Sermon Illustrations

This week I was reading the story of an Australian couple who went to Bangladesh as missionaries. When Stuart and Margaret arrived in the country they were informed, by the Baptist missionaries already there that the Muslim people were impossible to reach with the Gospel message. For the six years their experience seemed to confirm that conclusion. At the end of 6 years they were expelled from the country however they returned by themselves two years later.

They went to a city of 200,000 people, where they were the only Europeans, and to their knowledge the only Christians. They had no mission support agency but they determined to find ways to reach the Muslim people for Jesus Christ.

For six years they lived culturally as Muslims. That meant that Margaret never left the house, unless it was night. She was completely covered from head to foot in front of anyone but her husband. Stuart lived with the men and disciplined himself to eat what they ate, prayed when they prayed, and fasted when they fasted. They learned to present the Gospel in terms that were culturally appropriate to the Muslim people. For six years

The result that many many people came to know Jesus. Their effectiveness was an anomaly among missionaries to the Muslims.

Why did they succeed where others had failed?

From Bangladesh Stuart and Margaret returned to Australia to pastor a church in Melbourne. At that time, a little over a decade ago, it was a church with less than two hundred in attendance and they had been fighting for four years over where to locate the handicapped accessible bathroom. As you do in Baptist churches!!!

Stuart says that the little church in Melbourne thought they were getting a white Australian pastor who would do things like they always...

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