WESTERN EUROPE?Jonathan Hillman needed a miracle. God sent him a porta-potty truck.
The 25-year-old from First Baptist Church in Guymon, Okla., watched as police tried to ease the congestion of cars bottlenecked at the mouth of one of Europe’s busiest seaports.
Hillman was among a team of Southern Baptist volunteers handing out packets of gospel materials to cars passing through the port’s gates. Most of the drivers were North African Muslims headed for countries across the Mediterranean. Traffic backups like this were an answer to prayer because they bought volunteers time to offer the packets to every car.
Unfortunately for Hillman, the police were making headway. Traffic had started moving again, and cars were close to speeding past volunteers. He knew it might be the only chance for some to ever hear about Jesus.
From nowhere, a porta-potty truck lumbered into the circle that funneled cars through the port’s gates and came to an abrupt stop. Horns blared. Within minutes, the truck undid more than an hour of diligent traffic direction by the police. Packets in hand, volunteers went back to work.
Hillman is one of hundreds of Southern Baptists who’ve taken part in Project Northern Lights to spread the Word of God across North African nations where sharing the gospel is a criminal offense.
“Very often we take for granted the availability of God’s Word in the free world,” said Dave Webber,* the Southern Baptist worker who runs Project Northern Lights. “The Muslim world has a very high wall around it.”
The 39-year-old former pastor from Florida has spent several years serving in Northern Africa and the Middle East with his family. Home to the world’s second-largest desert, the Sahara, North Africa also ranks among the planet’s most spiritually barren places.
HEIGHTENED DEMAND
“Governments across North Africa absolutely prohibit the distribution of the Bible,” Webber explained. “It is not illegal to own one, but it is illegal to give someone else one. The sentence for a first offense is five years in prison and over $300,000 in fines.”
It’s no surprise, Webber added, that such threats make the Bible and other gospel materials virtually impossible to find in these countries.
Instead of risking life and limb to distribute God’s Word inside North Africa, volunteers focus on the more than 18 million North Africans living and working in Europe. Every summer, hundreds of thousands of these immigrants flow through southern Europe’s ports?most returning to North Africa to visit family. Ferries carry the travelers, their cars and hopefully, the gospel, across the Mediterranean.
But the project’s strategy hasn’t gone unnoticed, partly due to the sheer volume of material it distributes. More than 20,000 gospel packets are given away at the ports every summer. Each includes a green, pocket-sized, French-Arabic New Testament, as well as a JESUS film DVD and other evangelical literature. Distribution totals over the project’s 11-year history top 200,000 packets, making it the single largest source of New Testaments in North Africa.
“This project makes the front page of newspapers in several North African countries,” Webber said. “There is often instruction for people not to receive the packet.”
He added with a grin, “That usually makes them want it all the more.”
Receptivity at the port ranges from 20 percent to 60 percent day to day, a difference Webber credits to spiritual warfare rather than the stereotype that Muslims are hostile to the gospel.
“Typically the response at the port is far more favorable than people would imagine…. Even if they disagree with what we’re doing, they’re usually very polite.”
SUCCESS STORIES
Several years ago, a North African man passed through the ports and was offered a gospel packet by a Northern Lights volunteer. He took it home where he studied the New Testament and watched the JESUS film.
The man was considered a hajj, a title given to those fulfilling one of Islam’s five pillars by completing a pilgrimage to Mecca. He had not only traveled to Mecca once as required by the Quran, but four times?even bringing his wife along for the journey?a mark of esteem among Muslims.
PARIS?It’s a sight that would shatter most Americans’ romanticized image of Paris.
Just a 15-minute metro ride from the trendy shops and quaint cafes of the Champs-Elysees, a virtual sea of North and West African Muslims spills out the gates of a neighborhood mosque. Like waves breaking on a beach, their bodies bend in unison as hundreds of men prostrate themselves before Allah. Their prayers are guided by an imam’s Arabic incantations.
The crowd’s prayer rugs cover a city block’s worth of sidewalk. Tourists point and take pictures. Some French pedestrians are visibly uncomfortable as they negotiate their way around the assembly.
But the scene isn’t an aberration. Instead, it’s evidence of a trend that’s changing the way Southern Baptists view the international mission field: Islam is expanding across Europe.
FROM CROSS TO CRESCENT
Fueled by immigration and high birthrates, the number of Muslims on the continent has tripled in the past 30 years, making Islam Europe’s fastest growing religion. While European Muslims build mosques and win converts, European Christians (excluding evangelicals) are witnessing what’s been called a near free-fall decline in church attendance.
Tourists make up the overwhelming majority of those crowding Notre Dame in Paris, snapping photos during Mass as if the cathedral was more museum than place of worship. Even more alarming are statistics that only 5 percent of the French own a Bible and 80 percent have never even touched one. The shift is so dramatic that many demographers now believe more people in Europe practice Islam than Christianity.
No one knows exactly how many Muslims call Europe home since most European nations don’t track ethnicity or religious affiliation in census data. Guesses put the number around 20 million.
France accounts for the highest concentration of Muslims in the European Union?5 to 6 million, or about 8 percent of the population. Many entered the country as immigrants in guest-worker programs following World War II, but untold numbers have flooded France and other European nations illegally.
STRIVING FOR ACCEPTANCE
While the French government has made strides to help Muslim immigrants integrate into French society, things haven’t always gone smoothly.
In 2004, a law banning Muslim girls from wearing head scarves in French public schools ignited an uproar among immigrants. A year later, riots broke out in Muslim-majority areas of Paris after the deaths of two North African teenagers. The summer of 2007 saw peaceful but public protests by West African immigrants in a dispute with the French government over papers that would allow them to remain in France legally.
Such tension drives some immigrants away from their Muslim heritage while others gravitate toward it.
Osman* is among the men worshipping outside the Paris mosque. Handsome and energetic, the 20-something works as a technician for the city’s water department. Born in Paris, Osman’s parents are Christians who came to France nearly 30 years ago from Togo, West Africa. But after years of struggling to assimilate into French society, Osman finally found acceptance among other West African immigrants by converting to Islam.
Yet as Christianity’s presence in Europe wanes, there is hope.
SLOW BUT STEADY PROGRESS
Evangelical churches have seen slow but steady growth. In France, evangelicals numbered just 60,000 in 1940 but have climbed to nearly 500,000 today. Now about 3,000 evangelical churches worship in France?more than a third planted in the past 20 years. Immigrants are helping to swell the ranks of these churches, sometimes composing as much as 50 percent of the congregation.
Tony Lynn, a Southern Baptist missionary serving in Paris, said that most evangelical churches inside the city average 35 to 65 people on Sunday. Lynn and his wife Jamie?both from Michigan?have spent the past five years in Paris working to plant churches among the city’s 100-plus unreached people groups.
Lynn said one of the biggest obstacles to the gospel is a hallowed tradition of secular humanism that the French call “laicite.” Roo
“You can’t destroy radical Islam with bombs. Sooner or later you have to take on that ideology. Someone’s got to start confronting that which is motivating them,” said Islam expert Jay Smith of London as he displayed a copy of the Quran, the Muslim holy book. “This is what destroys them. This book makes them do what they do.”
As one of six speakers at the Inter-Faith Workshop on Islam hosted by Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary last fall, Smith advocated the confrontational style of evangelism for which he is famous in England. There he participates in Hyde Park’s Speakers’ Corner where Christians and Muslims openly air their disagreements.
The speakers in Kansas City attempted to dismantle what they said are popular misconceptions that Islam is a religion of peace and that Christians and Muslims worship the same God.
Patrick Sookhdeo of the Institute for the Study of Islam and Christianity, Sasan Tavasolli of the Outreach Foundation, Samuel Shahid of Good News for the Crescent World, as well as Midwestern President R. Philip Roberts and missions professor Robin Hadaway spoke during the workshop.
“There’s not one seminary, one Bible school that’s taking this on,” Smith charged as he called for more thorough preparation of Christians to understand Islamic teaching and apologetics.
Roberts seized the opportunity to accept Smith’s challenge, pledging further detailed studies of Islam if Smith would return to teach.
The fear of confrontation neutralizes the Christian’s witness to Muslims, Smith said. Noting that some 43,000 videos attacking Christianity are available on YouTube?offered up in English from sources in Pakistan, India and Bangladesh?he found only six Christian videos challenging Islam.
Since that survey, Smith and others have uploaded dozens of films attracting hundreds of thousands of viewers to his rebuttal of Islamic beliefs. Smith said Christians cannot depend upon government to counter the Islamic convictions that are at the root of much terrorist activity. He recalled former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s contention that he only saw peace and tolerance represented in the Quran after reading it three times.
“As a politician he cannot say what he knows. You can only imagine the vigilantism that would take place. He is elected to office by a constituency and many of them are Muslims. But I’m not elected to office and I don’t have a constituency, save one. His name is Jesus.”
Sookhdeo, referring to United Nations projections, said, “Muslims are very conscious of the idea that they will ultimately out-populate us.” He factored the impact of legalized abortion to present a dismal forecast for Europe as the increasing Muslim population becomes a majority by 2022.
“The argument is made that massive labor shortages require opening doors to principally Muslim immigrants,” Sookhdeo said in describing Europe’s dilemma. “Haven’t we killed off a whole generation? Then we will end up with a community that will ultimately destroy us. We will have reaped what we have sown. All of these things are interlinked.”
He explained how the strategy of Islamization differs from the expansion of Christianity. Having served in Christian ministry for 40 years, Sookhdeo has found that missionary endeavors often lack an ecclesiology that disciples and equips believers.
“We believe what we’ve got to do is get out there and get as many people as possible saved and then we leave them be,” Sookhdeo noted.
“Islam is very different,” he said, describing provisions for meeting basic needs, particularly with the influence of Saudi money pouring into countries to build new mosques, schools, hospitals, radio and television. “Every conceivable aspect of Muslim life brings them back to the Quran, Muhammad and sharia?a set of rules, guidelines and principles that govern all of Islamic society.”
He shared his frustration with media analysts who say terrorism has nothing to do with religion or ideology and more often point to “poor Muslim young people who can’t get work” as the cause.
“Most of the great analysts have never read Islamic theory, the books that reveal the strategy of the doctrine of separation of parallel societies.”
Sookhdeo explained the process of first creating a consciousness of Islam, requiring every woman to wear hijab to affirm her morality, and Muslims defining themselves in terms of Islamic identity. “Then they create institutions?an Islamic Legal Society or Islamic Women’s Society?all based on sharia principles,” Sookdheo said.
From there they approach local, regional and national governments, arguing for observance of Islamic holidays, separate space in swimming pools. “Then they begin to say, ‘We are here, you mus
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