By Jim Coggins

CHRISTIANS need to offer a “correct biblical response” to Muslims, said Randy Hoffmann. And that response is not to burn copies of the Koran, as Florida pastor Terry Jones threatened to do.

Jones’s militant attitude is “inconsistent with the teachings of the Bible and the spirit of Christian ministry,” said a September 10 statement by the Canadian Network of Ministries to Muslims (CNMM), which Hoffmann chairs.

The CNMM is a network of ministries operating in partnership with The Evangelical Fellowship of Canada.

We should “love and respect Muslims as human beings,” Hoffmann told BCCN. “But that doesn’t mean we won’t share the gospel with them.”

 Jesus is the only way to God, he added, and “if we really love them, we will want our Muslim neighbours to come to Jesus Christ.”

When Jesus did his Galilee ministry in Mark 6 – 8 and ventured into pagan, non-Jewish territory, he treated everyone with respect, Hoffmann noted – but he also preached the same message wherever he went, no matter what the local language or religion was.

In Acts 2, Peter also answered ”in a respectful way” when he responded to charges that followers of Jesus were drunk. Paul too spoke the truth respectfully on missionary journeys.

“A lot of Christians don’t understand the words of Christ to love the enemy and turn the other cheek,” said Faheem Moini, a pastor in the Vancouver area.

“People like Jones “do not understand Christianity or who Jesus is” if they “hate the people they should love.” If we are real Christians, we may hate Satan, but we will “love Muslims,” he added. Moini pointed to Ephesians 6, which says that “our fight is spiritual, not against flesh and blood.”

Hoffmann agreed: “We wage spiritual warfare through prayer and love.”

“The reason I am a Christian is because a Christian missionary showed me the love of Christ,” said Moini.

At the time, he was working for the Pakistani secret service spying on Christians. He now leads Calvary Persian Church in Coquitlam.

Satan’s trap

Hoffman noted that Terry Jones is not alone in taking the wrong approach to Muslims and cited numerous examples here in Canada. In one church, a leader came up to a Muslim man who had attended church a few times and demanded to know if he was interested in coming to Christ. “If not,” he added, “we don’t want you here.”

A leader in another church was so angry that he stated, “The best place for Muslims is to go to hell.”

Christians need to “speak the truth in love,” Hoffmann said. Destroying books or monuments does the opposite.

Satan seeks to influence people through their emotions, Hoffmann stated. He tries to “provoke Christians into responding in a non-Christlike way” – by being so angry about the  World Trade Center destruction that they stop witnessing to Muslims, for instance.

When Christians respond inappropriately, it just feeds Muslims’ anger, Moini said. He added that Muslims don’t understand Christianity and associate everything done in the West, from Hollywood movies to gay marriage, with Christianity – and inappropriate actions just add to the misunderstanding.

Christians may still face persecution even if they do everything right, Moini said, but they should at least not make the situation worse.

Understanding Muslims

Christians who react inappropriately to Muslims don’t understand the gospel but they also don’t understand Muslims, Moini said.

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“Muslims are people who are ready to die for God but don’t know him. We need to show them who God is. We have to bring them the real face of Christianity,” he added. “The love of God is something that Muslims are looking for.”

Muslims have different backgrounds, Moini continued. For instance, only Arabs are able to read the Koran, which is in Arabic. Other Muslims recite the Koran, but may not understand it. Muslims are also divided into Sunni and Shia branches, and it is primarily the Wahhabi group within the Sunni branch that is most militant.

These differences affect the way Christians can approach Muslims, Moini said. A DVD on the life of Mary Magdalene has been effective in reaching Iranian Muslims, but less effective in reaching Muslims from an Arab background, who are hesitant to learn from a woman.

A mission field

Witnessing to Muslims has become more important because of the influx of Muslims into Canada. There are now one million Muslims in Canada.

Because Muslims comprise over half of the immigrants coming to Canada, that number is expected to double in the next seven to 10 years. There are 120,000 Muslims in Greater Vancouver and 175,000 in Montreal. Toronto is already 10 percent Muslim, and mosques are springing up all across Canada.

The influx is due to the fact that Muslims now make up a majority of the world’s refugees -- fleeing violence and economic instability in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia, Sudan and Algeria.

Christians should approach Muslims with love and respect but also with boldness, Hoffmann continued.

“The body of Christ should not be intimidated by Islam. In Acts, God gave Christians boldness to share the gospel of Christ even in the face of negative reactions.” Christians should see the influx of Muslims not as a threat but as “an opportunity to fulfill the Great Commission. God is bringing them to our doorstep.”

Moini suggested there are two reasons Christians in Canada don’t evangelize Muslims: They don’t know Muslims or how to reach them, and they “don’t trust Jesus.” Christians who think it is impossible to convert Muslims, should know that “Jesus can make the impossible possible.”

The Muslims who come to Canada are not all the same, Hoffmann said. Some are devout, others are secular, and some are disillusioned because they have been persecuted by other Muslims.

Some in the second and third generations may move away from Islam. Others, seeing the corruption in Western culture, may pull back into their culture and Islamic faith.

Christians, in addition to witnessing, must be counter-cultural, demonstrating a holiness that separates them from Western culture, Hoffmann suggested, adding that God may have allowed Islam in order to call the Christian church to greater commitment.

Contrary to popular opinion, Muslims are not unreachable, Hoffmann said, adding that more Muslims have come to Christ in the past 25 years than in the previous 1,400.

These include 60,000 in Darfur in the last eight years and 300,000 Iranians since the Ayatollah came to power.

It also includes some in Canada. A few people in Moini’s church were Christians before they came to Canada, but most were converted here.

Because Christians in Canada do not know Muslims or how to go about witnessing to them, the CNMM has provided a ready answer by organizing its first ever ‘Loving Muslims Together’ conference for November 11 – 13 in Calgary.

The conference for both ministry leaders and “the wider body of Christ” is designed to train Christians “to love and share the gospel with their Muslim neighbours.”

Registration information is available at: cnmm.ca.

CNMM hopes to offer similar conferences, in different cities, every two years. Training may also be offered in smaller settings. “If churches or Christians have a heart for Muslims and don’t know how to reach them,” Moini said, “the ministries would love to train them.”

October 2010