A call to prayer…

I was awakened this morning again to the Islamic call to prayer.   I have traveled to enough countries in the 10/40 window that it doesn’t alarm or frighten me like it did at first.   It is a daily reminder to the mission we live.  It simply is a statement of awareness that I am not in “Kansas anymore.”  While on this vision and prayer adventure trip, we have been exposed to a variety of  life, faith, and culture from different angles.  I’ve seen this culture through the innocent eyes of an ex-patriot child in playful conversations; through the biblical and  archeological lens of history as a tourist in a distant land.  The angle that has touched me the deepest is through the lenses of persecuted believers.  We were told before we came that to be Turkish was to be a Muslim.  I would add to that, to be a Christian is to be persecuted.

Let me relay three accounts to you of how real and how daily persecution is for some in this land steeped in biblical history.  I became aware of the issue of persecution the first day I was here.  My translator, a 26 year old newly wed man, lost three of his closest friends who were believers.  The were brutally tortured and killed for their faith.  If you can stomach it, you really ought to read the article.  They were simply reading the Bible with a “potential believer” who turned out to be an Islamic spy.  He shared as much as he could with me about his friends, but then would become silent, staring into space, still grieving their loss.   Later I was on a train with a young couple.  He had been an atheist, until he became a believer a few years ago.  Not long after he became a believer, he led his girlfriend to faith in Christ.  She was from a strict Islamic home.  I watched the two lovers embrace and say good-bye as he sent his  girlfriend back home to her parents for the holiday in Istanbul.  He told me her parents don’t know that she is a believer.  They are a fundamentalist family and if they knew their daughter was dating a Christ follower, and that she herself was a Christ follower, the worst could only be expected.  The young man had already been disowned by his mother and father when he became a believer. He didn’t want to loose the love of his life also.   The latest conversation I had with a persecuted believer that I will relate to you (there are others) happened last night.  We sat on the bay of the Aegean sea, sipping traditional chia.  A local pastor who has been interrogated, charged, beaten, and threatened since the 1980′s shared his story with us . He had more stories to tell than I can relate to you personally and even corporately. He at one point discovered a bomb outside their church.  All were kept safe and the police were able to deal with it.  For decades now, he, his wife, and children live under the watchful eye of various groups who consider him a person of “interest” as a pastor of a Protestant church, one of 15 Protestant churches in a city of 4 million people and 10,000 mosque.

Today, I am heading to a town where there are only four known believers in a town of 100,000 people.  The believers live in such fear of their surroundings and environment, they won’t even meet together.  They  fear exile, losing their jobs, or worse…  My fellow pilgrims, this stuff is real.  How should we respond?  This is the question I am asking myself.

1. Stop my complaining and whining when I don’t get my faith served to me hot and fresh the way I like it.  Start appreciating my freedoms and faith.  Take ownership of my own faith journey.  Pray hard, read more, seek God, give of myself more and stand firm.

2. Intercede for the persecuted church.  I am typing this blog from my bed in the hotel room and using the internet allowed in the  country.  Some of the main sights on the persecuted church that I wanted to give you links to, are blocked by this country’s internet. So, if you want to take this prayer challenge further, you will have to Google the “persecuted church” from a country that allows for freedom of information.  Then get on your knees, so our brothers and sisters in Christ don’t have to stand alone.

3. Cross the line… I have a new resolve, with grace and tact, to cross the line and share my faith more often.  This faith gig is more than a convenient fashionable sweater you put on to keep you warm.  It is hard and the armor is heavy and noisy for sure (Eph 6).   It may slow you down; however, you need it, if you plan to contend for your faith in the workplace, school house, and neighborhoods.  This world, starting where you are, needs you to put peace on and take the “Prince of Peace” to them.

4. Strangely enough, value your church.  I was able to see in the lives of many 1st generation believers, that to follow Christ meant being abandoned by your family and losing your inheritance.  For some it means even worse.   For many, all they had for community was their church.  Again, let’s not take the bride of Christ for granted.  Do a study on the “one anothers” at biblos.com and let’s be the body and members of it (Rom 12:5).