The Beginning of a Movement?

The following is the story of how a "house church" that I worked with in South Asia came to be and where it's possibly headed in the future:

Several years ago a young man born into a Muslim family came to faith in Christ through a series of life-changing encounters. As a child he was admired by all in his village because of his kindness. One day he was playing ball with other kids and the ball was hit into a cemetery. None of the other kids would venture into that scary place to get the ball, but this young man did. While there a strange man came up to him and put his hand on his shoulder and said, “One day you will be a great man of God.” The confused young man left with more questions than answers. Several years later he had moved into the city and was excelling at his studies. While at the university he got involved with a radical fundamentalist Islamic group and quickly rose to the top as a student leader. After studying the Qur’an in depth, he again felt like there were more questions than answers. One night he took a walk to think through all of this. As he crossed a bridge in the city a strange man approached him and put his hand on his shoulder and said to him, “Soon you will be a great man of God.” It was the same man that had approached him in the cemetery! It was not long after that encounter that the young man came to faith in Jesus Christ. As you can imagine, his classmates and the fundamentalist group did not respond positively to this change. He was beaten severely and spent 10 days in a hospital. This might discourage some, but this young man became more convinced that he was now finding the answers that he’d always been searching for. Over the last few years he has worked with several missionaries to help them learn the local language and even got involved in distributing Bibles through the project that many of you have been praying for and giving sacrificially toward.

The young man is now doing his medical internship and is living at a hostel where he met other fairly new believers and started to gather them together in his room forming a house church. This is the group that I and another team mate got to invest in for the entire week training them in church multiplication using our First Steps curriculum and discipleship using the 7 Basic Commands of Jesus. The amazing thing about this embryonic group is that there are 3 Muslim background believers and 4 Hindu background believers among them and they are winning more from both faiths regularly. In fact, on the first day of the training we met in this young man’s small hostel room and sat on the floor studying the Scripture. During a break a new man came into the room. We learned that this man had received a Bible during a distribution recently and had been meeting with several members of the house church to learn more about Jesus. In the middle of our training, one of the young men started sharing with the visitor again and before we knew it he was rejecting Islam and praying to receive Christ!

Another young member of the church was studying English Literature at his university and got a scholarship to Cambridge for a semester. During his time there, the Muslim met a Christian who gave him a pocket Gideon’s Bible. During testimony time of our training he pulled that NT out and shared how just 3 months earlier he returned to the country and heard a radio broadcast that we helped to start. Then he was hanging out with friends at another university one day and my missionary friend gave him a NT that was in his language and English. Through that encounter he started meeting with the leader of the small church and 2 months ago he rejected Islam, received Christ and was soon after baptized. In keeping with our training philosophy, we went out to apply what we’d studied together in the morning. Amazingly, this 2 month old believer suggested we go to his campus to evangelize! So we loaded up and went. What a blessing to see him rush onto the campus and begin to gather a group together telling them that his friends were there to “explain the light of Jesus” that had changed his life. On the first day there we shared with a few small groups of students and started handing out NTs to an enthusiastic throng of young Muslims and Hindus. The following day we returned there again and the new believer had arranged for us to speak in the lecture hall to a group of about 50-60 inquiring students. So the missionary, the house church leader, and I shared with them for about an hour fully proclaiming the Gospel, and answering their questions regarding it. In particular I shared with the group my testimony of coming to faith as a university student and how Christ had since changed my life. I really connected with them by telling them that God created them with their ethnicity, but their ancestors had chosen their religion. So I beckoned them not to confuse the two. I shared with them how each man and woman must one day stand before a Holy God and no amount of religious devotion would achieve the merit necessary to escape judgment. So I asked them to consider Christ, who alone lived a perfect life and died as a sacrifice of atonement for their sins. Many followed us out of the auditorium asking questions and before we knew it we were distributing Bibles to virtually the whole campus. My teammate was a bit intimidated when a police officer cleared the crowd around him and then boldly said, “I am a police officer. I need two please!” People are hungering the world over for the TRUTH! Jesus Christ is the TRUTH. And that is the message we proclaimed. The rest of the week we continued the training and as the island team came back to the city, they took over the mass distribution of Bibles.

The highlight of the week for me was when teaching the 7 Basic Commands of Jesus in the small storage room (the hostel banned our meeting after the 2^nd day out of fear that Muslims living nearby would destroy their facility since these young men were hitting the streets and sharing the Gospel everyday after our time together!) where the missionary keeps the cases of Bibles for distributions. After one session we shared Communion together – the first time for several of the new believers. Then after teaching a session on what it means to love God and love one another, I washed the leader’s feet and then the whole group started to follow suit until everyone had both washed and been washed.

On Friday our whole team had the joy of worshiping with the “house” church in their normal location – under a grove of trees just outside the city. We sat in the shade and took part in one of the most amazingly simple times of worship that we all were forced to think how near this must’ve been to what the 1^st Century believers experienced. All the while a group of cattle herders had gathered with their herds. We gave them a solar powered audio NT and they sat and listened in amazement to the whole book of Luke. The primitive and the modern collided under that grove of trees and the Presence of the eternal One was with us. So as I sit here in my office today gathering these thoughts I am grateful that not only were we able to distribute over 16,000 copies of God’s Word, but we were able to invest in a group of relatively new believers and train them with a vision and means for making disciples and multiplying what they now have. The results are in God’s Sovereign hands, but as we left my brothers in Christ there had already begun to put into practice what I was blessed to teach them from God’s Word. Please pray for the men of Isahee Tablique Baptist Church (translated “The Followers of Jesus Apostolic Missionary Baptist Church”) as they follow up on all the leads from those who received Bibles through our massive distribution efforts.