Miraculous Movements: How Hundreds of Thousands of Muslims Are Falling in Love with Jesus

By Jerry Trousdale

How do the people most resistant to the transformative power of the gospel come to be its most devoted followers? Miraculous Movement recounts an amazing change taking place within Muslim communities where the truth of Jesus Christ is turning around the lives of many thousands of Muslims from more than twenty people groups. Discover through the sometimes humorous, often sobering, but always enlightening and encouraging true stories how imams, sheikhs, and entire mosques are forsaking Islam and embracing Christ.

This close look at what the Lord is doing to spread the gospel highlights the key scriptural principles that help Christians reach out in love to share the gospel in their own community. The authors outline the principle of service to others that open doors of opportunity to the work of the gospel.

Author Jerry Trousdale works with CityTeam Ministries, an organization dedicated to helping disciples make disciples through CityTeamÆs own ministry and through training other ministries in more than thirty countries.

Features includes:

• Outlines important principles on how to share the gospel with non-Christians
• Explains how ordinary people can lead neighbors to Christ in love and humility
• Tells many exciting and encouraging stories of Muslims who have accepted Jesus
• Describes CityTeamÆs unique program focused on GodÆs work through disciple-making movements, a strategy that harnesses the power of disciples making disciples and churches planting churches

• Language: English
• Publisher: Thomas Nelson
• Release date: Mar 5, 2012
• ISBN: 9781418550479

Book preview

MIRACULOUS MOVEMENTS

How Hundreds of Thousands of Muslims

Are Falling in Love with Jesus

JERRY TROUSDALE

9781418547288_INT_0001_0019781418547288_INT_0001_002

© 2012 by CityTeam

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other—except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Thomas Nelson. Thomas Nelson is a trademark of Thomas Nelson, Inc.

Thomas Nelson, Inc., titles may be purchased in bulk for educational, business, fund-raising, or sales promotional use. For information, please e-mail [e-mail].

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are taken from THE NEW KING JAMES VERSION. © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked NIV are from the HOLY BIBLE: NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House. All rights reserved.

All quotations from the Qur’an are from Quran, tr. Mohammed Marmaduke Pickthall.

ISBN 978-1-4185-4728-8

Printed in the United States of America

12 13 14 QG 5 4 3 2 1

ENDORSEMENTS

For seven years I’ve been hearing Jerry’s reports of God’s activity as Disciple Making Movements have unfolded in Africa. This past summer I had to go and see for myself. I heard many of the stories recorded in this book with my own ears from the people whose lives have been radically transformed. I joined prayer meetings as intercessors fasted and cried out to God for peoples and nations. I saw with my own eyes churches that had been planted and communities that were being transformed. And I met many former Muslims who have given up everything the world values, because they have fallen in love with Jesus. Truly, God is filling the earth with the knowledge of His glory as the waters cover the sea! Read Miraculous Movements and glorify the Lord with me.

Claude King

Co-author of Experiencing God:

Knowing and Doing the Will of God

Miraculous Movements is thirty-three amazing, true stories of how God is revealing Himself through visions, dreams, healings, etc. The book also shows how the power of much prayer and simple obedience based discipleship and training has transformed thousands of Muslim communities. CityTeam’s results over the past five years have been outstanding and we are delighted to be partnering with them for the glory of the Father

Hugh Maclellan, Jr.

Chairman of the Board

The Maclellan Foundations

With Miraculous Movements, Jerry Trousdale and his colleagues at CityTeam have made an invaluable contribution to the body of Christ!

David Garrison, PhD

Author: Church Planting Movements

If you want to be truly impacted by a book that has the ability to significantly increase your prayer life and give you a glimpse into how Muslims are making sacrifices to follow Jesus with everything they have, then this book is for you. In its pages are stories of men and women who have nothing to speak of in terms of material blessings, but everything in terms of passion and zeal for risking their lives to follow Jesus. It’s humbling, inspiring, and is exactly what can happen when we show people the gospel rather than tell them.

Arron Chambers,

Senior Pastor of Journey Church

Author: Eats with Sinners (Outreach Magazine’s

Recommended Outreach Resource of the Year 2011)

Kafka said a book must be an ax to the frozen sea inside us. This book is lethal to the frozen modernist Christian mind. God is being true to His Word doing greater things among Muslims as Jesus promised. My heart longs for the western church to wake up to the genius of simplicity found in these disciple making principles. These stories fuel a question that keeps me up at night, Why not North America?

Roy Moran

Shoal Creek Community Church

As a church planter for the last 10 years, our family has made it our mission to go where no one else wants to go. This book, Miraculous Movements, very much aligns with this mission of getting to know the community around you and then sharing the teachings of Jesus rather than trying to go in and hope people come to a church or, in some cases, a home church, just because you set up shop. This book shows how to attract people to follow Christ, not try to convert them to simply know Christ. If you want to read stories that will change the way you think about church plants and churches built outside our Western models, this is the book for you. Whether you are a church leader or a person who is curious to see what God is up to in other parts of the world, you won’t be disappointed.

Charles Hill, Church Planter, National Speaker

CONTENTS

About the Team and Author

Introduction

1. Unprecedented!

2. Jesus’ Counterintuitive Disciple-Making Strategy

3. Pray the Lord of the Harvest

4. Inside Islam

Disillusionment and Discontentment

5. Engaging Lostness

6. Discovery Bible Studies and Obedience-Based Discipleship

7. Simple Churches, Dramatic Transformation, Rapid Replication

8. Dreams, Visions, and Miracles Among Muslims

9. Of Whom the World Is Not Worthy

Learning from Heroes and Heroines of Faith

10. The Hardest People Yield the Greatest Results

11. Ordinary People Achieving the Impossible

12. Seven Paradigm Shifts

13. Getting Started

Biblical Practices for Engaging Lostness

Appendix 1

Appendix 2

Notes

ABOUT THE TEAM AND AUTHOR

TEN YEARS AGO

In 2002, CityTeam International was a seemingly successful rescue mission touching the lives of more than five hundred thousand disadvantaged urban dwellers every year. Yet while CityTeam was experiencing God’s blessing in helping-ministries and evangelism, the organization was a failure in discipling its converts to see real transformation in communities. But that was about to change. That year, CityTeam’s CEO Patrick Robertson read Good to Great by Jim Collins, and, inspired by what he felt was a call to recommit CityTeam’s mission to the cause of discipleship, he invited the staff and board of trustees of the organization to begin a journey into a highly intentional focus on obeying Jesus’ last words: Go therefore and make disciples.

Also in 2002, David Watson (now CityTeam’s vice president of Global Church Planting) had recently concluded a season of ministry in Southeast Asia and India that some have considered unmatched in its success in modern eras. But the successes he observed were born of the desperation that followed a tragic disaster earlier in his ministry when several people he had discipled were martyred in the process of planting churches among a very challenging people group. In the grief and discouragement that followed, David knew that something was missing, and he turned to the Bible for direction. He began to see that many of the barriers that keep the gospel from rapidly reproducing in challenging regions of the world are addressed in biblical principles that have almost been hidden in plain sight. The answer to his questions about ministry was more obvious than he could have imagined. In fact, the answer was the Bible itself. This new approach produced amazing outcomes in India as Watson stopped training missionaries from best practices models, and simply allowed them to discover what had previously been overlooked: God’s plan of making disciples from the text of the whole Bible.

One year later, in 2003, Jerry Trousdale (now CityTeam’s director of International Ministries) and a group of highly effective African colleagues met David Watson, and they resonated with the intentional application of biblical principles of making disciples who obey God. That led them to launch a ministry that set a challenging goal of seeing at least one hundred churches planted among each of the eighteen largest and least reached people groups of West and Central Africa, churches that would be characterized as disciples making disciples. Also around that time, another group of African leaders formed a large partnership of more than fifty ministries to more effectively make disciples among the least reached peoples of East Africa.

By 2006, God had woven together the experiences and newfound paradigms of Patrick Robertson, David Watson, and Jerry Trousdale and their partners in ministry into an alliance of organizations under CityTeam’s leadership. Together, they renewed and refocused their commitment to God’s work of passionately transforming individuals, their families, and communities throughout the world, by establishing self-replicating communities of believers who will serve people in need, proclaim the gospel, and make disciples in the cities and among the peoples of the world. In the last seven years, this network has seen hundreds of other ministries embrace the biblical values and principles that enable these outcomes and become part of the growing partnership of like-minded ministries, the result of which are the Disciple Making Movements detailed in this book.

The common element for all of these organizations is the discovery and intentional implementation of biblical principles and values that have been hidden in plain sight in the pages of the Bible. And each of the hundreds of ministry partners has witnessed the miraculous changes that people experience when they obey God with all their heart.

THE AUTHOR AND OTHERS

Jerry Trousdale and his wife, Gayle, served for some years among a Muslim-majority people group in Africa. Jerry studied missions at the masters and doctoral levels, and pastored mission-sending churches in California and Tennessee. Dr. Donald McGavran, the father of the Church Growth Movement, was a member of one of those churches.

In 2003, Jerry cofounded Final Command Ministries to catalyze Disciple Making Ministries among eighteen large unreached Muslim people groups in Africa. In 2005, that African team became part of CityTeam. Today, Jerry and Gayle live in Tennessee.

MUSLIM-BACKGROUND AND CHRISTIAN-BACKGROUND CONTRIBUTORS

Jerry was assisted by three individuals who greatly contributed to the assembling and shaping of this book, but whose names unfortunately cannot be made public.

Over parts of three months, thousands of kilometers, and several countries, more than 130 leaders from primarily Muslim backgrounds, and a few from Christian backgrounds, agreed to be interviewed in depth for this project.

The stories told in these pages are true accounts; none are fictionalized. However, all of the people mentioned have had their names changed, their locations masked, and some details of their stories adjusted to protect their identities. Some of these people’s lives are already at risk, and telling their stories in any form merely adds to the potential of reprisals from some in the Muslim world who might be offended by the reality of Muslims becoming followers of Christ. (In some areas, a Muslim who accepts Christ will face extreme violence, and even death, from the people in his community.)

Yet, in spite of this, many interviewees have told us that it is important for people to hear about the remarkable things that God is doing among Muslims today, even if their stories put them at personal risk. Therefore, you will be reading some of these dramatic stories in the pages of this book, all drawn directly from our interviews with these courageous Christians, and many of them in the interviewee’s own words. (Almost all of the people whom we interviewed either spoke through interpreters or spoke English as a second or third language, and in some instances we have chosen not to correct their wording, which may sound somewhat strange to a native English speaker.)

INTRODUCTION

Miraculous movements are sweeping through some parts of the Muslim world today. The Spirit of God is moving in a powerful way—indeed, in a way that we think is unprecedented—as hundreds of thousands of Muslims are turning their lives over to the Lordship of Jesus Christ. Former sheikhs and imams; men who bombed Christian churches and mercilessly persecuted the followers of Christ; ordinary men and women who have followed the teachings of Islam their entire lives—these and many others are finding the truth of eternal life through Jesus Christ, and the number increases every day.

Many of these Muslim people come to God’s Word by dramatic means, through dreams and visions, or as a result of seeing miracles, for men and women are being healed of physical disabilities and addictions, bands of hardened rebels are voluntarily laying down their arms, and thousands are seeing the power of God’s Spirit in their lives. You will read some of these stories in this book, and you will see that what God is doing among Muslims today is indeed unprecedented.

It is not easy to be a Muslim today. If Christians can begin to engage Muslims beyond the headlines of burkas and bombs, we will discover hundreds of millions of disheartened and discouraged people. Muslims’ lives are too often bounded by desolation and broken walls, but today many of them are desperate to discover people who love them, a God who loves them, and hope for the future.

We know this because we have observed up close thousands of new churches planted among Muslims; we have met these courageous people and heard their stories. You are about to meet some of them as well. Their lives will illustrate for you a marvelous picture of what transformation looks like among new Muslim-background Christ followers. Reading their stories is a paradigm-altering experience, which is precisely what we Christians need in order to believe that this is possible and to make it happen.

When Jesus looked upon the lost people in first-century Palestine, He was moved with compassion for them, because they were weary and scattered, like sheep having no shepherd (Matthew 9:36). And then He proclaimed something remarkable: these lost souls were a plentiful harvest that only lacked harvesters. Therefore, it is tragic when Christians look at Muslims, not with compassion, but with a default to fear, anger, and rejection.

If Christians were to be highly intentional about approaching Islam in a way that is inviting and attractive, without compromise, staying as consistently biblical as possible, here are some of the characteristics that we should expect to see:

rr1 That approach would demonstrate the compassion and love that Jesus has for individual Muslims.

rr1 It would be grounded in much prayer.

rr1 It would depend on Muslims discovering God in the Bible and faithfully obeying His Word.

rr1 It would be grounded in making disciples who make disciples, and churches that plant churches.

rr1 It would be achieved by the efforts of very ordinary people participating in an extraordinary harvest.

rr1 It would expect the miraculous favor of God to reproduce transformed people who are transforming whole societies.

And what would reproduction and transformation look like in Muslim countries? It would look like Muslim-background Christ followers proving their discipleship by bearing much fruit. And when disciples multiply and obey, things change!

CityTeam and our partner organizations are seeing changes as increasing numbers of churches are being planted among Muslims in Southeast Asia, Central Asia, the Middle East, and Europe, but our longest and deepest involvement with Islamic regions has been in Africa. Therefore, over the last seven years, for us and for a few hundred African ministries with whom we partner, the changes among African Muslim peoples has resulted in the following:

rr1 more than six thousand new churches have been planted among Muslims in eighteen different countries;

rr1 hundreds of former sheikhs and imams, now Christ followers, are boldly leading great movements of Muslims out of Islam;

rr1 forty-five different unreached Muslim-majority people groups, who a few years ago had no access to God’s Word, now have more than three thousand new churches among them;

rr1 thousands of former Muslims are experiencing the loss of possessions, homes, and loved ones, but they are continuing to serve Jesus;

rr1 multiple Muslim communities, seeing the dramatic changes in nearby communities, are insisting that someone must bring these changes to their community also; and

rr1 more than 350 different ministries are working together to achieve these outcomes.

DISCIPLE MAKING MOVEMENTS

Throughout this book, we will use the term Disciple Making Movements to describe what we see God doing to spread His gospel worldwide. In recent years, we have concluded that disciple making is a more accurate term than church planting to describe the core biblical principles at work in these rapidly multiplying movements.

In the coming chapters, we will explain in detail what this means and how the gospel is being spread to Muslims in particular. In a nutshell, Disciple Making Movements spread the gospel by making disciples who learn

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