Two things got us interested in ministry to and among Muslims. One, studying church history and learning that so many of the places that were key in the early days—Nicea, Constantinople, Ephesus, Antioch, Carthage—are almost entirely Muslim today. Two, I took a stripped-down version of a great course, Perspectives in World Missions, and learned that a large portion of the world’s Muslims do not have access to the gospel or a local Christian community.

What do Muslim believe? That there is no deity but Allah and that Muhammad is his prophet. That is the shahada of Islam.

I am an Anglican priest in Madrid, Spain. I often observe this practice of letting the practices of our tiny Protestant community be determined to a great extent by not doing what the Roman Catholics do. I understand the historical and contextual reasons for this practice. But in the long run it is not a recipe for fruitfulness. In the same way, the winsomeness of the Christian faith should be allowed to stand on its own.

This is now the fourth installation in my series on pastoral care for Christians who have converted from Islam. We started by addressing the issue of baptism, then the personality of God as portrayed in the Qur’an v. the Bible, and then the role of history in helping to form a firm identity for the convert.

Familiarity with history also allows for the recognition of self-worth and value for one’s local Christian community. It was striking to see how CMBs in North Africa were energized by hearing that their local bishop martyr, Cyprian, had made such a lasting and profound impact on Christian theology and ecclesiology.

It happened twice, once in North Africa and once in Constantinople. I had been invited to give some lectures to congregations consisting mostly of Christians from a Muslim background (CMBs).

In October of 2018 we founded al kanisa al masihiya fi Madrid—the Christian Church of Madrid—an Arabic-language weekly fellowship. We were meeting in a borrowed space from a Latino Assemblies of God congregation in Tetuan, a neighborhood with a large Muslim population north of downtown.

More Muslims have converted to the Way of Jesus Christ in the last four decades than in all the other years since the advent of Islam in the 7th Century. Something is certainly happening among Muslims and there is an openness in their society that was not there before.