God continues to confound the wise and stupefy our best guesses. It is clear to me that God is actively pursuing people right around this world, and in many places (more than we will ever know) he is under the radar, supplying nutrients to grassroots, underground movements of God’s People. Joel News once again discovers yet another story to give Father praise for!

The ‘grassroots’ house church movement in Bangladesh is beating its ten thousands, reports German missions strategist Wolfgang Simson. “In 1996 I was in Bangladesh, the third-largest Muslim country in the world, with only 600,000 known and organized Christians then. Only a few Muslims were coming to Christ, and found it extremely difficult to be integrated into the traditional churches. I spoke to the majority of Christian leaders connected to the Evangelical Alliance there about the need to start underground networks of house churches, allowing whole Muslim families to be discipled and multiplied. Many leaders shook their heads: ‘Impossible; unheard of; unpractical; difficult; deadly; ridiculous, maybe in China or India, but not here’ were some of the responses I got. Crammed into my airplane seat back home I felt like such a looser. Was it worthwhile to speak about these things at all? Should we not leave everyone just alone and do their thing?”

“A few days ago in Z�rich a few of us met with a man we call Brother Abdul from Bangladesh. He told us a story that made me cry - and maybe you, too. That very year I was in his land, he, as a 19 year old teenager then, started to do the very thing I was preaching. But he did not hear it from me, but from God. He started a movement to disciple Muslims through underground house churches we call ‘jamaats’, and it has now, in 2007, after only a few years, become the largest single movement bringing Muslims to Jesus in the world! Again and again people checked and rechecked the statistics; it is for fact that more than 500,000 Muslims have become disciples of Jesus through this house church movement, nearly overtaking the number of all other organized Christians in Bangladesh together.”

Source: Wolfgang Simson

Could this kind of “great awakening” have happened if traditional churches had simply figured out the right evangelistic strategy? Would there even be enough seats in the pews of the church buildings in Bangladesh to accomodate for such an amazing influx of church-goers? Thank God that his work is not confined to a church building’s retail space or conversion strategy.

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Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved.