The Veil is Tearing

We are living in a time of unprecedented Muslim conversion to Jesus - Iran is more evidence of this

NOTE: This photo is AI generated. I didn’t want to use a photo with real people in it for obvious reasons. Please don’t spread this photo around as if it represents anything that actually happened. Thanks Gemini.

When I was a young, wannabe, cross cultural church planter, first going out to work in the big wide world, each conversion story from Islam to Christianity was a huge deal. I can remember reading prayer letters in which just one Muslim would express a willingness to read the Bible. It was an amazing breakthrough since very few Muslims would consider becoming Christian.

Today, that is not the case. Hundreds of thousands of Muslims have made decisions to become Christians in the past twenty years. One can visit any one of a number of countries and find not just Muslim converts to Christ, but entire ministry teams made up of former Muslims, reaching their neighbors. It is not easy work. Unfortunately, Islam was born in violence and that violence continues in many parts of the world today. Particularly in places where the gospel is spreading fast, there continues to be very severe persecution.

In the span of history, there have been few significant turnings to Jesus by Muslims. Back in the 1960s, there was a movement on the island of Java. A political upheaval led to the mass conversion of some 2 million plus Muslims. As far as I know, this is the largest such movement (would love to hear otherwise if you are aware of similar movements in history).

What is happening today is quite unlike what happened then. Today, there are Muslim converts to Jesus in many people groups. Sometimes these might be connected to a local political context, but there is something much larger and more important happening. There is general disillusionment with Islam. Let me give you a couple of examples.

About 7 or 8 years ago I was in a restricted access country in Central Asia. I met a young Christian who had left his home and traveled hundreds and hundreds of miles on foot to join the Taliban shortly after 911 happened. At the time, he was probably about 14 to 15 years old, and he became a reader at a mosque in Northern Afghanistan while he was a soldier. He saw a fair amount of sexual abuse and other types of abuse on the part of the mosque leaders. After the U.S. military operations there, he saw how quickly the Taliban were routed. This was against all that he had come to believe in his Islamic eschatology about the overthrow of the infidels. This created quite a bit of consternation in his soul, and he walked all the way back home, beginning to search out alternate religious worldviews. Ultimately, he found Jesus.

Another example is much more recent and comes from my travels in Africa. I met a man of about thirty-five years old who had been a Quranic teacher. He was considered Hafez, which meant he had memorized the entire Quran and had documents attesting to his ability to teach in the mosque system. As he observed the behavior of the local leaders and experienced pettiness and jealousy among the teachers, he began to question and wonder about the entire Islamic system. Just at that time, a friend of his invited him to a small Bible study that was being held in an apartment complex. Never before in his life would he have considered it. But now he was open, and he eagerly learned about Jesus. When I met him, he was still teaching others theology, but now a completely different theological framework filled his teaching, mind and heart.

When you add to this the massive number of dreams and visions Muslims are having about Jesus, the effect is rather historically stark. We are living in a time with an unprecedented number of Muslims becoming Christians.

As we watch what is happening in Iran right now, you should be looking for how Jesus is moving. There are some similarities to what happened in Indonesia as massive political and social unrest is driving the uprising. At the same time, this is a very different situation. A foundation has been laid for the past two decades by hundreds of Iranian Christians. The church in Iran has already astonished the world by its growth, and this unrest is leading to further the divide between Islam and the Iranian people. I personally do not see much future for the mullahs, but the military in the form of the Revolutionary Guard just might continue to hold power after the mullah’s lose their role. We are in a time of great uncertainty. By next week this could all be over. It could drag on into the future.

For the Christian movement in Iran, however, there is great hope. ACORNS is an acronym that outlines how movements happen. In Iran today, we find each of these at work:

• Affinity group recruitment (Iran: the gospel spreading from neighbor to neighbor)

• Common acts of commitment (Iran: protests in the face of danger, with Christians participating)

• Opposition (Iran: no need to clarify this one)

• Retro-revolutionary ideology (Iran: contextualized opposition to the status quo)

• Network structures (Iran: decentralized house churches are the norm)

• Set of favorable circumstances (Iran: political upheaval and a church already on the move)

Join me in praying for the Iranian church, and for the flourishing of the Iranian people.