By Lucinda Borkett-Jones, Christian Today.
Despite the daily news of the persecution of Christians around the world by Islamist groups, there is another, lesser-known story of growing numbers of Muslims around the world who are turning to Christ as Lord.
Missionary David Garrison’s book, A Wind in the House of Islam, charts this phenomenon, which he says demonstrates that “we are living in the midst of the greatest turning of Muslims to Christ in history”.
The book is the result of two and a half years of research and involved travelling more than 250,000 miles to conduct interviews with more than 1,000 people around the Muslim world. In the study, a ‘movement’ of believers is defined as a group of more than 1,000 baptised believers or 100 new churches within a Muslim community. In total he found 69 movements that had started in the first 12 years of the 21st century, in comparison with virtually no voluntary movements of converts to Christianity in the first 12 centuries of Islam.
Garrison, who has been a missionary pioneer with the the Southern Baptist International Mission Board for nearly 30 years, told Christian Today that he started out with a “healthy scepticism” about the number of new believers, imagining that the figures might be have been over-estimated. Instead, he found that numbers were often vastly under-reported.
“What is exciting is not just how big the movements are…but how many of these movements there are now and that they’re not limited to one corner of the world, but we’re seeing them from West Africa to Indonesia, and virtually everywhere in between,” he says.
Muslims who convert to Christianity can face the death penalty and many experience intense persecution, so converts are often underground, making it impossible to know exactly how many new believers there are, but estimates currently range between 2 and 7 million.
So why is this turning to Christ happening now? “God has brought several elements together uniquely in our time,” he says. “Some of them are old elements – Muslim violence is not new, this is one of the least violent centuries in Muslim history – but what’s different is today when Muslims experience this violence, they can see an alternative… they can switch on their Internet, they can turn on their television and hear an evangelist speaking Farsi or Kazakh or Uzbek.”
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Somehow, I keep thinking of God’s perfect Kingdom. The lion lying down with the lamb. The wolf lying down with the sheep. Beating swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks.
Oh, precious, gracious, holy and sovereign Lord! Thank You! I wonder if this is why there is so much new jihad and international violence by Islamic terrorists–the enemy hates this conversion to the True God.
Love is stronger than hate. It seems to me that believers in Christ should befriend non-believers, specially Muslims and show by their lives how love is much stronger than hatred which seems to be the characteristic of the Muslim faith as illustrated by media coverage of activities of radical believers of Islam.
Praise be to God!