Beeson podcast, Episode 390
Dr. David Garrison
May 1, 2018
https://www.beesondivinity.com/podcast/2018/A-Wind-in-the-House-of-Islam

Announcer:	Welcome to the Beeson podcast, coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. Now your host, Timothy George.
Timothy George:	Welcome to today's Beeson podcast. Well, today I have the opportunity of speaking to Dr. David Garrison. He is the executive director of Global Gates. It's a mission organization that focuses on bringing the gospel of Jesus Christ to unreached people groups living in major urban centers. It's a wonderful and fairly new ministry and we want him to talk about that. But first of all, David, let me welcome you to the podcast and just ask you to introduce yourself to us a bit.
David Garrison:	Thank you, Timothy. It's a pleasure to be here. I grew up Southern Baptist, a small town in Arkansas. Got to hear the gospel from the time I was on the cradle roll; married a high school sweetheart there. And all our lives, we had been influenced by a pastor who was a missionary kid himself. That opened our hearts to missions. I think the Great Commission of course is for everybody. But in the course of following God, we served as missionary journeymen in Hong Kong for two years. I think-
Timothy George:	For some of our listeners who don't know the journeyman program, just briefly describe what it is.
David Garrison:	Well, it is a program of Southern Baptists that was modeled after the Peace Corps, recognizing that many Christians feel an affection and affinity for missions but don't necessarily have a calling. They could go and give two years of service out of college. In my case, right out of seminary. We lived in Hong Kong for two years. If you'd asked us probably three months into that time what we thought about missions, we'd say, "We just want to go home." Culture shock and all of that was part of that process. But about a year into it, we had a breakthrough, started seeing young people both at International Baptist Church and at Hong Kong Baptist University where I was teaching, responding to the gospel and God using us. The sense of being used by God has got to be the greatest high that human life has to offer.
	About a year in, we actually asked God if He would let us do this the rest of our lives. We called Him, and by His grace and His mercy, He said yes, and we've been on a wild adventure ever since. Been all over the world.
Timothy George:	I know you, yourself, were involved with the International Mission Board for a number of years, right?
David Garrison:	Oh, yes. Virtually every corner of the International Mission Board.
Timothy George:	When I first met you, you were working with the IMB as we call it, and this is a somewhat new formation of missions that has come about. But tell us how that all happened.
David Garrison:	Yeah. We had been working with International Mission Board for 31 years. Over the course of our lifetime, lived 25 different places, all over the world, studied a lot of different languages and cultures. But always the central focus was the unreached people groups, those that had little or no access to the gospel. When we came back to America, we took an assignment in 2009, working with the broader evangelical world. That took us to the Colorado Springs area where there's over 200 agencies with offices there. While we were there, we were contacted by this ministry called Global Gates. Global Gates was made up of former foreign missionaries who'd worked in Indonesia and West Africa and for various reasons had to come back to America for health reasons or for children's health issues. But rather than just go back home to their homes in Texas or South Carolina, they actually found their people group in the thousands living in New York City.
	So they moved into Queens; they moved into Harlem, moved into Bronx. And before long, there were gathering numbers of missionaries who were called to an unreached people group and were stunned to find that there were, for example, 60,000 Afghan Muslims living in Fremont, California, in the South Bay Area, or that there were over 100,000 West African Muslims living in Harlem, where we can have access to them, reach them. This caused a real paradigm shift. We had a realization that God was opening up doorways to the ends of the Earth, global gateways if you will, in these urban centers. They contacted me around 2010 and said, "David, would you be interested in working with us?" I did some training for them, joined their board of directors.
	Then later my wife, Sonia, and I felt like God was leading us to make the big jump. We stepped away from the IMB, always loving Southern Baptist International Mission Board, but feeling like this was a strategic gap that needed to be addressed, but somewhere between the North American Mission Board, which was doing a lot of church planting but not really focused on unreached people groups and the International Mission Board, which was focused on people groups, unreached people groups, but not working in the United States. So we, at Global Gates feel like we're building a bridge between those two strategic ministries.
Timothy George:	Now, ever since the days of the apostles, there have been unreached people groups. But that term is relatively new, isn't it? Can you say a little bit about how that became a part of the missionary vocabulary?
David Garrison:	It is. It's a very important concept. The biblical term for it is called the ends of the earth. Jesus made it very clear. He and His disciples had been to Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria. They knew those places. The ends of the earth was everywhere that Jesus had not yet gone. So in His day, it encompassed probably 99.9% of the world's population. But as the gospel has spread, those frontiers have been moved farther and farther away from the Kingdom of God. To this day, there is still a huge sector of the world that has little access to the gospel. It takes real intentionality. Missionaries have gone at great risk, great peril, great challenge. Often there are several languages insulating these people groups, for example in Central Asia, or in western China, or in north India, several languages you have to work through just to get to their language. 
	What's amazing today, Timothy, is that God is bringing these communities from virtually every people group on earth into our own backyard. We find them, for example, 13,000 Kurdish Muslims from northern Iraq living in Nashville, Tennessee. I mean, it's amazing. I was in a suburb of Nashville a few years ago speaking at one of our good churches there, and that night I got a little hungry so I went out to a local pizza place. While I was waiting, I noticed these guys look to me. They were talking about halal pizza. That told me something's going on here.
Timothy George:	No pepperoni, right?
David Garrison:	That's right. No pepperoni. They looked a little bit exotic. I started talking to them, turns out they were Hazara people, and I knew the Hazara, they're from Afghanistan. They're descendants of Genghis Khan's army that invaded Afghanistan in the 13th century. They're unusual 'cause they still speak a form of Mongolian language right there in the middle of Afghanistan and here they are in the suburbs of Nashville Tennessee where we can share the gospel with them.
Timothy George:	That's wonderful. I want to throw out another term. It's kind of passé now, but I'd be interested to hear you talk about AD 2000. There was a movement and it related to unreached people groups, I think. Say a little bit about that. We're, what, 18 years past that 2000 mark. What was that and what impact does it still have?
David Garrison:	Well, it was very exciting. It really related to Southern Baptists in the area of Bold Mission Thrust. You might remember back in the 1970s, there was this audacious vision. I think it was a God-based vision to take the Gospel to every man, woman, and child on Earth by the year 2000. Turns out a lot of mission agencies, a lot of evangelicals, across the spectrum of the country were having similar vision statements, to reach everyone by 2000. A fellow named David Barrett-
Timothy George:	Oh, yeah.
David Garrison:	Editor of the World Christian Encyclopedia, came and actually joined up with the staff, the International Mission Board, around 1985. He was challenged with the task of how are we doing in fulfilling this vision. What he pointed out was that we were really doing a remarkable job except that there's no way we would ever reach that vision because we were sending out more and more missionaries to the same places. Virtually 60% of the world's population were receiving no missionaries at all. The reason for that, we would say, is because, well, you can't get a missionary visa there, to China, to the Soviet Union at that time, to the Muslim world. 
	It was out of that tension, that creative tension of having a vision that we believed was from God but having a paradigm of missions that could not achieve that vision, that we birthed some new paradigms. One of those was called the Non-Residential Missionary. We would assign missionaries to a people group inside that closed part of the world even if that missionary could not reside there, or had to go in and out as a tourist or as a business person. That revolutionized our approach to missions. We were able to focus now not just on sending more and more missionaries to the same countries, but to deploy our missionaries more strategically to people who had never heard the gospel.
	This led to a tremendous awakening not only in our mission force, but among the people we're taking the gospel to. Who knew that we would then see the greatest harvest fields in the world coming out of that restricted part of the world?
Timothy George:	Wow.
David Garrison:	Our biggest turnings, our greatest numbers of baptisms, started coming from places like the former Soviet Union, places like the Muslim world, places like north India, and China. Even Cuba today has thousands of Baptist churches that have exploded after we assigned a Non-Residential Missionary to work with a struggling church there and begin to pour gospel resources into those difficult places.
Timothy George:	Yeah. Well, some people are associated with one book. You've written several books, but I wanted you to talk about the book for which you are best known. I want you to introduce it to our listeners. It's a great book and if you haven't read it and you're listening to the Beeson podcast, you need to go to Amazon.com and buy it and read it. The book is entitled, "A Wind in the House of Islam." How did you write that book? What's it about?
David Garrison:	Well, thank you for that plug for the book. I appreciate that. I wish every Christian knew what God is doing in the Muslim world today. That's really part of what inspired this. When my wife and I went to North Africa, we studied Arabic, lived in Egypt and Tunisia working with Libyan Arabs. Tough, tough situation. We didn't see a lot of response. I used to joke that I learned hundreds of ways not to win Muslims to Christ. We didn't see them just racing to the baptistry. 10 years later, our family relocated to India and we just had Muslim background believer partners from all over. We were seeing a lot of response. We had over 100,000 Bengalis who had come to faith in Christ and been baptized. We were hearing reports of movements among the Fulani in West Africa, among Kazakhs in Central Asia, among Iranians, and others.
	It was almost like, "Can this be real?" I received a phone call one day from executive vice president of Pioneers, another growing, booming mission organization. He said, "David, we're having the same questions. We're wondering can this be real. Would you be willing to take some time to go and survey these?" I talked to my colleagues and superiors at the International Mission Board and they said, "Yeah, let's block out some time." I thought I would just take a year, do some samples, a dozen or so samples from a dozen or so movements. I ended up visiting 44 different movements. I spent three years, traveled a quarter of a million miles, and was able to see something I never imagined learning.
	We got over 1,000 interviews, each of them from movements of at least 1,000 baptized believers in different movements in the Muslim world. I was so stunned by this, the things they were telling me, what I was seeing, and it was so different from what I remembered from our time in North Africa that I wondered if this had ever happened before. I went back and did a historical retrospect of when in history had there ever been movements. We documented every time there's been at least 1,000 baptized believers. It made history. We could point to when this happened, we could describe it as much as history would allow, and then we compared it with what's happening today and discovered that, Timothy, 84% of all the movements to Christ in the Muslim world in history, in 14 centuries, have happened in the last 25 years.
	Something is happening today that we've never seen before.
Timothy George:	That's the wind in the house of Islam.
David Garrison:	That's the wind in the house of Islam. It is the wind of the Holy Spirit. Jesus said that the Spirit is like the wind. You don't know where it's coming from, where it's going. It's got a mind of its own. When it does blow through, you see the evidence of it, changed lives, communities turned upside down for Jesus. That's what we saw in West Africa, North Africa, the Arab world, Central Asia, the Persian world, South Asia, all the way across to Indo-Malaysia, that whole area. We're seeing the Holy Spirit is drawing people to faith in Jesus Christ in unprecedented numbers.
Timothy George:	You know, many of us have a monolithic view of Islam. We think of it as one big conglomeration of people who follow the worship of Allah, believe the Quran is the word of God, and so forth, the five pillars. But you've pointed out, I think very helpfully, the diversity that is there within Islam itself. We always think about the Sunni/Shia divide as very fundamental, but there are many other ways in which the Muslim world is not a monolith. I wonder if you'd say a little bit about that.
David Garrison:	That's a good observation. 23% of the world's population, 1.6 billion+ adherents, Islam is the fastest growing religion in the world. But even within the Muslim world there's tremendous ferment and conflict and diversity. It's remarkable, because from the outside it may look like, "Oh, they all believe the same. They all practice the same." There are commonalities, but the worldviews, the history, the culture, different. West Africa with its history of everything from gold and now diamonds and slavery that has so impacted West Africa and it's insulated from other parts of the world by the Atlantic to the west and the Sahara to the north and the Congo to the east. It's created its own little room in the house of Islam so that the peoples there have a shared history and shared experience.
	We wanted to dive into that room and say, "What's God doing here? How is the wind blowing through this room?" We got stories from there that were very different from those in North Africa, the land of the Berbers, land of conquest and colonization that's been going on really since the Phoenicians over 2,000 years ago. God is at work in a different way there. There are different stories, but the same Jesus, the same gospel, and the same Holy Spirit is blowing through. What we were able to do in this book is literally visit every corner of the Muslim world. We identified nine distinct geocultural zones or "rooms" in the house of Islam. We visited each of those rooms to see how are Muslims coming to Christ here. We would ask them, "Tell us your story. What did God use to bring you to faith in Jesus Christ?"
	Our thinking was if we can learn from them how the Holy Spirit has worked, how God is at work, then we can better adjust our own approaches to align them, if you will, with the ways the wind is blowing so that we can ride that wave of what God is doing, catch that wind, and not just do our own thing but be a part of what God is doing in those rooms.
Timothy George:	You've identified these nine rooms. Does that cut across the Sunni/Shia divide?
David Garrison:	Well, the majority of the Shia are in Iran. The Persian world becomes one of those rooms and certainly its influence spills down into other areas, like we've seen in Yemen and parts of the Persian Gulf and parts of Afghanistan where the Persian language, a variation of it, called Dari is spoken in Afghanistan and then up into Tajikistan in the former Soviet Union. It is more concentrated there. That is sort of the Shiite hub. Consequently, we're seeing a different way that people are responding to the gospel there. In fact, some would say in that Iranian corner or that Iranian room in the house of Islam, people are responding to almost everything. 
	Every way the gospel's being presented, we're just seeing probably the greatest number of Muslims coming to Christ today is happening there in Iran and in the Iranian diaspora that's now spread all over the world.
Timothy George:	Several years ago, I wrote a book called, "Is the Father of Jesus the God of Muhammad?" That got me into a lot of conversations with Muslims and people who had come to Christ in Islam, and so many of them told me a story about a vision of Jesus that they received, which often led them to a Bible or a missionary or someone. But the vision of Christ appearing to them. Now, I came from a background that would view that skeptically. But I came to the conclusion that these people are telling the truth, that in some mysterious way Jesus Christ has actually appeared to them in a vision and that led them into further inquiry and into faith, often. Can you say something about that?
David Garrison:	You're exactly right. By the way, I do have your book on my bookshelf. I bought it as soon as I could get it and have really relished it. Yeah, we are seeing that happen everywhere. It's not our worldview. I tell people that after Sigmund Freud, it just messed it up for all of us. We don't talk about dreams 'cause it can be a little embarrassing. People read things into them. That's not the case in the Muslim world. Not in every Islamic people, like I said, they're not all the same, but it was so common to hear them talk about a dream of someone reaching out to them with love and compassion and then wanting to know, "Who is this person?"
	They don't typically get enough in a dream to come to salvation, but it drives them to want to know more. Many of them, after having these dreams, they've sought out a Christian or they've sought out an ingeo, what they call the New Testament, and they've read it and then they discovered who this person is that has so troubled their sleep for so long. Of course, we as Christians know that it's biblical. Dreams are from one end of the Bible to the other. It's we who have changed. For Muslims, they retain that regard for dreams. They get it from the prophet Muhammad. He said, "Listen to your dreams. God may speak to you." Fortunately, He seems to be doing that very thing.
Timothy George:	Now, it's interesting. When we're speaking with Muslims, we're speaking to people who already have some concept of Jesus. Isa, in the Quran, and Isa in Islam is a very important figure, a prophet. Say a little bit about the Muslim view of Jesus.
David Garrison:	Yeah, I'll just first say it's deficient. Unfortunately, it's deficient and it tries to abrogate the position of Jesus in the New Testament as the Word incarnate, as the only way of salvation, as God among us. They would reject all of those things, but they certainly know the name Isa al-Masih, Jesus the Messiah is what they call Him. There are flickers of light in Quran. The Quran appropriates many things from the Old and New Testament, many stories that were circulating in Muhammad's day that he got from Christians. But oftentimes he twists them just enough to keep a Muslim sadly trapped, short of seeing who Jesus really is. Even though you can begin in the Quran to introduce the subject of Jesus and then talk about Jesus, unless they bridge over into the revelation that's found in Scripture, they're left with a, "Why should I ever give my life to Jesus?"
Timothy George:	I sometimes recommended something, I don't know what you'd think about this. It's a little bit edgy or controversial, but I've often said to people, "You should read the Quran." You can buy it, at least an English adaptation of it, translation of it, which of course is not the very word of God according to Muslims. That's only in Arabic. But you can go to a bookstore and buy the Quran. You ought to read it. Then with your Muslim friends and neighbors, invite them to tea and read with them the Quran if they will read with you the Gospel.
David Garrison:	Amen.
Timothy George:	What do you think about that?
David Garrison:	Oh, I think it's wonderful. In fact, Timothy, one of the things that surprised us in our surveys, interviews, some of the things that people told us didn't surprise us. I read the Scripture and I fell in love with Jesus. Okay, we expect that. But when Muslims told us, "I read the Quran in my own language for the first time and I realized I was lost," that stunned us. We heard that many, many times for so many Muslims in the world today. The Quran is to them sort of what the Bible was to medieval Christians, people who could not read Latin, didn't understand Latin. It hadn't been translated into the vernacular. For them, it was a mystical, magical book that the priest alone could somehow dispense to them.
	Well, for so many Muslims, the imam is the keeper of the Quran and they don't understand Arabic. Even Arabs don't understand eighth century Arabic. They know the formulas, they know the words, but it's still mysterious. Something happened in the early 1980s. King Fahd of Saudi Arabia got this idea, and I think it was God-inspired. He thought, "Wouldn't it be great if we translated the Quran into the language of all the peoples of the Muslim world?" Maybe he was inspired by Cameron Townsend with Wycliffe Translators. I don't know. He thought this would help Islam. In fact, it's done more to undermine Islam than almost anything you could imagine because we've had imams and we've had devout Muslims who had memorized the Quran in Arabic say, "When I read the Quran in my own language for the first time, I realized there is no salvation here. There's no savior. There's nothing to deal with my sinfulness."
	But even in reading the Quran, they said 96 times it references Isa al-Masih. It's always lifting Jesus up to a high level. Meanwhile, Muhammad is only mentioned four times in the Quran.
Timothy George:	He's not the Messiah.
David Garrison:	He's the Messiah.
Timothy George:	A prophet.
David Garrison:	Exactly. It's prompted them, then, to either have dreams and visions or go and find a Scripture or find a Christian and say, "I need to know more about Isa al-Masih." That's led them into a saving relationship as they've read the New Testament revelation of Jesus.
Timothy George:	I'm so glad you're visiting us here at Beeson Divinity School. We have a number of students who really have a hunger to serve God and a vision for doing it in the Muslim world. We've had a number of our graduates who've gone into what we call restricted areas. We don't say where they are because it could be very dangerous. But they have a passion, love for Muslim people, to share with them the good news about Isa, the Messiah. Your ministry, the Global Gates that we talked about earlier, focuses on a similar kind of interaction here in North America. But what would you say? This is not instead of, is it?
David Garrison:	No, no, no.
Timothy George:	Talk about how those two competing visions or locales, maybe is a better word, for what we're doing.
David Garrison:	The world that you and I grew up in really was a competing vision. It was an either/or. It was binary. You're either home or you're foreign. The world today is one. The interconnectedness is just astounding. In fact, there's a young woman from right here. She and her husband have just joined Global Gates and they met a couple from the Muslim world who were in one of our southern cities right here in the heart of the south and developed a friendship. They invited this Muslim family to attend church with them and they agreed and went to church. Took them to a Christian music concert where they got to hear the gospel in all of its beauty and richness. But then then went back to the Muslim world, back to the Middle East where they were from. 
	But this young Global Gates missionary woman, she maintained a relationship by Skype with the daughter in this family and about two weeks ago, this young Global Gates missionary sent me an email. She said, "This young woman, she's come to faith in Jesus Christ and she wants to be baptized and join a community there deep inside the Middle East in a place where we can't send missionaries." She said, "Do you know someone?" We were able to talk to some of the other ministries we work with and connect that young woman. By Skype, she came to Christ. It's no longer a binary world of here or there, it's a both/and. Our Global Gates missionaries, in our vision statement, is reaching the ends of the earth through global gateway cities.
	All of our missionaries, they're working with unreached people groups here in our cities, but through those relationships, they're traveling back to Afghanistan. They're traveling to Palestine. They're traveling to northern Iraq. They're traveling to China and to north India. It's truly becoming a global expression of the gospel. It's not just a home or foreign, it's global gateway ministry.
Timothy George:	Wonderful! We're about out of time, but I wonder if you would have a word for our listeners about praying for the Muslim world. What would you say about prayer?
David Garrison:	Prayer is one of those things that's making tremendous difference. In my questions to Muslims who have come to Christ, it's hard to quantify that. I'll be honest, I never had a single Muslim background believer from these movements who said, "Oh, yeah, it's 'cause a little woman in Alabama was praying for me. That's why I came to Jesus." They don't know. But one of my friends, one of my good buddies in Colorado, he does the North America distribution of 30 Days of Prayer for the Muslim World. He asked me as I was going out doing these surveys, I'd come back and tell him these stories about this imam who came to Christ and this village that was now Christian. He said, "David, tell me, how many of these movements have happened in the last 24 years?" I said, "I don't know, I hadn't thought about it." He said, "Well, look at the numbers and see."
	I went back and I checked the history of these movements and I came back and said, "You know, it's astounding. In 14 centuries of movements, 84% of them have happened in the last 24 years. Why do you ask?" His eyes glistened with tears and he said, "David, it was 24 years ago that we started 30 Days of Prayer for the Muslim World." There is a correlation. For Christians in America who have been afraid of the foreigner, afraid of these Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist groups who as a result of that fear have an anger or a hostility, I would just urge them to pray. When we pray, we see them through God's eyes and we see that every one of these Muslims is someone for whom Jesus died and someone who needs to come to Christ.
Timothy George:	My guest today on the Beeson podcast has been Dr. David Garrison. He's the executive director of Global Gates, a wonderful mission organization concerned with sharing the Gospel with people groups in North America and from North America around the world. He is the author of "The Non-Residential Missionary," "Something New Under the Sun," "Church-Planting Movements," and especially I want you to know "A Wind in the House of Islam." Thank you so much, David, for being with us today.
David Garrison:	Thank you, Timothy, my pleasure.
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