I Will Give Them an Everlasting Name: Pastoral Care for Christ's Converts from Islam

By Duane Alexander Miller

What are the challenges faced by Christ's converts from Islam, and how can their Christian friends help them to overcome those challenges? In this book, Duane Miller draws on years of pastoral experience and academic research to propose practical resources and ideas that have proved successful in the past. This book is not a work of clinical counseling, but a resource ready to be read and applied by the experienced pastor as much as someone who is new to ministry among Muslim-background seekers and converts from Islam. Addressing topics from church history to baptism, and from finances to prayer, the book is being published at a time when the global Church is seeing unprecendetend numbers of new disciples coming from Muslim backgrounds, and was written to help the Church in providing them with a new and welcoming home.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Regnum Books International
• Release date: Nov 9, 2020
• ISBN: 9781913363772

Duane Alexander Miller

Duane was born in Montana, grew up in Colorado and Puebla (Mexico). Completed a BA in philosophy at the University of Texas at San Antonio then an MA in theology at St Mary’s University. Later life took him to Jordan where he and his wife studied Arabic, to Israel where he helped found a seminary, and to Scotland for doctoral work. Now lives in Madrid where he teaches and ministers, interested in the interactions of Islam, Christianity and secularism in modern contexts. Main areas of research for his PhD in divinity were religious conversion from Islam to Christianity, contextual theology, and the shari'a's treatment of apostates. He has also published research on global Anglicanism and the history of Anglican mission in the Ottoman Empire and had the pleasure of teaching in many places over the years: from Costa Rica to Turkey, and Kenya to Tunisia. He is Associate Professor at the Protestant Faculty of Theology at Madrid and priest at the Anglican Cathedral of the Redeemer in Madrid.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

You’re not very pastoral. We wonder if you might fit better into a university setting.

Those were, approximately, the words of the committee in charge of deciding if I was going to be ordained or not as a priest/elder in the Anglican tradition.

Yet here I am, years later, doing the scholarly work of writing a book but on the topic of pastoral care. After being told I was lousy at pastoral care I thought a lot about the topic. I prayed about it. I served as chaplain at a children’s hospital for almost half a year.

Now what do I mean by pastoral care? That is, after all, right there in the title of the work. By pastoral I mean the work of the pastor – or priest or minister or what have you. What did pastors do in the Bible? They made sure their sheep had water, food and security – at least. The pastor made sure the sheep could mature and grow, and made sure that the flock did not decrease, but increased. We find an outline in Psalm 23: the pastor made sure the sheep could lie down (rest) by still waters (quenching thirst) in green pastures (having food). The pastor took care of the sheep as they traveled along paths from one place to another. The pastor also provided security and comfort with the rod, whether by smacking the sheep back on to the right path or fighting away predators. That is what I mean by pastoral care. If you’re reading this book I’m going to assume that you can connect those images to your own work with Christ’s converts from Islam.

Next question: who am I to speak to this question? I am a native of the USA and not a convert from Islam. I have served as a cross-cultural minister for 15 years now, much of that time in the Middle East and Europe. I serve as a priest at the Anglican Cathedral of the Redeemer in Madrid, which has members and visitors from all around the world, including some from the Muslim world. I also teach at a local seminary. I received my PhD in Divinity from the University of Edinburgh (Scotland) in 2014, and my thesis (or dissertation in the USA) was on the topic of converts from Islam to Christianity. I have published dozens of articles and chapters of research with publishers including Oxford, Cambridge, Brill, Thomas Nelson, Edinburgh, and Routledge. I have authored two books: Living among the Breakage: Contextual Theology-making and ex-Muslim Christians (Pickwick 2016) and Two Stories of Everything: The Competing Metanarratives of Islam and Christianity (Credo House 2018). I’m co-author of Arab Evangelicals in Israel (2016).¹ These achievements are rather modest, but given that this work is meant to be an initial foray into an unexplored territory, I hope it will be enough to earn your attention.

I am an evangelical and catholic Christian belonging to the Anglican tradition. That having been said, as with my previous works, I am trying to embody the best of the Anglican tradition (think C. S. Lewis, think N. T. Wright) by writing for the whole world of mere Christians. So, whatever tradition one may belong to, know that I know your tradition, I respect it, and I appreciate it. You are needed as Christ’s witness to the Muslim world.

Third question: what sort of research have I done? A few years ago I was in Kenya and I gave a talk on this topic – a lecture that forms the backbone of this book. In that lecture I stated that this material is cutting edge, and that no one else has engaged in it. A friendly missionary approached me afterwards and thanked me for the talk, but informed that some years back in France there had been a meeting on this topic where missionaries and pastors shared their own personal experiences on discipling (similar to providing pastoral care for) converts from Islam. I responded: this research is based on years of traveling and interviewing converts and pastors and missionaries. It is not merely a collection of personal anecdotes and insights. This book is not about sharing personal stories – it is about sharing what I have seen to be insightful, biblical, and wise practices that are being used throughout many countries in caring for Christ’s converts from Islam.

Where has research been carried out? I have built on the foundation of my research for the article The Episcopal Church in Jordan: Identity, Liturgy, and Mission (Journal of Anglican Studies, 2011),² my doctoral thesis Living among the Breakage (2014, published in 2016) and gone on to do research in other countries. All in all, the places where research has been carried out include:

• Egypt

• England

• Israel

• Jordan

• Kenya

• Palestine

• Scotland

• Spain

• Tunisia

• Turkey

• USA

Further interviews and communications have also been carried out with converts from India, Iran, Morocco, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

What this means is that in this work I am not merely trying to share personal anecdotes about what has worked for me in my own ministry. Rather, I am sharing what I have found to be ‘best practices’ from various different countries in various different contexts.

You, as a pastor, minister or counselor, will need to discern what will work best for you and your Muslim-background convert or seeker. The topics addressed here are not exhaustive. Any one of them can (and probably should) be modified to fit your denominational and social context. But as Patrick Johnstone and I noted in our ground-breaking global census of believers from a Muslim background, it is better to make a flawed, partial beginning than no beginning at all.³

A final word on vocabulary. I have chosen the phrase pastoral care to describe my topic. When I talk about pastoral care I am focusing on the function of leading or shepherding a person towards a genuine knowledge and participation in the one, true God. Questions of ordaining women to be official pastors of congregations are foreign to what I am addressing here. Pastoral care, in this book at least, is a dynamic or quality within a relationship, not a question of status or order within a church’s hierarchy.

However, there are other activities that are valuable and have significant overlap with what is being discussed here. These include discipleship, spiritual direction and counseling. The main insights here should be able to transfer, with some modification perhaps, to those other activities. Also, this is not a clinical book. I am aware that there are theoretical frameworks for pastoral care, discipleship, and, especially, counseling. If anyone would like to take these practical applications and integrate them into such a framework, they are welcome to do so (with attribution, of course). This is not meant to be a clinical guide but rather a practical handbook.

ENDNOTES

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¹ Duane A. Miller, Living among the Breakage: Contextual Theology-making and ex-Muslim Christians (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2016); Duane A. Miller, Two Stories of Everything: The Competing Metanarratives of Islam and Christianity (Grand Rapids: Credo House, 2018); and Azar Ajaj and Duane A. Miller, Arab Evangelicals in Israel (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2016).

² Duane A. Miller, The Episcopal Church in Jordan: Identity, Liturgy, and Mission, Journal of Anglican Studies (2011).

³ Patrick Johnstone and Duane A. Miller, Believers in Christ from a Muslim Background: A Global Census, Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion Vol 11 (2015).

1: THE CHALLENGE

People often assume that the main challenge faced by converts from Islam is persecution. Two notes on