Receiving Muslim converts? - Part one

It is with some trepidation that I tackle the subject of the place of converts from Islam in the Christian church.

This is because there are so many problems facing those who have been grounded in Islam, and there are very few Christian missionaries among Muslims who have not experienced considerable difficulties in helping Muslim converts adapt to their new-found faith. There is perhaps no more baffling unsolved problem than the care of the new convert.

Our churches need to be willing to receive converts from Islam with open arms and to share in their trials. Sadly local churches, especially in a Muslim environment, are often unwilling to receive Muslim converts for fear of the consequences — the possible wrath of the Muslim community upon themselves. Such cowardliness and faithlessness are inexcusable. Do we have any idea of what conversion may mean for a Muslim? Do we realise the cost for any Muslim who wants to be a disciple of Jesus?

Considerable price

Muslims who become Christians will always have to pay a considerable price for their faith. Shall we give them a cold shoulder because our own comfort and complacency may be threatened? Unfortunately, this is often the case in practice and many new Christians from Islam can tell of cases where they have been received unsympathetically by the church. I cannot conceive of any justifiable circumstance where a local church could refuse to extend a warm hand of fellowship to a converted brother from Islam and I have little doubt that wherever this does occur, it will be nothing less than the church's concern about its own vested interests that will be the root cause of it. For a local church to reject a brother or sister in order to preserve its own security is surely to anger God.

Baptism?

The command to believers to be baptised as an outward sign of their unity with Jesus Christ in his death and resurrection is set forth clearly in the New Testament. Converts from Islam must, therefore, be encouraged to be baptised in obedience to our Lord's command. This is not a matter of personal choice; nor an optional extra; it is one of open acknowledgement of Christ.

It is often true that, when Muslims advise their families that they wish to become Christians, the reaction is that, if they wish to believe in Jesus Christ, let them do so, but let them avoid baptism or church membership. As there is so much emphasis on ritual and form in Islam it appears that many Muslims feel that as long as the would-be-believer in Jesus has hitherto followed all the forms of Islam, he is still really a Muslim at heart. As long as he does not submit to baptism, the obvious initiatory rite of the Christian faith, he has not really become a Christian. Baptism is, therefore, the symbol of a Muslim's final break with Islam and his adoption of Christianity.

The story of Hannah

The daughter of a British imam is living under police protection after receiving death threats from her father for converting to Christianity.

The 32-year-old, whose father is the leader of a mosque in Lancashire, has moved house an astonishing 45 times after relatives pledged to hunt her down and kill her. The British-born university graduate, who uses the pseudonym Hannah for her own safety, said she renounced the Muslim faith to escape being forced into an arranged marriage when she was 16. She has been in hiding for more than a decade but called in police after receiving a text message from her brother. In it, he said he would not be held responsible for his actions if she failed to return to Islam.

‘My situation is frightening, but I'm not going to let it frighten me to the extent I can't live my life. I pretty much feel like I've lost my family and that's very hard. Some days I feel very low and what my father might do preys on my mind. But I regularly change my phone number to avoid him catching up with me’, she said.

Hannah was born in Lancashire to Pakistani parents who raised her and her siblings as strict Sunni Muslims. She prayed and read the Qur’an, wore traditional Muslim clothes and was sent to a madrassa, a religious Muslim school. She ran away from home after overhearing her father organising her arranged marriage. Hannah was taken in by a religious education teacher and later announced her new faith.

Although unhappy, her parents tolerated their daughter's dismissal of Islam as a ‘teenage phase’. But when she opted to get baptised, while studying at Manchester University, her family were incensed and the death threats began. Her father arrived at her home with 40 men and threatened to kill her for betraying Islam.

‘I saw my uncle and around 40 men storming up the street clutching axes, hammers, knives and bits of wood’, she said.

‘My dad was shouting through the letterbox, “I'm going to kill you”, while the others smashed on the window and beat the door. They were shouting, “We're going to kill you” and “Traitor”.

‘It was terrifying. I was convinced I was going to die, but after about ten minutes the noise stopped and the men suddenly went away.’

After receiving the latest text threat from her brother, she finally went to the police.

Complete break with Islam?

There is a general consensus among those working among Muslims today that every effort must be made to avoid wrenching Muslim converts out of their culture and to guard against attempts to westernise them.

Recently, however, this commendable objective has led to a widespread conviction that Muslim converts should be allowed to remain wholly within their societies and communities and keep their place in the universal Muslim ummah (community). It has even been suggested that they should not be called Christians at all but rather ‘Jesus Muslims’ or ‘followers of Isa’, and that they should exercise their faith in Jesus in an Islamic context, either by forming separate groups who nonetheless worship according to traditional Islamic forms, or by remaining in their own mosques and societies, expressing their faith in Jesus in more direct Islamic forms.

From the outset I must confess to being able to offer no easy solutions to this problem and have great sympathy with those who work in predominantly Muslim societies and cultures and who grapple with the problem and seek to resolve the issue of leading Muslims to Christ without disrupting their lives and cultural heritage. This article, however, is being written primarily for those living in the West who have minority Muslim communities in their midst.

I remain persuaded however that Muslims who believe in Jesus Christ as their Lord and Saviour and look to him for eternal life must break from Islam and become united as Christians to the local church. This is an ideal that I do not believe we are entitled to compromise in any way.

A missionary friend observed those who accepted the Christian faith at first and made an earnest effort to live with their own families and in their Muslim environment. In every case he has noted that this was not possible. Either the person was forced to compromise his Christian conduct and profession, or he was forced to leave his family and the Muslim environment.

Suffering for Christ

Yes, Muslims will always have to pay a price for their faith in Jesus and their conversion may prove equally costly for those who seek to bring them to Christ. Yet we have a perfect example in Jesus himself who suffered and died that we may live. The apostle who could say so confidently of himself, ‘Imitate me, just as I also imitate Christ’ (1 Corinthians 11.1), spoke often of his hardships for the gospel. ‘Even to the present hour we both hunger and thirst, and we are poorly clothed, and beaten, and homeless’, he wrote to the Christians at Corinth (1 Corinthians 4.11).

We must encourage Muslim converts to make a complete commitment to Christ and come out from Islam, boldly declaring allegiance to him and his church. If this involves much loss, hardship and suffering, so be it. Such must always be the course of those who would truly follow Jesus. ‘For to you it has been granted on behalf of Christ, not only to believe in him, but also to suffer for his sake, having the same conflict which you saw in me and now hear is in me’ (Philippians 1.29-30).

But how can we practically integrate Muslim converts into our local churches in the West? This is the question we will address in a future issue.

E.M. Hicham is an assistant pastor and author of Your questions answered: a reply to Muslim friends, published by Evangelical Press. He is also a founder member of MEC Word of Hope Ministries — a non-profit-making literature ministry producing literature for Muslim evangelism. For more details, visit http://www.word-of-hope.net