Fresh Vision for the Muslim World

Mike Kuhn

• Éditeur: IVP
• Année: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780830858958
• Sujet: Theology & Religion
• Sous-sujet: Christian Ministry

After living for more than two decades in the Middle East, pastor, author and college Arabic instructor Mike Kuhn wonders if there can be a fresh vision for the Muslim world—one not rooted in media lies or personal fears but in the values of Christ's kingdom. Is the only option to fight, to eradicate, to judge? Or can the mindset of confrontation give way to one of incarnation? In Fresh Vision for the Muslim World, Kuhn challenges readers to love the Muslims down the street and across the world with the love of Christ. Kuhn's vast experience and research show readers that Muslims today have the same hopes and spiritual needs as any of us. With practical suggestions, Kuhn helps readers leave the path of isolation, fear and self-preservation and choose a less-traveled road: a path of self-awareness, empathy, and deep listening. Choosing the latter path is radical. It is difficult. And it is a step toward seeing Jesus Christ receive his rightful place of honor among a people longing to know him.

Part I

A Visionary Paradigm

How do human beings change? Jesus asked his disciples to “open [their] eyes and look at the fields! They are ripe for harvest” (John 4:35). Essentially, he was asking them to embrace a new vision of reality. Undoubtedly, the physical objects within their field of vision would remain the same. What would change was their ability to see what Jesus himself saw. Perhaps Jesus still asks his followers in our day to open their eyes—to get a new vision. Might he challenge us to see the Muslim world in a totally different light?

Vision has power to change the soul. We take the first steps on the road to change by getting a new vision.

Chapter 1

Casting a
New Kind of Vision

A wet, rainy night in England always had a soothing effect on my soul—like a balm on an open sore. A friend had simply laid a couple of DVDs out on the table. I sensed sleep would not come easily after our conversation, so I picked one up.

Beyond the Gates of Splendor. The title alone was enough to get my attention.

As a college student I had read Through Gates of Splendor. Many factors conspire to lead a young man into missions, but Elisabeth Elliot’s book had definitely left its mark on me. The appeal of these five missionaries-turned-martyrs was not so much their death, noble as that was. It was that they were real people, real men. They laughed, loved, thought deeply, played with their kids, and lived their lives for something great. Some suffered a sense of inadequacy; the exuberance of others could reach the point of irritation. Reading about these athletic, gifted men (and their wives) had given me hope. If they could die for their cause, just maybe I could live for it.

Two Stories

The DVD turned out to be a documentary with heart—the story of Steve Saint, son of one of the missionaries martyred by the Waorani people of Ecuador (sometimes referred to as the Auca Indians) in the 1950s.

What a strange visitation of providence. I was no martyr, but I had just experienced a death of sorts.

A Story of Exile

An American who had made my home in the Middle East for long years, I now found myself in England as an exile—deported from Egypt and blacklisted, unable to ever return.

Fulfilling my mission in Egypt meant more than delivery of a message. It meant an entering into life—not an easy task—and I make no claim to have done it perfectly or even well. We (my family and I) spent the early years peering through the window at a culture and people we aspired to know and love. At some point the window mysteriously opened, and we were pulled through. The people of the Muslim world became our neighbors and friends. We laughed at their jokes, waited in their traffic jams, wept at their funerals, and cried for joy at their weddings. We tried ever so hard to see things from their perspective. Our motives were sometimes viewed with suspicion. We had moments of discomfort and longing for “home.”

To outside observers the language seems the insurmountable barrier; however, it is merely the key that unlocks a door to a new culture. After opening that door we found a confusing matrix of family values, economic systems, and political and historical realities that simply could not be assimilated in a day. Suffice it to say that I was a transplant—growing deep roots in an adopted culture. My neighbors and friends delighted to hear me speak warmly and positively of their country. They were all too aware of its many inconsistencies and defects. Yet here was an American referring to their country as his country by adoption. I meant it, and I think that pleased them.

Then on the night of September 18, 2005, returning home on a flight from Africa, I was not allowed back into Egypt. Internal security police had blacklisted me. I was escorted to a holding room and kept under guard and questioned intermittently that entire night.

During one interview the plainclothes officer behind the desk asked me my profession, and I replied, “Pastor.” Egyptians have difficulty distinguishing the sounds of p and b. (They are wonderful jokesters, those Egyptians, and often tell how their president returned from a visit to the United States and strangely insisted that his name be written on every door in every public place. The American president, he said, had his name on every door (push—Bush!). So my interlocutor, mystified by the name of my profession, began to repeat it over and over with a b rather than a p. As the humor of being referred to as what sounded like bastard in this climactic moment began to sink in, I had to smile.

In Middle Eastern culture magnanimity and generosity top the list of virtues. That night two Pakistanis and three Egyptians shared my incarceration. We were served no food, but just after dawn prayers, a stocky Egyptian woman showed up and offered to bring sandwiches and tea for a small fee. Various ones placed their orders while the two Pakistanis slept at the other end of the room. I questioned the Egyptian guard about how long they had been there and if they had eaten. His nonverbal response let me know these troublemakers were not worth the effort. Taking my stand on the high ground of Arab magnanimity, I replied, “But these men are our guests” (asserting myself as though I actually had rights!). The Egyptian begrudgingly agreed that the Pakistanis deserved to eat, as they were, after all, guests in “our” country.

One of the Egyptian captives gave rather evasive answers to his interrogators. At one point he was invited into an adjacent room. Shocking shrieks and screams of confession amid the unmistakable thud of blows landing on flesh assaulted our midnight stupor. Confusion. Disconnect. Could it be that the young Egyptian man sitting beside me five minutes ago was the centerpiece of a torture scene? He returned later to reoccupy his place on the bench beside me, weeping, his eyes and face swollen and red, his head now between his knees. I noticed red streaks going down his neck and marveled at the vulnerability of man to his greatest adversary—man.

The next morning as I was taken to the British Air office to buy a one-way ticket out, I asked my escort if I might phone my wife, who had been awaiting my return all night with no news. Middle Easterners are masters of body language. My escort made no reply but simply rubbed his fingers across his thumb. I slipped him a ten-pound note and was allowed to use the phone at the British Air desk to inform my wife that I would not be returning home. As far as I knew then, and as far as I know now, I will never return to Egypt.

A Story of Martyrdom

Just a few weeks later, I sat up that rainy night in southern England, listening to Steve Saint relate the story of his father’s heroic death, and I experienced the power of the words “They being dead yet speak.” Rachel Saint and Elisabeth Elliot responded to that terrible event in a way that defies our comfort-seeking culture. They waited. They prepared. When the time came, they moved in and lived among the very tribe that had taken the lives of Rachel’s brother, Nate, and Elisabeth’s husband, Jim.

The vicious tribe had defied the friendly advances of peace-loving missionaries and speared them mercilessly, seemingly on a whim. The world was left with the perplexing question, why? Could any sense be made of their martyrdom? A sense of aha! developed as reports proliferated about the conversion of the Waorani Indians. A neat, evangelical resolution of the tension of martyrdom was found in that faith birthed deep in the jungle. Yet as Elisabeth Elliot has pointed out, such neat and happy endings are seldom satisfying: “A healthier faith seeks a reference point outside all human experience, the polestar which marks the course of all human events.” That polestar is an inscrutable and immutable God—“I will find rest nowhere but in his will, and that will is infinitely, immeasurably, unspeakably beyond my largest notions of what he is up to.”1

I suppose we could stop there. Certainly no one can deny the mystery and lack of neat resolution in the current tension between the Western world and radical Islam. If God is up to something, most of us are at a loss to discern it. But one focus of this book is to suggest that God is, in fact, up to something. Although the tension will not resolve into a neatly packaged scenario, the current world conflict has all the makings of a symphony, admittedly discordant at times, but led, nonetheless, by a master conductor. Our world is not madly spinning out of control while our God fretfully bites his nails. You and I will find our purpose and our peace as we rest in a God who, as C. S. Lewis said of Aslan, is not safe but is good.2

Another moral of the story of the Ecuadorian martyrs readily commends itself. The treachery of the Waorani, while real, masked a more basic motivation—fear. It is no psychological secret that those most vulnerable and abused often act most savagely and treacherously. Elisabeth Elliot recorded that the Waorani people speared foreigners simply because they feared being cannibalized. Rather than be eaten, the tribe attacked. Their provincial view of the world did not allow them to trust the kind advances of those who meant them no harm. They had no grid other than that of jungle warriors through which to process the missionaries’ gifts and acts of kindness.

A large yellow “bird”—an airplane—had allowed men who covered their white skin with funny clothes to penetrate Waorani territory. For centuries the dense jungle of Ecuador had been impenetrable. Some of the Waorani had left the jungle never to return, but this was the first advance into the Waorani’s homeland. Who could say what such an advance would produce? These jungle Indians, face-to-face for the first time with people they supposed to be cannibals, feared for their lives. Perhaps they were more justified than we have been led to believe, as foreigners of a less-kind disposition may well have abused their simplicity. Much as a wounded animal bites the hand that would help it, so the Waorani struck out in fear.

Satellite and Internet technology have penetrated the Muslim world to a degree unknown heretofore. The presence of Western military in the Muslim world causes tremendous uncertainty and suspicion. While living in the Middle East, I was privy to incessant waves of conspiracy theories, most of which had to do with Zionists and Westerners holding the reigns of world events and directing them for the benefit of a privileged few. Incredulous, I listened to these elaborately detailed schemes of world dominance. I now realize that fear, similar to that of the Waoranis of Ecuador, dominates the worldview of much of the Muslim world. Just as the Waorani tribe murdered in fear, so radical Muslims are striking at anything associated with the West.

To fear the unknown is not a one-way street. In the West I often hear sweeping generalizations about the Middle East, Arabs, and Muslims: “Those people are killing each other. Don’t they know they can trust us? Why are they so filled with hate? We’ve always upheld justice and returned the country to its people after we leave. We even help rebuild the country.” It’s a common malady of humanity that we see our own (or our group’s) intentions as noble and pure while we are skeptical, if not downright antagonistic, toward the motivations of others.

In a class I taught recently in the United States, where I now live, I was asked why “the Muslims” are always killing each other. The reference was to the Sunni-Shiite tension in Iraq. My reply? “Good question. Let me help you see it from their side. I lived in a Middle Eastern city of eighteen million people. Yet for all the overcrowding and irascible problems of that city, it was a relatively safe place to live. Murders were fairly rare. Contrast that with any large U.S. city—Los Angeles, New York City, Miami. Middle Easterners hear the statistics of violence in the United States and ask me, ‘Why are the Americans always killing each other?’ Yes, there is persistent violence in Iraq between Sunnis and Shiites these days, but in vast areas of the Muslim world people live in peace and go about their daily affairs. They want to find better education for their children, make their payments on their house, afford a better car. Their concerns are much like yours.”

Surprise! Or maybe not.

Incarnation

There is an opposite reaction to fear. The word I will use to describe this reaction is incarnation, derived from the Latin carnis (flesh) and in—“in flesh.” In Christian parlance it is most often used of Christ as he took on humanity (human flesh) and lived among us.

In the case of the Waorani of Ecuador, Rachel and Elisabeth adopted much of the Waorani way of life. They incarnated among them, learning the tribe’s language, eating their food, being exposed to their illnesses. In brief, the women lived among the tribe, embracing much of the tribe’s life and culture. The tribe, in turn, learned and embraced much from the women, including the message of God’s love and grace.

The incarnation of the gospel, for all its benefit to the Waorani people, came at great cost. We are fortunate to see the resulting faith of the primitive tribe, but we also do well to remember the immense price that was paid. The process of incarnation is costly, yet it is the messy work to which Jesus has called his followers. Perhaps a vignette from Jesus’ life will further illustrate.

A Modern-Day Samaria

Despised and hated people groups are not new to the world scene. In Jesus’ day the despised people group was the Samaritans, a type of Jewish half-breed. From the perspective of the purists, they had ...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Part I: A Visionary Paradigm
• Part II: A Historical Perspective
• Part III: A Theological Dimension
• Part IV: A Reality Check
• Part V: Steps to Incarnation
• Notes
• Praise for Fresh Vision for the Muslim World
• About the Author
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press
• Copyright