Category: News Briefs

Source: WorldVenture, March 5, 2022

Donna and Mark McDonnel are WorldVenture global workers to Ukraine temporarily evacuated to Poland. And they just spent 48 hours straight helping Ukrainian refugees. Because sometimes, that’s what it means to serve.

Donna received a call from her friend and Arabic-language teacher, a Jordanian man teaching in Kyiv.

Donna’s teacher managed to escape with his Ukrainian wife—who was very distressed—and their two kids in their car. “That little suburb, across the street from Kyiv Christian Academy was home to a good-sized Tatar community, and he was teaching Quranic Arabic at a school there,” [she says]. It was recently shelled by the Russian military.

This man and his family traveled with different caravans of people of different nationalities and spent over 48 hours waiting to cross the border into Poland. Donna and the teacher spoke throughout this time of escape, and she helped him think through where to find a new home.

Donna [and others] arranged for lodging to house them on their trip through Poland—an adventure all its own. Eventually, the teacher and his large group made their way to Berlin, Germany, en route to their hoped-for destination of Switzerland. But the start of their new lives has begun with a new challenge: All 11 have tested positive for COVID-19. They are now quarantined. It’s a rough way to start a new life after a harrowing experience fleeing their former lives.

“They are not going back to Ukraine,” Donna reports of her friends. “He sees this as starting a whole new life. His biggest concerns were being received as a Muslim and the rumors of prejudice.”

Read the full story with prayer points.

See also Russian Evangelical Leader Apologizes to Ukrainian Christians and The Wartime Prayers of Ukraine’s Evangelicals (Christianity Today) as well as How the Ukraine War Is Dividing Orthodox Christians (The Conversation).

As the man in the next article found, sometimes having your life turned upside down can be a tremendous blessing.

Source: Asian Access, March 8, 2022

God has used the pandemic to dismantle the ministry construct under which I had been working. The pandemic forced me to embrace undoing ministry. I had no choice because pandemic rules and restrictions grounded me at home. Slowly, the restrictions created by the pandemic became God’s instrument to deconstruct my ministry practices and perspective.

Deconstruction made it clear that what I had prioritized and pursued in life and ministry needed radical review and revision. The time and space created by the pandemic provided needed time to lazily linger in Bible reading and reflection, writing, and prayer. I grappled with the truth that ministry is all about participation in the work of God, not performance in the ministry.

God deconstructed my ministry so that he could do the spiritual reconstruction needed to help me to focus on what really matters as defined by the values and vision of the kingdom of God. God let me see that many things I had considered as success were not really significant in the kingdom of God. In the eyes of God, small works of love in the obscurity of the ordinary are significant and rewarded (see Matthew 25:34-40).

Read the full story. The author leads the A2’s ministry in the Philippines.

Asian Access also shared A Call to End the War and Pray for Peace, with prayers and statements about Russia and Ukraine from ministry leaders across Asia.

Source: 24-7 Prayer, March 1, 2022

We’re joining with a global call from Pope Francis and the Archbishops of Canterbury and York to pray and fast for peace in Ukraine, on Wednesday, March 2.

Join us as we seek God’s kingdom of righteousness and peace together.

We’ve created a free downloadable prayer guide that you can use personally, or with a group, to pray. There are also downloadable slides with prayer points for groups, either in person or online.

Download prayer guide and slides or find additional prayer resources from 24-7 Prayer including scripture-based lectio, some especially for families.

Editor’s Notes:

The many videos, prayer guides, and articles coming out to help us understand and pray for Ukraine are too numerous to include, but if you need a place to start, try Prayercast, and see what various ministries are doing and saying at Mission Network News.

FEBC is one of the ministries posting a stream of videos and stories from within Ukraine. On Monday, they wrote, “Igor and Sergey, who have sent several video updates, are walking the streets of Kyiv and sharing Christ with those they are with. Igor just reported leading 20 teens to Christ today. The Holy Spirit is giving them courage and boldness, and people’s openness to the gospel is unprecedented in this moment of extreme danger.”

You might have missed this story about a certain prayer meeting: The Ukrainian Needed Prayer. The Russian Volunteered (Christianity Today).

Source: Middle East Concern, February 28, 2022

[On February 28] a verdict was issued by Branch 34 of Tehran’s Appeal Court overturning the convictions of nine Christian converts from Rasht.

The nine were initially arrested at their homes over several weeks in January and February 2019. On July 24, 2019, they were each convicted of endangering state security and promoting Zionism and sentenced to five years in prison.

In a surprise development, on November 2, 2021, the Supreme Court ordered a review of their sentences on the basis that promoting Christianity and “Zionist evangelism” in private homes is not an example of “gathering and collusion against internal or external security” as decided in the original verdict. Additionally, this case is not considered to meet the definition of the establishment of groups aiming to disrupt national security as defined by the penal code. Furthermore, according to this legal statement, promoting Christianity and establishing a house church are not considered crimes.

Read the full story. Note some serious charges remain.

Source: Beyond, February 18, 2022

When they arrived in their country of service, Joel and Becky started looking for people who would set aside tradition and focus on God’s Word as their guide for church planting. 

In the beginning, very few people were interested to hear what they had to say about God’s vision for his church. During the first four or five years, only one local believer joined them in pursuing a church planting movement.

Then, suddenly, more and more believers joined their team. Their influence grew among local believers who were pursuing evangelism and church planting. Consequently, they were able to train in increasingly larger spheres. Those local believers said they noticed that Joel and Becky stuck around. “Expat (foreign) workers come in and out of our country all the time,” Joel says. “Unsurprisingly, it seems many locals prefer to wait and see who sticks.” 

Additionally, while Joel and Becky were proving themselves to be invested long-term, they also gained experience working in local cultures and languages. “We can now serve our local brothers and sisters as trusted servants of God and help them catalyze movements in their own country,” Joel says. “We commonly ask, ‘What’s it going to take to see God’s Kingdom come to these people that God loves?’ Many times the answer is commitment and perseverance.

Read the full story. 

Up for a deeper dive into fruitful practices related to church planting? Take a look at Michael Cooper’s Reflections on the State of Church Planting in the US (Journal of the Evangelical Missiological Society).

Source: Morning Star News, February 16, 2022

Malingumu Bruhan, 34, returned for his grandfather’s funeral in Muhira village, Nawaikoke, and then accepted his uncles’ request to stay and visit, as they said they had not seen him for a long time, he said. Other visitors had left when Bruhan’s uncle, Ndifakulya Musa, began rebuking him.

“My uncle accused me of embarrassing them by holding Christian evangelistic, open-air meetings and debates with Muslims,” Bruhan told Morning Star News. “He accused me of being an infidel by converting to Christianity, and that Allah will reward them in [paradise] if they kill me.”

As Bruhan [kept] silent, his uncles’ anger grew, he said.

“They started beating me up as others gathered firewood, while another was sent to go for petrol because they wanted to use it to burn me alive.”

As his uncles were waiting for the fuel, another convert from Islam who had accompanied Bruhan to the funeral came looking for him but was told he was nowhere in the vicinity, he said. The friend spied Bruhan’s shoe, which had come off as his uncles dragged him off for slaughter.

“My friend made several phone calls after finding my shoe, and they arrived and started searching for me,” he said. “They found me behind the house about 100 meters away, tied and with firewood around me. They tried calling the police, which scared the attackers, and they fled.”

Having sustained head injuries, Bruhan was taken to a clinic at Bulumba town, then later transferred to another area undisclosed for security reasons.

An evangelist well-known for his public debates with Muslims about Christianity and Islam, Bruhan has survived 11 murder attempts, he said.

Read the full story.

Also read about an evangelist from Tanzania who is planting churches in Muslim-majority Zanzibar (International Christian Concern).

Source: Mobile Ministry Forum, February 2022

Two resources are now available to help us gain a big perspective on the current state of the world’s people.

Gordon Conwell’s Center for the Study of Global Christianity has released its Status of Global Christianity 2022, which shows that the growth of the world’s Christian population continues to fall behind the overall population growth (but only by one-hundredth of a percentage point). More importantly, the report shows that the vast majority of non-Christians (81.7% of them, or 4.4 billion souls)—do not know any Christians! These people may have no other means to learn about Jesus or His people except through the screens and speakers of their mobile phones.

DataReportal also released its annual authoritative Digital Global Overview Report. There is a lot to chew on in its 300 slides! Did you know that the number of social media users in the world grew by nearly half a billion in 2021 (from 4.2 billion to 4.62 billion)? Take a look through the slide deck for information about the world population (slides 13-18), global/regional/country-level internet use (slides 19-85), social media use (slides 86-214), and mobile phone use (slides 215-236).

Read the full story and view the slides. It looks like DataReportal has now also posted reports for specific countries and regions.

Source: Mission Network News, February 10, 2022

In Pakistan, a 17-year-old boy led his entire tribe to follow Jesus. Rehan worked as a waiter at a roadside restaurant. He often worked 12-hour days, trying to scrape together enough money to feed his family.

One day, a truck driver began visiting the restaurant. Over time, Rehan noticed how well the man, Safdar, treated him and asked him why. Nehemiah with Forgotten Missionaries International (FMI) tells the story.

“Rehan said, ‘How is your attitude towards a waiter so gentle? Have you joined some other sect than Islam?’ Safdar gave him an audio Bible. Rehan took it home and began listening. Then Safdar suggested Rehan take off from his work and spend time together to answer his queries and questions at the FMI Discipleship center.”

Rehan realized how much Jesus loves him and he was baptized a couple of months ago. He didn’t stop there though; he gathered his family together and told them as well. His parents were moved by the message but still feared backlash from the tribal leaders. Nehemiah says when someone in Pakistan starts following Jesus they often face persecution from their tribe and family.

Nehemiah says he invited three FMI partners to help him share the gospel with the tribe. “One evening, he gathered all the tribe’s members under one big tent. First, Rehan showed a movie about Jesus. Then an FMI partner shared a 15-minute devotion about new hope in Christ. That day, a 17-year-old-boy led his whole tribe to the Lord Jesus Christ.”

Praise God for this tribe of about 60 people, and ask him to strengthen them. Pray the story of Rehan and his tribe would not be an isolated one.

Read the original story or listen to the audio broadcast.

You might also be interested in Looking Back on 30 Years, in which the UK Director for Frontiers considers factors that have led to the movements toward Christ we see today in the Muslim world.