Source: IMB Connecting, July 2015
One airplane ride, a two-and-a-half-day bus ride, and a seven-hour camel ride away from the StoryTogether [gospel storytelling] workshop location, Central Asian believers regularly gather for prayer, praise, and teaching in a dry mountainous region among some of the world’s fiercest Muslim extremists.
For 15 years since the gospel first penetrated “behind the mountains that are behind the mountains,” as one workshop attendee describes his home, many of the 20 people groups within the church network have persevered in following Jesus with no Scripture to guide them.
[Several missionaries in another area] worked with their national partner to bring church leaders from two languages groups to their hub city for the first of four StoryTogether workshops. The workshop goals are to produce “story crafters” who will learn to tell biblically accurate stories about God and the church in their culture’s style, and begin building a canon of stories the story crafters will then teach to others.
The men, thirsty for God’s Word, were eager students as they learned the first story—Jesus’ parable of the sower and the four soils. Tasked to go out into the community and retell the story, one group found camel herders who spoke their language. The other language group visited a labor camp filled with thousands of Central Asian men, some of whom spoke their language.
One hundred laborers—sleeping 5 to 10 men in a space the size of a dorm room and working six to seven days a week in extreme conditions—listened carefully as the visitors recounted the parable of the soils. The next day, the StoryTogether students returned, prepared to tell a second story.
“When they got there, they found the 100 men that had heard the first story waiting eagerly for the StoryTogether team. The laborers told the StoryTogether participants that they could not sleep and they could not stop thinking and talking about what they had heard the night before.” After discussing the stories until late in the night, 20 laborers stood up and said they wanted to follow Jesus.
» Full story with photos and prayer points.
» Other stories from Central Asia: Seeking Work but Finding Faith and Reading with Bibi (both from Operation Mobilization). Readers might also be interested in reports of broadcast ministries reaching Albanian Muslims in the Balkans (Godreports).