Missionaries adjust to risks in Arab lands

Brandon Bayne wants to win souls for Jesus Christ in the Arab world. That's why he steers clear of Muslim nations and instead trains Latinos from the Americas to be missionaries on the ground there.

"There has to be someone at some point who crosses a border," says Mr. Bayne, a third-year ministry student here at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Mass. But in light of escalating anti-Americanism and resentment spawning violence against missionaries, he says, that missionary "doesn't have to be a Westerner."

In fact, according to Bayne and other mission theorists, Latinos have better success rates in winning Arab converts because their dark skin and modest economic backgrounds help build relationships with indigenous Muslims. Latinos, Filipinos, and other non-Western Christians are thus increasingly staffing the front lines of the world's most dangerous mission fields, where spreading Christianity can be punishable by death.

In the wake of missionary murders in Yemen in December and in Lebanon in November, evangelical Christians are debating how best to spread their faith in regions hostile to Christianity, America, and Western culture. At issue is not whether to preach "the good news" to Muslims abroad, but whom should be sent to do it.

"Somebody is going to have to risk their life to bring the Gospel to the Yemenites," says Timothy Tennent, director of missions programs at Gordon-Conwell. "The question is, who should it be?"

Answering that question seems to be a process of elimination. For whom is the job too risky? And which groups are destined to fail at planting churches or winning converts, because of wide cultural disparities? Evangelicals are tiptoeing through answers, finding that many adventurous young Americans might not be suited to the calling.

After Sept. 11, 2001, Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va., stopped sending student interns to mission fields in Pakistan, Lebanon, and Muslim-majority areas of India. Recent murders mean that policy will stay in place indefinitely, according to Don Fanning, director of the university's Center for Global Ministry.

"That's kind of a practical response concerning the liability of the university," Dr. Fanning says. "To push gullible kids into harm's way isn't a good idea, anyway."

At Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif., students continue to train for mission work in the "10/40 window," a reference to latitudes north of the equator where Islam dominates and Christianity is largely unpracticed. In class, they learn personal security tactics, from carrying a cellular phone to notifying several people whenever they leave a village.

Yet as violence against missionaries has escalated in recent months, instructors have been reemphasizing that no one with small children should embark on missions to certain dangerous regions. "We're trying to prepare people more biblically to accept suffering as a component of any mission outreach," says J. Dudley Woodberry, professor of Islamic Studies and dean emeritus of the School of World Mission at Fuller. "But children should not have to undergo that type of situation."

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