims there are turning to Christ in record numbers.

  Before September 11, 2001, there were only seventeen known followers of Christ in all of Afghanistan. Today Afghan Christian leaders tell me there are more than 10,000 believers in the country, and Afghan Muslims are open to hearing the gospel message like never before. Dozens of baptisms occur every week. People are snatching up Bibles and other Christian books as fast as they can be printed or brought into the country. The JESUS film was even shown on television in one city before police shut down the entire TV station.

  The enormous controversy over the case of Abdul Rahman, a Muslim convert to Christianity facing execution for apostasy by a court in Kabul, became the talk of the nation in the spring of 2006, with saturation coverage by Afghani TV, radio, and newspapers. The event shined a huge spotlight on the fact that Afghans are turning to Christ in such numbers that Islamic leaders are furious. It also showed the fledgling Afghan church that fellow believers around the world are praying for them and eager to see them grow and flourish.

  By God’s grace, and with pressure from American, Canadian, British, Italian, and other leaders, the case against Rahman was dropped. He was set free and left the country.

  But persecution of believers in Afghanistan has hardly diminished. Just days after Rahman’s release, two more Afghani believers were arrested, and according to the Compass Direct News service and Open Doors International, a Christian ministry to the “closed” countries of the Middle East, “One young Afghan convert to Christianity was beaten severely outside his home by a group of six men, who finally knocked him unconscious with a hard blow to his temple. He woke up in the hospital two hours later but was discharged before morning.” Compass and Open Doors also reported that “several other Afghan Christians have been subjected to police raids on their homes and places of work in the past month, as well as to telephone threats.”329

  Yet none of this has stopped the Afghan church from growing. “God is moving so fast in Afghanistan, we’re just trying to keep up,” one Afghani believer told me. “The greatest need now is leadership development. We need to train pastors to care for all these new believers.”330

  Afghanistan is not alone.

  As I mentioned earlier in this book, I went to Alma-Ata (now Almaty), a city in southern Kazakhstan, near the Chinese border, on a missions trip in 1986. At the time there were no known Kazakh believers in Christ in a country of some 15 million people. By 1990, there were only three known believers. But today evangelical leaders in the country report that there are more than 15,000 Kazakh Christians and more than 100,000 Christians of all ethnicities.

  On that same trip, I went to Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan. At the time, there were only a handful of Uzbek believers in a country of 27 million people. Today there are some 30,000 Uzbek followers of Christ, and hunger for the gospel is at an all-time high.

  While these may seem like small numbers in comparison to the overall populations of these Muslim countries, the immensity of their importance cannot be overstated. These are historic developments, unprecedented in the fourteen hundred years since the Islamic religion was founded, especially when one considers the tremendous social, religious, legal, and economic persecution faced by Muslim converts from Islam. In many of these countries, a new believer in Christ risks being ostracized from his or her family, fired from a job, attacked verbally and physically by Islamic fundamentalists, imprisoned by authorities, and even executed.

  INSIDE THE FIRES OF IRAQ

  In Iraq, the hunger for Christ is also at an all-time high, say Iraqi pastors and other Arab Christian leaders who have been inside the country.

  More than one million Arabic New Testaments and Christian books have been shipped into Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime. More are being printed inside the country, and pastors say they cannot keep up with the demand. What’s more, Iraqis today are turning to Christ in numbers unimaginable at any point during Saddam Hussein’s reign of terror.

  Iraqi general Georges Sada, who in addition to serving as a senior advisor to Iraq’s president has served as president of the National Presbyterian Church in Baghdad and chairman of the Assembly of Iraqi Evangelical Presbyterian Churches, s
ays that at least 5,000 Iraqis have publicly identified themselves as new followers of Christ just since the fall of Saddam Hussein. The number of secret believers may be much higher, he told me, since conditions are not yet safe enough in the country for all believers to gather together for worship and prayer.

  The Kurds in the north of Iraq are especially receptive to the gospel message and are converting to Christianity “by the hundreds,” Sada reports. One evangelical church recently started in Kurdistan now has more than 800 people worshipping there every week, most of whom are new converts from Islam. What’s more, Nechirvan Barzani, the prime minister of the Kurdistan Regional Government in Irbil, has vowed to protect the ancient Assyrian Christian community there as well as new followers of Christ from persecution and violence. Sada and Dr. Terry Law, president of World Compassion, a Christian relief organization based in Oklahoma, met with Barzani in May of 2006. “I would rather see a Muslim become a Christian than a radical Muslim,” Barzani told them, an absolutely remarkable statement by a Muslim leader in a land racked by sectarian violence.331

  Despite the fact that numerous Iraqi churches have been firebombed and converts from Islam have been attacked and killed, at least fourteen new evangelical churches have opened in Baghdad alone since the war. Other evangelical congregations are forming all around the country, some with as many as 500 to 600 people attending every Sunday. In 2004–2005, more than 160 Iraqi believers began training to become new pastors and lay leaders. Iraqis are also flooding back into the ancient Christian churches.

  “Catholic and Orthodox Christian priests are seeing their faith in Christ revitalized,” one Iraqi pastor, who asked not to be named, told me. “They want to see their churches restored to the first-century kind of activity—evangelism, discipleship, and miracles.”332

  Why such spiritual hunger? Every Iraqi Christian I have interviewed has given me the same two answers: war and persecution.