Missionaries Under Cover

Missionaries Under Cover
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1005107,00.html


For 21 months now, Americans have been engaged in a crash course on Islam, its geography and its followers. It is not a subject we were previously interested in, and the U.S. military in two countries continues its on-the-job training in sheiks and ayatullahs, Sunni customs and Shi'ite factionalism. Yet there is one group that has been thinking -- passionately -- about Muslims for more than a decade. Its army is weaponless, its soldiers often unpaid, its boot camps places like the Queens classroom. It has no actual connection with the U.S. government (except possibly to unintentionally muddy America's image). But in the past few months, its advance forces have been entering the still-smoldering battlefield of Iraq, as intent on molding its people's future as the conventional American troops already in place.

Not for a century has the idea of evangelizing Islam awakened such fervor in conservative Christians. Touched by Muslims' material and (supposed) spiritual needs, convinced that they are one of the great "unreached megapeoples" who must hear the Gospel before Christ's eventual return, Evangelicals have been rushing to what has become the latest hot missions field. Figures from the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Massachusetts, suggest that the number of missionaries to Islamic countries nearly doubled between 1982 and 2001--from more than 15,000 to somewhere in excess of 27,000. Approximately 1 out of every 2 is American, and 1 out of every 3 is Evangelical. Says George Braswell Jr., a missions professor at the Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary: "We're having more now than probably ever before go out to people like Muslims."

Read the complete article at:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1005107,00.html



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