Many headlines about Muslims these days focus on the
brutality of ISIS or other terrorist groups. A personal touch now and then
might help to provide a balance.
When Jack Allen asks American churchgoers if they know any
Muslims, a minority answers yes. Far fewer actually have Muslim friends. Yet in
his seven years of reaching out to Muslims across the United States and beyond,
he has found that Muslims most often come to know Jesus through Christian
friends.
Allen far prefers one-on-one settings for sharing the
gospel, but he considers patience to be even more important. Mostly he just
plants seeds, he says. He buys food in Pakistani restaurants, so as not to loiter.
He offers to pray with Muslims, since they almost never turn him down. But once
in a while, he does get to see full fruit.
One day Allen was sharing the gospel door-to-door with a
friend. They met a Muslim Lebanese-American named Saeed, who was sitting on his
porch. Saeed invited them in. He was a big man, so Allen asked if he liked
football: “Yes.” Then he asked if he had ever seen a John 3:16 sign at a
football game: “Yes, what is that?” Allen told him. “Really?” asked Saeed. Allen
asked if Saeed wanted to know that if he died that night he could have eternal
life: “Who could pass up an offer like that?” Saeed prayed right there and
then, and looked up John 3:16 in his late wife’s Bible.
Saeed asked hard questions during the next two years before
he died, but Allen entrusted his soul to God. He just knew Saeed needed to hear
John 3:16 that day.
On another occasion, Allen was with a friend who was a good
singer. They met a Muslim named Ishmael, who agreed to listen to Allen’s friend
sing Amazing Grace. Ishmael interrupted multiple times to ask about the meaning
of the song.
Allen requested the use of an alias for security reasons. He
has visited some ten countries, mostly in the Middle East, and often with his
wife. Last year one Arab country refused to let Allen enter. But all his
travels have given him “a growing passion for the nations.”
He attended seminary in California in the 1970s, then he
spent the thirty years in various pastoral roles around the country. In 2006,
he was already thinking of retiring from direct church ministry when he
attended a weekend seminar on reaching out to Muslims. He came home convinced
that God was calling him in this new direction. His wife replied: “Oh no,
another mid-life crisis!”
Since then they have raised support to simply find and
befriend Muslims wherever they go: local mosques, gas stations, car repair shops,
college campuses, and restaurants. Allen spends a lot of time in these places,
while his bride keeps the books, picks him up at the airport all hours of the
night, sends newsletters, travels overseas with him, and helps him answer
questions in churches, where they seek to equip and energize other Christians
to build bridges with Muslims as well.
When Allen and his wife speak in churches, they often like to
role play “how not to evangelize to
Muslims.” They portray meeting a Muslim working at a gas station. First they pretend
to degrade Muslims; then they start over and show how to lovingly and
relationally share Jesus instead.
Allen promotes following Jesus. He avoids politics and laden
terms like “Christian.” Theology is crucial for him, but not when it becomes a
rabbit trail. He likes to share who Jesus is and why He came. One of Allen’s
friends says Muslims might interrupt him when he talks about faith, but not
when he tells stories about Jesus.
Allen agrees. In Jordan, he relayed Jesus’ parable of the
prodigal son to four Syrian refugees. At the point in the story where the
father hugs his son, one of the refugees exclaimed, “This story is causing the
hairs to stand up on my arm!”
Fear chases Allen just like anyone else. He fights it, but
he can become anxious as he approaches a new place. Sometimes he fears losing a
friendship or watering down the truth.
Overseas, he visited a family in the West Bank where he was
one of the only Westerners around. This was especially intimidating at night.
In Pakistan, friends refused to allow him to stay in one place for very long as
he spoke at an outside event. They considered the physical dangers just too
great—though he smiled at the thought of a walking target being harder to shoot
than a stationary target.
His most fearful experience was in a Gulf country, where
proselytizing is illegal. He dined with a government employee whom he had met a
few times before. The man requested a Bible. Back in his room that night, Allen
suspected a set up. He thought it could impact other Christians or even Muslims
in the area. But Allen holds to Acts 4:20, where Jesus’ disciples refuse to quit
preaching in the name of Jesus. In the end, Allen gave the man a Bible.
One thing Allen does not fear is Muslims moving to America.
On the contrary, citing Acts 17:26, he thinks God leads them to new places
where He will show Himself to them. Moreover, Allen is unafraid of the Middle
East. He notes that Christians have been there since Pentecost—including
locals, expatriates, and missionaries. As for the non-Christians there, Allen
refers to Luke 9 when Jesus refused to let James and John call down fire upon a
Samaritan village, “For the Son of Man did not come to destroy men’s lives but
to save them.”
Regrets? “Now and then I wonder if I shared enough.” He also
feels God has confronted him for arrogantly thinking nothing could happen to
him, or that he never makes mistakes—especially in the country that blacklisted
him. But overall, joy permeates his life and mission.
Allen repeats his thesis via Nabeel Qureshi, a Muslim
convert to Christianity, who recently wrote a book entitled Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus: “Effective evangelism requires relationships. There
are very few exceptions. In my case, I knew of no Christian who truly cared
about me…Since no Christian cared about me, I did not care about their message.
But that was about to change.”
The change Qureshi experienced is the same change Allen
wants to be—and the change he hopes to inspire in other Christians.
