She rocked the Muslim world with interviews on Al-Jazeera in 2006. In A God Who Hates, Syrian-born Wafa Sultan disturbingly and unwittingly exposes a deity with the character of the snake (Genesis 3:15) and the dragon (Revelation 12) that hates the gender and the race that produced the Redeemer. She has some good sociological insights on why Muslim women endure oppression and how Arab Islam is unique in Islam. She is on a journey. Her book is insightful but disturbing and not to be digested uncritically. Her work is experiential and anecdotal, but also courageous and revealing.
Outreach Handbook
. Available from
Crescent Project at 1-800-446-5457, but not yet posted to their web site.
Section Titles:
-
- Finding a Muslim Friend
- Initiating a Relationship
- Deepening Friendship
- Meeting Felt Needs
- Asking Good Questions
- Sharing Your Faith
Too often Christians are hesitant to speak with Muslims, much less build relationships. This guide will help you to start friendships with Muslims, deepen them, and create opportunities to share the hope of Jesus Christ.
Jesus lived and taught where most military men and women are serving. Kenneth Bailey’s book, Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes: Cultural Studies in the Gospels, reveals what Jesus’ life and teaching meant to his Middle Eastern audience. His impact on them was often quite different than his impact on Europeans and Americans today.
For example, according to Rolland Muller in his book The Messenger, The Message, and The Community (p. 237), parents in the Middle East today still indoctrinate their children using a story with a moral about how it is more honorable to say “yes” to your father in public even if you plan not to do what he says, than to say “no” in public and obey him later. Compare this to the parable Jesus tells that is recorded in Matthew 21:28-32. In that story, one son tells his father he will work in the vineyard but does not, and the other son tells his father he won’t work in the vineyard but does. By commending the son who publicly humiliated his father but privately obeyed him, Jesus shocks his audience in ways that we cannot comprehend.
Jesus taught in Aramaic, not Greek. Yet the original New Testament is Greek. Kenneth Bailey has spent 40 years living, studying, and teaching in Egypt, Lebanon, Jerusalem, and Cyprus. He reads ancient New Testament translations and commentaries in Aramaic. From the Greek he can reconstruct the probable words that Jesus actually spoke and estimate the understanding his audience most likely had. His insight into the teaching, context, and drama of Jesus outstrips that of the finest Bible scholars who study texts and traditions in mainly Hebrew, Greek, and Latin.
Service in the Middle East brings sparkle to the Bible through reading this book, and reading this book adds freshness to serving in the Middle East.
Once upon a time, non-European (and non-Roman Catholic) Christians outnumbered European ones by more than ten to one. What happened and why? Is what is happening to Christianity in Europe today parallel to what happened to Christianity outside of Europe nearly one millennium ago?
In the Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia—and How it Died, Philip Jenkins provides scholarly and riveting insight. No other history book on the shelves today is as important for understanding contemporary times.
With Inside the Revolution Joel Rosenberg brings the color and excitement of his best-selling novels to a scholarly analysis of the Global War on Terror (now called “overseas contingency operations”). He describes, from an Evangelical perspective, how the world is not so much consumed by a “Clash of Civilizations” as it is affected by clashing movements within the Muslim world. For Joel, Osama Bin Laden, Thomas Jefferson, and Jesus Christ are icons representing the three competing revolutionary ideologies. Joel’s work captures the situation’s complexity and gravity better than any other work in print today.
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