CPM/DMM: God's Glory Attention Deficit Disorder (GGADD)
Pay Attention to What God is Doing in the World Today
“The work God is doing today among Muslims is so historic and unprecedented that I wonder if any
of us can truly comprehend it. Never before in the 1,400 years since the death of Muhammad have we seen so many Muslims coming to faith in Jesus as their Savior and Lord. And these are not just isolated individuals but whole families and communities. In our lead article for this issue, Dr. David Garrison reports on an unprecedented number of movements to Christ developing among Muslim communities all over the world (see page 6). As Garrison reports, in the first 1,300 years since Muhammad, there was only one voluntary movement to Christ among Muslims of 1,000 or more believers. In the last 20 years of the 20th Century, there were eight. In just the first 12 years of the 21st Century there have been 64. That is not a misprint. As of 2012 there were at least 64 documented movements to Christ taking place among Muslims, each with over 1,000 baptized believers and 100 worshiping fellowships. And the number of these movements is growing.” (Rick Wood, Mission Frontier Journal, July-August 2013, p 4)
Pay Attention to the Need for Clarity
The following article by Graeme Wood in The Atlantic’s March 2015 edition is a necessary and valuable piece to pay attention to on Islam. A couple of quotes are listed below the link.
“The reality is that the Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic. Yes, it has attracted psychopaths and adventure seekers, drawn largely from the disaffected populations of the Middle East and Europe. But the religion preached by its most ardent followers derives from coherent and even learned interpretations of Islam. Virtually every major decision and law promulgated by the Islamic State adheres to what it calls, in its press and pronouncements, and on its billboards, license plates, stationery, and coins, ‘the Prophetic methodology,’ which means following the prophecy and example of Muhammad, in punctilious detail. Muslims can reject the Islamic State; nearly all do. But pretending that it isn’t actually a religious, millenarian group, with theology that must be understood to be combatted, has already led the United States to underestimate it and back foolish schemes to counter it. We’ll need to get acquainted with the Islamic State’s intellectual genealogy if we are to react in a way that will not strengthen it, but instead help it self-immolate in its own excessive zeal.”
“Properly contained, the Islamic State is likely to be its own undoing. No country is its ally, and its ideology ensures that this will remain the case. The land it controls, while expansive, is mostly uninhabited and poor. As it stagnates or slowly shrinks, its claim that it is the engine of God’s will and the agent of apocalypse will weaken, and fewer believers will arrive. And as more reports of misery within it leak out, radical Islamist movements elsewhere will be discredited: No one has tried harder to implement strict Sharia by violence. This is what it looks like. Even so, the death of the Islamic State is unlikely to be quick, and things could still go badly wrong”
Wood writes from a secular American perspective. As believers in Christ who seek to see the launch of cascading movements to Christ among Muslims, there is benefit from the insights in this very thorough article.
Pay Attention to What Stills Needs to Be Done
Kent
Parks, International Director of Act Beyond www.beyond.org.,
frequently communicates the following reality. In 1980, missiological
researchers found that 25% of the world’s population was considered outside the
reach of the gospel. Hence, the term, “unreached peoples.” In 2015, the number of the world’s population
who are presently “unreached” (having little or no access to the gospel in
their own context), has grown to the sobering level of 29% of the world’s
population remain Unreached.
If
we continue doing what we, as the collective global missions community, are doing
in missions, we are sadly losing ground. Physical births actually outnumber
spiritual births in the world today, among the unreached. Some people, with
whom I concur, call this a call to the Bride to re-align our visions, our
passions, our resources, our efforts, to full-throttle attack upon this
Spiritual Injustice. For these, Unreached People Groups, there are few, if any
indigenous followers of Christ to tell them the incredible news of Christ. They
have no access to the gospel in their own tongue. They have no one to demonstrate/declare
His glory to them.
One
hugely missing piece is the lack of the level of intentionality when it comes
to the equipping, affirming, releasing of women to be engaged in the process of
the reach of the unreached.
One of the key CPM reflections for our hearts as followers of Christ is to answer the
question, “what needs to be done in order for this UPG to be reached, not what
can be done?”
