Thursday, June 05, 2003


The Stealth Crusade

Inside one Southern university, Christian missionaries are being trained to go undercover in the Muslim world and win converts for Jesus. Their stated goal: to wipe out Islam.
by Barry Yeoman May/June 2002

...Indeed, evangelical leaders encourage missionaries to continue proselytizing, even though converts might be tortured or killed. "Missionaries need maturity and spiritual toughness so that when the fruits of their witness are required to walk through the fire, the missionary does not automatically attempt to rescue them," the Southern Baptist study urges. "Persecution is Biblically and historically normative for the emerging church; it cannot be avoided or eliminated.... To avoid persecution is to hamper the growth of the kingdom of God."

In the end, say evangelicals, the earthly suffering of Christians pales before the eternal hell to which Muslims are sentenced. "It's hard for me to say, 'I have a passport out of here if things get out of hand, but you have to stay here and take it,'" says Raymond Weiss, a former missionary in Bahrain. "But that's what Jesus says: Sometimes it will be fathers and mothers against each other for his sake." ...