Inside the Revolution

by Joel C. Rosenberg

  Not everyone with a satellite dish has the purest motives, of course. Many are searching for pornography and other forms of cultural pollution pouring out of Europe and Hollywood. But as people flip through the channels searching for something they want in the privacy of their own home or room, sometimes they stumble upon a channel showing something they need, a channel that provides them a completely different perspective on the God of the universe and a completely different take on how we can interact with Him.

  With the explosion of satellite dish sales has come an explosion of satellite evangelism. Al Hayat is one of the premier sources of Christian programming, but it is certainly not the only network beaming biblical messages into the region.

  The Egyptian-based “Nilesat” and the Gulf-based “Arabsat” systems refuse to carry any Christian programming, but today there are no fewer than sixteen different Christian television channels operating on the “Hot Bird” satellites run by the European telecommunications company Eutelsat.609 These channels are widely diverse in Christian doctrine, style, and impact. Nevertheless, they all share the same objectives: to communicate the gospel; to broadcast sermons and church services in Arabic, Farsi, Turkish, and other regional languages and dialects; and to show Christian feature films and miniseries, including the famous JESUS film, which was produced in 1979 by Warner Brothers and Campus Crusade for Christ International and has had some 6 billion viewings worldwide in the last three decades. And these channels are succeeding beyond anything the Radicals can imagine.

  One Christian network known as SAT-7 is regularly seen by at least 9 million viewers throughout North Africa and the Middle East, according to Dr. Graham Mytton, research consultant and former director of audience research for the BBC World Service, based on a survey of eight sample Muslim countries. This number includes 2 to 3 million viewers who watch daily or at least once a week: 319,000 people in Morocco, 201,000 in Syria, and 118,000 in Saudi Arabia. It also includes 5 to 6 million “occasional” viewers: 1.2 million people in Morocco, 464,000 in Syria, and 309,000 in Saudi Arabia.610

  Not long ago, the head of one Middle East ministry told me a remarkable story he knew firsthand, one that is indicative of the kind of impact satellite evangelism in general—and SAT-7 in particular—is having.

  An elderly woman in Iran was watching the JESUS film in Farsi in the privacy of her little apartment, he recalled. She had always been fascinated with the person of Jesus Christ, but she knew so little about Him. She did not have a Bible. She did not know any Christians. She had never been to church. She was not even particularly seeking out a film about Jesus that night. She just stumbled onto it while flipping through the channels coming into her satellite receiver.

  But as the story unfolded, she began to respond to the love of Christ. She was intrigued by His teachings, amazed by His compassion and miracles, and moved by His love and forgiveness even for His enemies, even for those who had condemned Him to death and nailed Him to the cross.

  When she saw the depiction of Jesus rising from the dead, she found herself in tears.

  At the end of the film, the narrator explained how a viewer could pray to become a follower of Jesus Christ. In doing so, he read a Bible verse—Revelation 3:20—in which Jesus says, “Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and will dine with him, and he with Me.”

  Unfamiliar with the passage and thus not aware that Jesus was speaking metaphorically—saying that if a person opens the door of his or her heart and welcomes Him in, then He will come in and save that person—the woman thought, I guess I had better open the door. So she got up from her chair, walked over to the front door of her apartment, and opened it.

  She was suddenly blinded by a bolt of light emanating from a figure in the doorway. “Who is it?” she asked.

  “It is I,” Jesus said.

  “Come in, my Lord,” she said, and Jesus entered her home.

  For the next few minutes, Jesus spoke to her about Himself, told her He loved her and had forgiven her, and told her to get a Bible and begin reading it. And then, as suddenly as He had appeared, He was gone.

  The woman, startled but excited, looked back at the television screen and noticed there was a phone number she could call for more information. She picked up the phone and dialed it immediately.

  The call was routed from Iran to an overseas number through a secure telephone system that terminated at a secret call center—one Lynn and I have visited—where Iranian converts who are trained as counselors answer calls such as these and help those wanting more information about becoming a Christian or growing in their faith.

  “I just saw Jesus,” the elderly woman told a counselor, her voice trembling.

  “That’s great,” the counselor replied. “Isn’t it a wonderful film?”

  “No, no, you don’t understand,” the woman said. “I just saw Jesus—in person, in my home. He appeared to me. He told me I am now His follower. Can you help me get a Bible and understand what I should do next?”

  The Power of Radio

  Before the advent of satellite TV broadcasting, radio was the main way Arab evangelists brought the gospel to millions of Muslims—many of whom were illiterate—in closed countries. Even today, radio is still a powerful weapon in the evangelical air war in the epicenter. Trans World Radio, for example, broadcasts biblical programming in Arabic for twenty-eight hours a week (roughly four hours a day) from two stations, one in Cyprus and one in Monte Carlo, targeting the Middle East and North Africa, respectively. As a result, they receive more than two hundred thousand letters a year from listeners asking for answers to their many questions, requesting Arabic Bibles, requesting Bible correspondence courses, and sharing their stories of how they came to faith by listening to TWR’s programs. Other radio ministries have similar approaches and results.

  As I was researching this book, a dear Arab evangelist friend of mine shared with me a great example of the impact of gospel radio. A few years ago, he received a letter from a man named Mohammed who was the assistant to an imam in Saudi Arabia. Though the young man lived in the most extreme Wahhabi country on the planet—and worked in a mosque every single day—he would go home after work and listen to Christian radio, which came on late at night.

  One night he tuned in to a fifteen-minute broadcast that was focusing on Egyptian illiterates. The language of the program was a dialect used by impoverished people from upper Egypt, and the broadcaster spoke slowly and with very simple vocabulary. He began by sharing three or four testimonies of Muslims who had come to Christ. Then he shared a short message focused on one simple truth: Jesus Christ is powerful, and He answers prayer. That was all.

  Now, the Saudi man was well educated and deeply religious. He could have been turned off by this simple presentation and angered by all this talk of Jesus penetrating the airwaves of Mecca and Medina. But he had a need in his own personal life, a very specific and unique need.

  For a long time he had prayed to Allah and to Muhammad to help him meet that need. But nothing happened. And then he heard on the radio that “Jesus Christ is powerful, and He answers prayer.”

  As an assistant mosque leader, he believed that he could not pray to Jesus, that Jesus was not omnipresent, that Jesus was not God to be prayed to. But he said to himself, “I have nothing to lose if I do.”

  So as he went to bed, he started repeating that phrase again and again. He fell asleep with the words in his mouth: “O Christ, the powerful.”

  At five the next morning, there was a knock on his door. His brother was at the gate, saying, “Good news, good news, Mohammed.”

  Mohammed said, “What’s going on? Why do you wake me up now?”

  His brother said, “I don’t know what happened, but your need, your request, has been met.”

  Mohammed was stunned. He remembered what he had gone to bed saying: “O Christ, the powerful.” And right there in front of his brother, he said, “I’m a Christian now. I
am a Christian.”

  He quit his job at the mosque. He went underground. He received biblical discipleship and ministry training. And today he is a Christian evangelist in Saudi Arabia.

  “So, Joel, who worked?” my Arab evangelist friend asked me. “Who changed this young man? Christ the Lord. That’s very simple. He went in faith to Christ, and Christ delivered. And that’s the story of scores and scores of people. God has used radio to open the eyes of anyone, including Muslims, if they are willing to have their eyes opened to Him.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  The Ground War—Part One

  How the Revivalists are making disciples despite extreme persecution

  All of the true followers of Jesus Christ in the Muslim world that I have met are deeply burdened for their neighbors and their countrymen. Often when they pray, they are in tears because they know that hundreds of millions of Muslims go to bed every night without any hope, without any peace, without having their sins forgiven, without the assurance that they are going to heaven when they die. This grieves the Revivalists and motivates many of them to take enormous risks to get the good news of God’s love and plan of salvation to those who have never heard the gospel or never accepted Christ as their Savior.

  What comforts the Revivalists, they say, is Jesus’ message in Matthew 16:18, when he said, “I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (KJV). This passage is a great source of relief and consolation for pastors and ministry leaders in the epicenter because it means that at the end of the day, they are not responsible for the success of the church in the epicenter. That’s Jesus’ job. He said that He is building His Church in the epicenter and around the world, and nothing and no one can stop Him.

  What, then, is the job of the Revivalists?

  Simple: to obey the Lord Jesus Christ in whatever He tells them to do. “If you love Me,” Jesus said in John 14:15, “you will keep My commandments.”

  So what does Jesus tell them to do? Love Him enough to preach the gospel, make disciples, plant churches, and teach and equip others to do the same.

  To some the notion of doing the work of God even while trusting God to ultimately accomplish that work may seem contradictory. But not to the Revivalists. They say the distinction is that the burden of obedience lies with individual followers of Jesus Christ, while the burden for success lies with Jesus Christ Himself. As one ministry operating very effectively in the Muslim world likes to teach its members: “Your job is to share Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit and leave the results to God.”

  To men and women trying to serve the Lord in very dangerous and difficult circumstances, these are liberating principles. The Bible teaches that Jesus loves His true followers regardless of their performance. He wants them to obey Him, whatever the cost, but He is not grading them based on their results. The results are dependent on Him, not them, and this, many Revivalists have told me, helps them sleep peacefully at night despite the enormous task that lies before them.

  “Boots on the Ground”

  As we saw in the last chapter, the leaders of the Revivalists are deeply grateful to the Lord for providing radio, satellite television, and increasingly the Internet as powerful and effective new ways of reaching vast numbers of Muslims with the gospel and biblical precepts.

  Still, most are not convinced that they can win the battle for the souls of the Muslim people through an “air war” alone. That is, they do not feel that they can merely beam in the evangelistic programming and Bible teaching—however strong the quality of those programs—from afar and make the revolutionary impact they believe is needed. What is vital, they insist, is waging a massive and historic “ground war” to complement the “air war.” As God directs them, therefore, they are steadily and systematically putting “boots on the ground” all throughout the Muslim world—men and women trained to make disciples, who will be qualified to make other disciples, who will be able to make other disciples as well.

  Ultimately, the Revivalists say, their hope for transforming the Muslim world is not in technology but in human beings who have been “revived”—spiritually transformed by faith in Jesus Christ and filled with the power of the Holy Spirit of God.

  Jesus, they note, used no technology when He came to a dusty corner of Roman-occupied Palestine. Rather, He preached to the masses, sometimes five to ten thousand at a time. He also recruited individuals, built a team, and invested His time in teaching this small band of brothers how to live like God-chosen global game-changers. He walked with His twelve disciples. He ate with them. He traveled with them. He spent time with their friends and family members. He gave them projects and assignments to test the content of their character and the quality of their faith. He forgave them when they made mistakes. He encouraged them. He prayed for them. He prayed with them. And He loved them to the last moment of His life on earth.

  What was the result? Admittedly, one—Judas Iscariot—failed disastrously, betraying them all. But look at the other eleven disciples. They started as worldly, fearful, jealous, petty, competitive, small-minded, uneducated, and untrained men. But after a few years of walking and talking with Jesus and observing His life, His purity, and His supernatural power in action, these men became such bold, decisive, and fearless preachers, pastors, evangelists, and apostles that even their opponents had to admit that they had soon “turned the world upside down” (Acts 17:6, KJV). This is the model believers in Christ must follow, the Revivalists say, if they are to change the Muslim world.

  The key is the personal touch. The Muslim culture is an Eastern culture, not a Western one. It is based on relationships and storytelling and on people spending long periods of time with one another. People in Eastern cultures are not so worried about schedules and quotas and sales figures and returning e-mails and phone calls quickly. They are interested in personal contact. They are interested in firm handshakes and good food and strong coffee and sweet tea and looking in a man’s eyes to see if he is a good man or a bad man and whether he can be trusted or not.

  In such a culture, a spiritual revolution cannot all be waged or won by remote control. It cannot all be done from radio and TV studios in Europe or the U.S., or via e-mail and Web sites. Some of it—much of it—must be done face-to-face, person-to-person.

  Can that be dangerous? Absolutely. But the Revivalists say there is no other way.

  Never before in human history have there been so many followers of Christ living in North Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia. The mission of the Revivalists, they tell me, is to focus on helping mere followers turn into fully devoted disciples who are willing to do whatever Jesus tells them to do, go wherever Jesus tells them to go, and say whatever Jesus tells them to say. They want to do so in every city, every town, every village, and every neighborhood in their countries and region.

  What’s more, they are trying to identify, train, and mobilize leaders. They are prayerfully seeking out men and women who are ready to help new converts study the Bible for themselves. They are looking for people who are willing to lead new and young believers in worshiping their risen Savior. And they are hoping to find people who are able to plant new churches, often in the privacy and secrecy of their own homes, since renting or buying or building a church facility would draw too much attention and buildings could be attacked by Radicals and blown to smithereens. This, the Revivalists stress, is how movements are made.

  Waging a Spiritual War, Not a Physical One

  In the pages ahead, I will profile some of the most effective “ground commanders” I have met in the Middle East. But first, let me be crystal clear about an extremely important point. When I use the terms “air war” and “ground war,” I do not mean to suggest in any way, shape, or form that the Revivalists are violent people or that they would ever resort to military weapons to force their beliefs on others. To the contrary, the Revivalists abhor violence as much as the Radicals embrace it. Their deeply rooted conviction not to use violence to advance
the Kingdom of Jesus Christ comes directly from the teachings of the Bible.

  On the night of His arrest in the garden of Gethsemane, Jesus told Peter not to attack Roman soldiers with his sword, noting that “all who draw the sword will die by the sword” (Matthew 26:52, NIV). Likewise, the apostle Paul wrote to those he was discipling, saying, “For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds” (2 Corinthians 10:3-4, NIV).

  Paul made an even more detailed case to this effect in Ephesians 6:10-17: “Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of His might. Put on the full armor of God, so that you will be able to stand firm against the schemes of the devil. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places. Therefore, take up the full armor of God, so that you will be able to resist in the evil day, and having done everything, to stand firm. Stand firm therefore, having girded your loins with truth, and having put on the breastplate of righteousness, and having shod your feet with the preparation of the gospel of peace; in addition to all, taking up the shield of faith with which you will be able to extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.”

  Revivalists do not use pistols, rifles, machine guns, explosives, or bombs of any kind to advance their objectives. They understand that a physical war as well as a spiritual war is being waged against them, but the Bible teaches them to wage only a spiritual war, a war of ideas and beliefs, not a physical war.

  Thus, they say they thank God every morning for a new day and for continued life. Then they pray that God would fill them with the Holy Spirit, suit them up in the full armor of God, give them the strength and the courage to do and say whatever He commands them, and accomplish His divine purposes for that day in and through their lives.