Source: Joel News International, April 2017
Azerbaijan is a Muslim majority country where the freedom to practice any other faith often comes with a price. According to estimates there are only 10,000 evangelical Christians.
Sari Mirzoev should know. In 1991, shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, he became the first Azeri Muslim to convert to Christianity. “Nobody understood why I did this, but as I saw God at work in my life, I realized that everyone around me was spiritually dead.” He accepted Christ while attending a Russian congregation. At the time, there wasn’t a single church for ethnic Azeri people. “All the believers that I knew were Russian.”
In 1995, Mirzoev says God gave him a prophetic word that Azeri Muslims would come to Christ as a result of his testimony. Twenty-two years later, he leads the largest Azeri evangelical church in the country called Love Baptist Church. “Sometimes we have as many as 30-40 people who accept Christ as their personal Savior in a single service,” says Mirzoev.
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» See also Uncovering the Unreached, the story of a western worker mobilizing Ukrainians and Russians to pray for Muslims and other unreached groups in their region (Send International).