The Call for Muslim Evangelism

Here are a few more pictures of Norah.

I’ve been putting together some goals and plans for the upcoming year and thought I’d share a few of them with you.

Our team, Project North Africa, has several opportunities for people from both North and South America to get involved. Married couples can get involved full time with our “Seven Cities Project,” we need single men who can learn Arabic and travel all over the continent to meet with our contacts interested in the gospel, single women will not lack any opportunities working with the Muslim women, and college students can get involved with our summer internship.

As you can see, just about anybody can jump in and have a part in reaching North Africa with the gospel.

Since, I’ve finished language school; I’m looking more at raising up laborers from South America than before. This coming year, I plan on traveling a lot looking for people to partner with us. I’m looking at presenting the ministry in North Africa to churches in Peru, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, and Paraguay.

We would like 14 families in the next seven years to be in major North African cities planting churches, and at least two teams of single women and single men to head the field in the next year.

After preaching in chapel last week, six Bible college students told me that they wanted to know the next step in working with us.

Next week I will be starting a Muslim prayer group for those who are interested and give them as much material as I can to keep them thinking about and working towards getting to the field.

I’ll be teaching on missions at the Peru Bible College which will give me even more opportunities to get students excited about all of the possibilities out there for them to get involved.

Please pray for more laborers to go to the field. That is the only recorded prayer request of Jesus Christ in the entire Bible, so I think we should take it pretty seriously. Let’s take a risk and see what God can and will do through us in the Muslim world.

A good friend of mine who works as a missionary in the Muslim world wrote the following.

No one has more right to address this topic than he does. He’s accepted the challenge to take the gospel boldly to the Muslim people going against the flow of the “modern” Muslim mission model. The Lord has already blessed his ministry tremendously for it.

This is something that we run into all the time and I couldn’t agree with him more on the issue. He was just a little nicer about pointing out how ridiculous this “code” talk is than I would have been (which is why I am posting his comments right now and not my own).

I’m proud to work alongside mighty men of valor like him.

You should probably be sitting down for this one, it gets rough:

“Everyone who has traveled from America or Europe to a Muslim country inevitably learn the ‘code language’ that is used here by the missionaries who are afraid of getting kicked out of the country. Usually that language is learned after consistent scolding for using “bad words” like Jesus, church, and the gospel. I don’t want to be pompous but I’ll risk it and say, ‘If you can’t say the name of Jesus with boldness where you are going…don’t go!’”

Most missionaries don’t use those words even in private in their own homes or out in the woods. They think that someone is always listening. They have been conditioned to fear before they ever arrived here by their organizations. I don’t know if they think someone has binoculars and is reading their lips in English or Spanish or maybe they have been bugged.

So, here is the translation of some of your more common words so you know what to say when you meet some of these missionaries because if you don’t, they may just be likely to hang up on you or walk away from you with no warning:

Missionary- (The worst cuss word in existence) ‘M’ (just simply the letter) or ‘Macaroni’ (seriously) or more commonly ‘worker’

The Jesus Film- ‘The J. Film’

The Bible- ‘The Good Book’

Evangelism- ‘Sharing’

Preaching- ‘Talking’

Mission Board- ‘Company’

Church- ‘Group’ (which I guess is not that far off as a literal translation)

Church Planting- ‘C. P.’

The Gospel- ‘The News’

So I know that some of you who read this blog who have visited the Muslim world have bought into this language hook-line-and-sinker. Personally, though, I just simply feel ashamed of myself when I act so obviously ashamed of Christ and my job. So for the record, so you know, when people ask I tell them what I did before I came here: Taught the Bible. When I am on the street or in the presence of Arabs I use every one of those words with liberty in English, Spanish, and often Arabic. When they ask me where I am going on Sunday I tell them that I am going to church. AND I have never said that I nor anyone other missionary is a MACARONI. Sheesh!

I may get kicked out of the country tomorrow but I would rather my days be short and full of impact and courage than many and full of fear and waste.

PS. You can’t teach disciples to have courage (which is any missionaries main job, especially in a persecuted country) while you are afraid to use Jesus’ name…in public…out loud…with courage!”

I was working on my computer a second ago drinking my fourth cup of coffee when I noticed something in my tasty beverage that looked like a coffee bean.

Taking a closer look, I realized that it was in fact not a bean, but an ant.

The North American thing to do would be to empty my cup in the sink, clean it out, and pour a new cup.

But I had more than half a cup left when this happened, so such an absurd thought didn’t even cross my mind.

I just stuck my fat finger down in my coffee, ungracefully fished the insect out of the cup, and finished enjoying my daily caffeine fix. It didn’t even phase me.

That’s a pretty big step for someone as anal retentive as I am.

People should be able to make comments on the blog now.

Thanks for letting me know, Alonso.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Out of all the major elements in a normal church service, there is, in my mind, no job more important (other than the preaching itself) than the guys who work with the audio. After all, what good is the most powerful message ever preached, if nobody can hear it because of bad microphones?

The sound room guys, often get taken for granted until something messes up. All of the sudden the invisible people become the church piñata and everybody wants to take turns beating them down with thorny branches. Benjamin Armstrong knows exactly what I’m talking about.

For me, it’s kind of hard to get so angry with them.

I mean, think about what they really have to do.

They get to church at least a half an hour before anybody else just to test every microphone, amp, speaker, and television in the building. Then they have to make sure everything is plugged into the right place and marked so they can make split second changes when the preacher forgets to turn on his lapel mic, or walks away from the pulpit mic as he’s going on another “exciting” rabbit trail.

We won’t even mention trying to blend Mr. Tone-deaf who’s sing a soul stirring solo while the rest of the quartette forgets the words to the song and mumbles along.

After flipping switches and playing with a sound board big and confusing enough to make anyone at NASA want to cry, the Devil gets into one of the cords and the infamous screech rings out.

Then the people who showed up ten minutes after the service start to feel the moral obligation to turn around with absolute disgust in their eyes as if to say, “Why did you want to make that horrible eardrum piercing noise in the middle of everything that’s going on. If I were running audio here, I would make sure that nothing like that ever happens again.”

Well, isn’t that special.

The truth is, that if you knew anything at all about audio you would know that first of all that the people in the sound room wanted that to happen less than any other person in the church. Secondly, five hours of preparation doesn’t necessarily keep that kind of stuff from happening. And finally, fifty people turning around simultaneously to give the death stare doesn’t make the sound magically clear up again. In spite of what you may think, the guys back there are not deaf and they also heard what you heard - the only difference is that they are actually doing something to fix the problem.

In spite of how people treat them, they almost always come back to the next service and do it all again. I have all the respect in the world for our sound guys. Their like the kicker on the football team who never gets credit for the extra point or even the forty yard field goal, they just get flack for shanking one in the middle of the game.

So if you wonder why I don’t usually yell at these guys, there you have it.

Why don’t you thank the guys who run the audio in your church this Sunday for everything they do and put up with. Especially thank them if you hear nothing but the music and preaching. I bet you that you’d be the first one ever to do something as outrageous as that.

I know some of you have told me that you couldn’t post a comment to some of my posts in the past.

Well, I think I figured out what the problem was, so you should be able to talk back to me now.

Go ahead and click on “comments” below any given post, and let me know what you’re thinking.

I realize that many of you really would like to see all of the pictures of Norah I have put up on the blog.

Here’s an easy way to see them all at once without all of the garrulous junk in between.

Just go over to the left side of this blog and scroll down until you see something that says “Categories.”

Below that you will see an option for “Pictures.” Just click on that and it will pull up all of my posted pictures.

Hope that helps.

Gretchen and I took Norah on her first flight this weekend as we traveled to Lima.

Though she already has a Peruvian passport, we needed to get her one that said “The United States of America” on it in order to get her back to visit her family someday. Otherwise, we would have to apply for her to get a special visa to visit her own country.

Kind of puts us on the front lines of the immigration issue. You never know what kind of forbidden fruits my one month old baby may try to smuggle into the country, and then there’s the issue of what happens if she overstays her allotted time. She may get condemned to working in construction or fast food for the rest of her life as an illegal alien!

(But just think of the scholarships she could get, though!)

Anyway, in order to avoid returning to our home country illegally, we decided to make the extra effort to get Norah her very own shiny blue passport from the U.S. Embassy.

We went through the tedious process, so hopefully, we will get it sent to us soon, otherwise may just have to go up there and visit you guys with this group of immigrants.

Pray for the passport!

Last week, with the indispensable help of the notorious Joy Soncco, Gretchen and I were able to get Norah’s first passport.

It’s also the first Peruvian passport in our family and we couldn’t be prouder.

You should’ve seen the looks on people’s faces when we handed the airline a red passport this weekend. They had no idea what two obviously non-Hispanic people were doing with a legally Peruvian baby.