CPM

On a hot day in 1983, Tom, a missionary on his way home in a rickshaw, saw a young man on the side of the road, and asked him if he wanted a ride. The young man, Abdul, had been through a tough time, including being locked in his room, solitary confinement, beatings, death threats and suicide attempts, because he had questioned the Koran. He went home with Tom, who gave him a Bible. When he returned home, Abdul read the entire New Testament in one night. John 3:17 astonished him, because it told him that God does not damn people but save them. That very night, he opened his heart to this God! One week later, he had read the entire Bible. His salvation was the start of the most dynamic present-day evangelistic movement in an Islamic nation, currently numbering hundreds of thousands of Muslims now following Isa, and around 10,000 who are baptised each month. That's a millennium event!
Source: Kingdom Ministries, Switzerland. KM is a team which aims to help start church-planting movements.

"Sister Ling is a simple, plain-looking farmer's daughter, but Christ's beauty and grace shines in her eyes," in the words of a report from Revival Chinese Ministries International (RCMI). "In 1991, the house churches in the central Chinese province Henan suffered heavy persecution. Sister Ling's family was torn apart. She and her husband had to leave their 7-year-old daughter in the care of another Christian. In the midst of this terrible time, Sister Ling's church decided to send her and another believer to far north-eastern China as spiritual pioneers. At 2 a.m. the night before she left, she and her husband sneaked into the village where their daughter now lived. The little girl woke, and cried when she saw her parents. After the traumatic goodbye, Sister Ling set off on her 2,500 km (1,600 mile) journey. It looked like it was going to be a difficult job; two years previously, several young believers had been sent to the region, but they had not been strong in their faith. Their work had resulted in eight new groups. The two women's job was now to choose a few key people from each group and train them in Biblical truths. Four months later, the Christians were filled with God's love for the lost, so they went out to evangelise. Many came to faith, because the Holy Spirit was with them. Sister Ling's home church decided that the two women should stay longer, so they discipled ten Christians who subsequently each went to different places to pass that which they had learned on to others. More and more people came to faith in Jesus. Ling declared January 1994 to be "Gospel Month". The churches fasted and prayed, and covered the streets with tracts, going from house to house evangelising. Over 4,000 new churches were planted in the surrounding towns and villages. Countless signs and wonders happened, and the believers were filled with joy; their experiences reminded them of the book of Acts. Sister Ling and her team prayed for more leaders and workers for the growing flock; God answered by speaking to thirty people who then worked full time for the Gospel. They travelled in pairs, training new leaders and giving the rapidly-growing church a Biblical foundation. Sister Ling's leadership team has no pastors or elders, and nobody has any theological training. Everything they teach they have heard from God themselves. The team now consists of 120 full-time staff, working in three provinces in north-eastern China, Inner Mongolia, Hebei and Shandong. 300,000 people have come to faith in Christ, and gather in 5,000 churches."
Source: RCMI, Dennis Balcombe

In the space of only a few years, thousands of house churches have been planted in seven districts of the Indian State Himachal Pradesh, a core Hindu area in northern India on the slopes of the Himalayas. Hundreds of Christians work as full-time missionaries in Randeep Mathews' church planting movement. Only a few years ago, news like this would have been unthinkable.

One death leads many to life
Saritha was the only one who followed Jesus in one remote village in Himachal Pradesh. She had to fight a lot of resistance and had many opponents, but remained true to her faith, believing and regularly praying that other villagers would find Jesus. She suddenly fell ill and was taken to hospital, but none of the drugs had any effect. Discharged from hospital, she returned home and testified with her last breath that she would go to heaven. Moved, her parents became Christians. Over the following weeks, many others in the village also decided to follow Jesus; the village is now home to around 80 believers. One disciple's death led many to life, and God answered Saritha's prayer, even in her death.

A medium follows Jesus
Pummy is a 30-year-old single Sikh who worked as a medium, prophesying to others in the names of idols. Then she started to hear about miracles happening in Christian meetings in the area. Interested, she wanted to find out whether the rumours were true. After witnessing what was happening, she decided to follow Jesus herself. Her story has led over thirty others to Christ. As a child, she was adopted by a rich non-Christian family. Because she has become a Christian, her family has excluded her from their will, but Pummy will not deny Christ for any price.

Source: Agape Voice

Something very special happened when house church coach John White and Kenny Moore, Southern Baptist Director of Church Planting for the State of Colorado, had breakfast together on October 2, 2002. Both have a passion to see Colorado covered with living expressions of the Body of Christ. While lingering over the last cup of coffee for the morning, their thoughts were turned to the ninth and tenth chapters of Luke. They observed that this was where the Lord was really shifting gears, where the foundation was laid for all that would follow till the end of the age. Up to this point, the Lord was doing the ministry. Now he was sending out the 12 (Luke 9:1-6) and then the 72 others (Luke 10:1). "Now there were 42 two-man teams to establish the presence of Christ — to plant churches — everywhere," writes Jim Montgomery, a respected missionary and publisher of The Great Commission Update. "I would have been ecstatic," says John White, "if I had 42 church-planting teams for the state of Colorado. But what Jesus was saying really astounded us. 'The fields are ripe but these 42 teams are so few.'" The harvest is not the problem. The critical missing component is an adequate number of harvest workers. How do we get enough apostolic church planters? Luke 10:2b says to do one thing: ask the Lord of the harvest for them. John and Kenny covenanted with each other to pray this "10:2b" prayer together every day possible from that moment on. So every day either John would call Kenny or Kenny would call John to pray. If they didn’t connect, they would leave their prayer on voice mail.

800 days later
In the following 30 months, they have followed through on this pledge about 700 or 800 times, saying "God, here we are again, John and Kenny, pleading for more harvest workers for Colorado, just like every day." "Regular prayer, like the poor widow in Luke 18," says White, "can and should become a healthy, regular and hence relentless intercession." Kenny and John started inviting others to do the same, regularly praying the 10:2b prayer in teams. There are now between 200 and 300 people praying 10:2b with a partner virtually every day. The 10:2b virus is spreading!

Amazing results
"And the results have been amazing," says White. "We're to the point where we get a phone call or e-mail almost every day from someone saying something like this: 'It’s in my heart to plant a (house or simple) church. How do I do that? Can you help me?'" Kenny Moore used to get six or eight people over the course of six months who would indicate a desire to start a new church. He now has a steady stream of inquiries, and there have been around 100 Southern Baptist Churches established in Colorado alone from the time he and White began praying 10:2b together.
Tim Pynes had been on the staff of a large, post-modern church in Denver. With so many programs in this mega-facility, Pynes found he had merely turned into a project manager. "This is not what I signed up for," he told White. "I want to invest in the lives of people." He left the megachurch and started meeting White. He now has a growing network of 8 house churches in Denver.
Guy Muse, a Southern Baptist missionary in Ecuador, has been encouraging all of his house church people to pray the10:2b prayer on a daily basis since May of 2004. "In that month of May alone, 30 new congregations were established," he reports.

"Cast out", not "send forth"
The Greek word for "send forth" in Luke 10:2b, ekballein, was a very forceful, almost violent, term. It is the word used when casting out a demon, for example. White and Moore realised that they should not pray for potential labourers who may be interested, but for highly-motivated people who God had taken and, as only he can, placed with gentle force in the harvest. It seems to work...

Source: Jim Montgomery and John White, DenverWH[at]aol.com

Some things only happen every couple of hundred years, others only every couple of thousand. This and the next Friday Fax are dedicated to one of these millennium events.
Fourteen centuries ago, Islam overran previously Christian nations such as Egypt and Tunesia. For the past thousand years, particularly since the barbarous "Christian" crusades and the development of un-Biblical westernised religious church traditions, Christians have found it difficult to win Muslims for the Gospel. Islam, with 1.4 billion adherents, is the world's second-largest religion after traditional Christianity which has proven resistant to the Biblical Gospel. As a young Christian, I heard only one message about Islam: "it is practically impossible to win Muslims for Christ" - a message from Hell, in my opinion, born out of centuries of pseudo-missionary frustration. Ineffective missionary methods, non-integrative churches and a fantastic lack of faith among top Christian leaders right up to the 1990's combined to create a climate of missionary unbelief. In 1982, only 2% of all Christian missionaries were working among Muslims - a ridiculously small proportion.

5,000 120,000 522,000

Yesterday, I ate lunch with three missionaries working among Muslims. One of them said "In the past two years, I've seen over 5,000 Muslims come to faith in Jesus in northern India. The work is growing so fast that the number will very likely soon pass 50,000. They meet in multipliable house churches, and ever more Mullahs are joining the movement..."
Another told "From our own experience and through other reliable sources, we know that in Bangladesh, 7,000 Muslims were baptised each month in 2003. They are radical followers of Jesus. In 2004, an incredible 120,000 joined them. Since 1997, the number of Muslims following Jesus has grown by 522,000." 522,000? That's more than the number of evangelical Christians in Switzerland, Austria and France together! Is that possible? What happened?
Baptist missiologist and author David Garrison says "More Muslims have come to Christ in the past two decades than at any other point in history. In North Africa, 16,000 Muslim Berbers turned to Jesus; in a central Asian republic, 4,000 Muslims have found Christ; 15,000 Kazakh Muslims found Christ in the past 15 years. In an appearance on Al Jazeera, Sheikh Ahmad Al Qataani, a leading teacher of Islamic clerics in Libya, said 'Every hour, 667 Muslims turn to Christianity, 16,000 every day, 6 million each year!' Those numbers are certainly exaggerated, but show that Islamic experts recognise what is happening: a massive missionary movement of Muslims to Christ."

A vision becomes reality

Let me use Kevin Greeson's story as an example of what's happening. Greeson is a Baptist missionary in southern Asia. In his book "Camel Training" published in 2004, he writes "In September 1997, I lay down on my hotel bed in Singapore, where I was attending missionary training. Before going to sleep, I saw a vision of thousands of Muslims in Bangladesh going to Hell. The vision's realism gripped me so strongly that I began to weep - for the first time in 22 years. The scene changed, though; the Muslims were given a new directive, were re-routed and went to Heaven. The next day, I was excited to hear that 30,000 US Christians had taken part in a prayer campaign for the people group among which I wanted to work, and that they had been praying the very hour I had my vision. My first years there as a missionary brought no fruit; after two years, we had gathered 23 women who worked weaving baskets for export to the West. Then we heard of Abdul (name changed).

Learning from Abdul

Abdul was a local church planter, and himself a saved Muslim - or Isahi (one who belongs to Isa/Jesus). In 1998, he had seen 50,000 Muslims baptised, and 8,000 churches planted by 2003. He was doing something differently, and we learned from him to do them differently too. We told the women to invite their husbands to a meeting; they all brought their husbands or fathers, and we explained verses from the Koran which speak of Jesus, showing him to be far more than just a prophet. They were excited and angry - excited, because they recognised the truth about Isa (Jesus), and angry about their Imams (islamic pastors), who had withheld the truth from them. Then we showed them the Jesus Film in their language. What then happened was unbelievable; the men insisted on meeting again the next day. For four days, they sat there and listened to the Gospel. They all turned to Jesus, and six new jamaats (house churches) were formed. Over the following 2 1/2 years, our team saw 4,500 Muslims baptised and 314 new churches started. Two years later, the number of churches had grown to over 800. The movement is still growing. What did we teach the Muslims which made them so open for Christ? It has something to do with a camel..."

When Muslims throw the Koran in the river

"One morning in May 1999, I read a report in Bangladeshi national newspaper, quoting a Member of Parliament who stood before his colleagues and asked 'What is happening to our religion? Muslims in the capital are throwing their Koran in the trash, and in one district, they even throw the Koran in the river.' What was going on? One day, an Imam held the Koran up in the Mosque, saying 'This book has done nothing to improve our lives.' Then he threw the book in the river. The congregation of around 4,000 men followed their leader's example, throwing their Korans in the river too."

What comes after resignation?

Kevin Greeson's report shows something of the inner erosion happening in Islam. But many adherents of other religions and religious subsystems are just as resigned. Just as traditional Constantine churchianity, Animism or Buddhism, the core of Islam does not help people live their lives, but generally just preserves the status quo of poverty, difficulties, uncertainty and illness for most and riches for a privileged minority. On top of all that, religion can only superficially answer the questions every person faces: why am I here, what am I supposed to be doing, where am I headed? The Bangladeshi Imam spoke for many in his recognition of the truth. In this phase of religious resignation, most people simply perform religious rites perfunctorily, outwardly going with the flow, inwardly questioning. Many Muslims, for example, wonder about Allah's secret 100th name...

The camel knows

Every Muslim knows that Allah has 99 names, and many know of a tradition which says that only a camel knows his 100th name. That name is 'Isa'! The Koran, the Muslims' holy book, does not answer the question directly, but gives enough clear hints. Many experienced missionaries start a conversation with Muslims with the words "I have discovered an amazing truth in the Koran, which gives hope of eternal life in paradise. Would you please read me Sure Al-Imran 3:42-55?"

The Koran teaches that Jesus knows the way to heaven

This Sure says three things about Isa (Jesus) which clearly lift him above the status of a prophet: Isa is holy (3:42-48), has power over death (49-54) and knows the way to heaven (55-56). This is a shock for many Muslims, because what does the Koran say about Mohammed? The surest answer is to say that Mohammed is what he said of himself; in Sure 46:9-10, he says "I am nothing new among prophets; I do not know what will become of me or my followers. I am just a voice of warning."
If Mohammed is nothing different or more than all the prophets before him, and did not claim to be the greatest prophet of all, did not know where he or his followers would go after death, and professes to simply be a voice of warning, the contrast with Jesus' statements about himself (for example John 6:47 and 14:1-7) could hardly be greater. If you then ask a Muslim "I want to go to heaven when I die. Which prophet can help me get there?", the result is often a process leading them to read the Injil (New Testament) and find Jesus. Information from the Koran (very important for Muslims) reveals Jesus to be clearly more than just a prophet, and endows him practically with saviour status. "The Koran does not contain enough light to show someone the way to salvation, but enough small candles to guide seekers the right way," says Greeson.

For God's sake, don't bring Muslims to church!

Greeson sees four aspects which are decisive in helping Muslims find Christ and remain in him:

1. Speak in a way that Muslims understand. 'Canaanite' language is as much a hindrance as calling yourself a Christian, which is so culturally and historically laden that Muslims understand "A person with Western culture, ungodly and immoral." The word 'Isahi' (follower of Isa) is far better.
2. Cultural conformity is not a hindrance, but builds important bridges. Paul became a Jew to the Jews, and a Greek to the Greek. Followers of Jesus must learn to overcome their fear of the unknown and foreign cultures through love.
3. Send out early. Where Muslims who become Isahis are taught and sent out early, they win others to Christ and plant new churches, thus starting a movement with church multiplication as one of its basic principles. Christians who do not understand this and claim that these things need significantly more time are a serious hindrance, and should be avoided.
4. "Please do not bring newly-saved Isahis to existing traditional churches!" advises Greeson. That tears them out of their cultural surroundings, and causes them to be rejected by their friends and family - exactly the people which a church planting movement should reach. A far better strategy is to start culturally relevant Jamaats (meetings). House churches provide an ideal structure. "So if Muslims do not come to church, we take the church to the Muslims!"

Source: Kevin Greeson, "Camel Training Manual". A summary of the CAMEL training is available.

"The number of house churches in the USA has probably doubled in the past 18 months, from 2,500 to 5,000," according to participants at a symposium organized by Church Multiplication Associates' Neil Cole in Los Angeles from 25-28 April 2005. "The main growth comes from missionary groups aiming to reach the unchurched with the Gospel and involve them in multipliable discipleship structures," says Cole. "We're expecting up to 1,000 participants at the next national House Church conference in the USA in Denver from 2-5 September 2005," say Tony and Felicity Dale, part of the team organizing the conference. John Eldredge was the main speaker at last year's conference; this year, speakers include Rolland and Heidi Baker, who saw some 5,000 new churches planted in Mozambique and neighbouring nations over the past 5 years, Wolfgang Simson and Neil Cole.

Bill Bright Billion Soul Initiative

Dr. Bill Bright, the founder of Campus Crusade for Christ who died in 2004, prompted the Billion Soul Initiative founded at the end of last year. Close colleagues and participants in consultations with Bright report that he explained his personal missionary vision for the future shortly before his death. He called on Christians to cooperate to call 1 billion people to follow Christ in the next 10 years by planting 5 million house churches. James O. Davis, John C. Maxwell and Steve Douglass subsequently formed the Global Pastors' Network. A 'global church planting congress' is planned for September 2005, in which over 350 Christian leaders will gather to plan this "largest evangelistic initiative in human history", as the organizers describe it.

Source: various, including James O. Davis