Category: News Briefs

Source: Anglican Frontier Missions, July 3, 2015

On a packed, beat-up bus, filled with smoke, deep in the heart of an Islamic nation, I was chatting with [a] new-found friend who me told me that though his mom and dad were Muslims, he’d didn’t really believe it anymore.

After a few more minutes of conversing, the bus stopped abruptly– no gas station, no rest stop, nothing in sight. What followed absolutely amazed me. Every single man got off the bus, spread out in two lines on the frozen dirt of the high mountain plateau, and began doing the Islamic prayers. Even the guy sitting next to me who had just told me he didn’t believe anymore was joining in!

Though many of us understand some of the historical, political, social, and religious events that have led American culture to become increasingly “tolerant,” relativistic, and post-modern, wrapping our fingers around the world’s second largest religion can be downright baffling. Where is Islam today? How does it differ, country to country? Where might global Islam be heading? And most pertinently, when I meet a Muslim, what are some things I might say or do to draw them nearer to Christ?

» Read full story.

» Also on the topic of Muslim-Christian relations, read How American Muslims Are Helping Black Churches Rebuild After Spate Of Fires (Huffington Post) and watch this fun, challenging, ad about the labels we put on people (Coca Cola).

Source: TWR News, June 30, 2015

A broadcasting ministry received the following letter from a listener in Turkey:

“Hello, I’m a student at a theology university of the country’s religion. We were always told that the Bible has changed. And they teach us always the faults of the Bible. I was so much wondering about these things that I finally got a Bible.

“Our teacher told us that if we want to learn how ridiculous Christianity is that we can listen to a radio program. This is how I started to listen to your program. I listened nine months regularly to your programs. You never said anything ridiculous. What you told was so logical and true. I decided to give my life to Jesus Christ. It is so difficult for me to study at this school and to be a Christian. I can’t talk with anyone about this.”

“Could you please pray for me?”

» Read full story and one from another broadcasting ministry that writes about ministering to an Iranian woman suffering from hopelessness and depression (SAT-7).

» In some parts of the world, Christians, too, have limited access to Christian input and materials. See The Journey of God’s Word to Myanmar (Asia Harvest). And listen to an interview on Building the Church in Burma (Compassion Radio).

Source: INContext, July 2015

In February 2015, the Pew Research Center released the sixth in a series of annual reports analyzing the extent to which governments and societies around the world impinge on religious beliefs and practices. Looking at the overall level of restrictions—whether resulting from government policies or from hostile acts by private individuals, organizations, and social groups—the study finds that:

1. Restrictions on religion were high or very high in 39% of the 198 countries and territories monitored.

2. Nearly 5.5 billion people (77% of the world’s population) live in nations where religious restrictions of some kind (related to either government or social groups) are either high or very high. This figure has increased from 76% in 2012 and 68% as of 2007.

3. Among the world’s 25 most populous countries, the highest overall levels of restrictions were found in China, India, Burma (Myanmar), Egypt, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Russia, where both the government and society at large impose numerous limits on religious beliefs and practices.

4. Among these populous countries, China had the highest level of government restrictions in 2013 [the most recent year for which data was available].

5. India had the highest level of social hostilities involving religion.

» Read the rest of the report.

Source: Act Beyond, July 2015

Most of what we hear about the Middle East is terrible news. But the turmoil and warfare there are creating desperation that has lead to an openness to the gospel for many people. We heard several Syrians quoted as saying, “Satan has caused this war in Syria, but God has used it to lead us to Jesus, which never would have happened otherwise.”

Amal was a young boy when he started having scary dreams of death and hell. He could never get away from them. For several years he said that he was tormented by these dreams. When he was about 12 years old he cried out to God begging him to please take away these dreams, to show him how he could get peace.

Amal is now a disciple who makes disciples. He has received some training from some long term workers with whom we work. With their help and encouragement Amal started several groups with men interested in the gospel. Many are now believers and have also started groups. God is at work!

» Read full story.

Source: Christian Aid Mission, July 2, 2015

Far from allowing the Islamic extremist violence of Boko Haram to drive them out, native Christian workers in Nigeria’s northeast have expanded their church-planting ministry to meet the needs of displaced people.

An evangelistic ministry based in Nigeria has long focused its efforts on the primarily Muslim, northeastern states of Adamawa, Borno, and Yobe, which have been under a state of emergency since May 2013. Many of the thousands of displaced people have fled to camps in Adamawa’s state capital of Yola. The indigenous ministry is still working in northeast Nigerian villages, albeit much more discreetly, but it has expanded to camps for the internally displaced—not only offering humanitarian assistance, but proclaiming Christ at a time when few are bold enough to do so.

“There are more than 70,000 people in the camps there, so it becomes another mission field for us,” said the director of the indigenous ministry. “We used to reach them with the gospel in their villages, but now we reach them not only with the gospel; we reach them with food, we reach them with medicine, we reach them with Bibles.”

» Read full story.

Missions Catalyst News Briefs 7.1.15

1. WORLD: Wars and Statistics
2. INDIA: Holiday Wars
3. LEBANON: Muslim Leaders Condemn Persecution of Christians
4. WORLD: Refugees, Crisis or Opportunity?
5. INDONESIA: Former Jihadist Starts Jesus Communities

Listen to Josh Lavender sing Hope in Jesus.

Greetings!

How do you communicate hope? Before we can communicate hope to others we must learn to make them feel welcome. I am finding that the tools that a missionary needs to communicate well are also needed close to home. The pluralistic West hosts many subcultures, even where I live in upstate New York. In light of that, my pastor sent me a helpful list of seven things to say to church visitors and from the same source ten things you should never say (Thom Rainer).

Even more helpful is this list of things to avoid saying in an honor/shame context (HonorShame.com). The explanations are SO helpful. I think some of my relatives are from an honor/shame subculture!

Communicating hope must also be done with prayer. Are you praying this Ramadan for Muslims? Here are some ways to pray for Muslims besieged by war (Zwemer Center).

Communicating hope in Jesus,

Pat

Sources: various via Pat Noble, June 2015

Did you realize that Monday, June 29 was the one-year anniversary of the declared “caliphate” by ISIS? It bought to mind  an interview with Philip Jenkins by The Gospel Coalition which discussed Jenkins’ latest book, The Great and Holy War: How World War I Became a Religious Crusade. Meanwhile, many evangelicals in the U.S. and elsewhere are despairing about the moral decline of society.

All this causes me to think about social changes, especially those that are ideologically driven. How is the enemy leveraging ideologies? How do we pray, or act? The first thing may be to recognize when what we’re hearing is propaganda and to combat it, if only in our own minds, with hard facts. Since data is inherently boring, I try to find information presented with great graphics, like those from INContext and Missiographics.

Some creative types use their art to humanize the data. Check out Hard Data, a five-minute video and music piece illustrating military data about casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan. Jump in and watch from 8:50 to 10:10 to hear the artist describe this work (Flowing Data). Another great data visual about war is an interactive 15-minute piece, The Fallen of World War II (Neil Haloren). While the civilian and military deaths have gone down, the number of “other casualties” of conflict, refugees and internally displaced people, has risen steadily. See a New York Times visualization of the flight of refugees around the globe.

But back to holy wars and the utopian ideals that often drive them. Their appeal may be that they give hope to those who have none. Scripture calls hope, specifically “the hope set before us” as believers, the anchor of the soul (Hebrews 6:18-20). And take a look at the context: this hope is for “we who have fled for refuge.” We can keep praying for more of those seeking social change or simply seeking refuge to know such a hope!

Source: World Watch Monitor, June 29, 2015

As you may have seen, June 21 was the first-ever International Yoga Day, observed from New Delhi to New York. In yoga’s birthplace, India Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself led a yoga session attended by 37,000 people in the heart of Indian capital. June 21 also was a Sunday, and that’s why several of India’s Christian organizations voiced their opposition—not to yoga itself, but to another big national event scheduled on a Christian holy day.

“It’s not that we do not welcome yoga, minus its (Hindu) religious connotation, since it has merits for mind exercise and relieving stress. However, the hype and overboard is just too much,” said [a senior Presbyterian church leader in the north-east of India and former leader in the National Council of Churches in India].

Yoga Day is the latest of several attempts by India’s government to hold high-profile events on Christian holy days. The government declared a nationwide observance of “Good Governance Day” on Christmas. It convened a national conference of judges on Good Friday. India’s education minister has said yoga would become part of the federal school curriculum, and a top official of one of India’s 29 states told a Catholic convention that Christians should start reciting Hindu mantras as part of their worship services.

» Read full story.

Source: Mission Network News, June 16, 2015

Amnesty’s 35-page report The Global Refugee Crisis: A Conspiracy of Neglect blames the world and its leaders for failing to “fix” desperate circumstances currently surrounding 50 million people.

“The global refugee crisis may be fueled by conflict and persecution,” part of the report reads, “but it is compounded by the neglect of the international community in the face of this human suffering.”

About two-thirds of the world’s refugees have been in exile for more than five years, many of them with no end in sight. Approximately 86% live in developing nations; Turkey, Lebanon, and Pakistan each host over one million refugees.

Outlining crises in the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeast Asia, [Amnesty] calls for a “paradigm shift” in the way people view the global refugee crisis. It also blames the global community for refugee deaths.

“The current approaches to the world’s many refugee crises are failing—and the toll in lives lost and lives blighted is far higher than many armed conflicts.”

» Read full story.

» See also: The Global Refugee Crisis in Unprecedented and Getting Worse (VICE News), A Record Year in Misery: the World Has Never Seen a Refugee Crisis This Bad (Foreign Policy), the four-minute video Interview with a Refugee Pastor (IAFR), summaries of a Brookings panel on Europe’s Migration Crisis, the moving Diary of a Teenage Refugee (Tearfund), and Migrant Deaths Worldwide (Carnegie Council). Many refugees are coming from a country many people have never heard of: Eritrea. Read about why they are fleeing what has been called the “North Korea of Africa.”

Source: Catholic News Agency, June 17, 2015

The leaders of four branches of Islam in Lebanon gathered earlier this month to issue a joint statement in the face of sectarianism and the rise of the Islamic State, denouncing attacks against Christians in the region.

“In the name of religious, humanitarian and national principles, the summit condemns religiously motivated attacks against Eastern Christians, including attacks against their homes, villages, property, and places of worship, when in fact the Prophet had recommended that they be respected, protected, and defended,” the participants said in a June 2 statement.

Such attacks, “like those suffered by other Muslims and non-Muslims belonging to other faiths and cultures, like the Yazidis, are tantamount to aggression against Islam itself,” they added, according to abouna.org, a site edited by Fr. Rif’at Bader, a priest of the Patriarchate of Jerusalem.

The June summit included representatives of the Sunni, Shia, Druze, and Alawite communities.

» Read full story.