Secret believers: The disciple-making movement that’s sweeping the Middle East

Something big is happening within global Christianity. It is profound, exciting and likely to reshape the future of the Church in Europe and America.

Ever since William Carey launched the modern missionary movement by sailing from London to India in 1793, the direction of travel for Christian teachers has predominantly been from West to East. Think of Henry Martyn, who travelled from his native England to Iran to place the first copy of his new Farsi Bible in the hands of the Shah of Persia. Think of Hudson Taylor and James Fraser’s groundbreaking work in China. Think of David Livingstone, CT Studd or Mary Slessor’s work in Africa. 

For the past two centuries, the traffic has been decidedly one-way. But suddenly, we are witnessing a quiet revolution. At a time when many Western churches are declining in number and fervour, and when many persecuted churches are flourishing and fast-growing, Christian leaders in the Middle East and Asia are sensing God calling them to invest their time in training up believers in Europe and America. This new breed of missionary rarely boards a plane: few of them can afford the ticket or to take time away from the work God is doing in their own nation. Instead, they are harnessing video technology to build online connections with Western church leaders so that they can teach them how to partner with God to see disciple-making movements of their own in the historic heartland of Christianity.

A new movement

The Bhojpuri people of northern India have always been so staunchly Hindu that Westerners labelled their region “the graveyard of modern missions”. When an American missionary named David Watson arrived in their holy city of Varanasi in 1990, he discovered that there were only 5,000 Bhojpuri Christians in a population of almost 100 million. Fresh out of Bible school and brimming with confidence, however, he trained a handful of those believers in the best Western missionary methods and sent them out to plant churches across Bhojpuriland.

When six of these church planters were murdered by angry Hindus, Watson experienced a crisis of confidence that the missionary methods he had learned at Bible school in America were fit for purpose on Asian soil. He pulled down the blinds of his tiny office and locked the door. Every day for two months he wept and prayed in the darkness: “God, I just can’t do this. I didn’t sign on to train up people to go out and get killed. I cannot believe that you would call me to reach the Bhojpuri without also teaching me how to do it, so please show me how you want me to reach these people.” 

When I interviewed him 30 years later, he was still emotional about those crucial weeks in which he pleaded with the Lord to teach him how to reach Bhojpuriland effectively.

One day in December 1991, Watson experienced a profound encounter with the Holy Spirit in which he felt drawn inextricably towards Luke 10. As he read Jesus’ instructions to his 72 disciples in how they were to reach the towns and villages of Israel, he became convinced that God was drawing him back to the forgotten manifesto of how Jesus’ followers are to go about completing his Great Commission. 

“If the Great Commission matters so much to Jesus,” Watson reasoned, “then he wouldn’t have left it up to us to work out how to go about it.” Although he did not know it at the time, this revelation was to mark the beginning of a phenomenon that missiologists refer to as “disciple-making movements”. Since then, through simple obedience to the instructions of Jesus in Luke 10 (see box), many such movements have succeeded in birthing millions of new believers in some of the hardest-to-reach regions of the Middle East and Asia. 

What would happen if we stopped expecting believers from the East to learn from the declining churches of Europe, and instead asked them to train us?

At first, the Bhojpuri believers kept lapsing back into the evangelistic strategies and church growth methodologies they had been taught by their Western friends. But by the third year, they began to find that the teaching of Jesus in Luke 10 was just as relevant to their own context as it was to first-century Israel. Within 15 years, there were two million baptised Bhojpuri believers in more than 80,000 churches. Even after Watson and the missionaries left, the disciple-making movement kept growing.

From 2008 onwards, the leaders of the Bhojpuri breakthrough began to share their lessons with believers in other unreached nations. Perhaps the most famous are the underground churches in Iran and Afghanistan, featured in the YouTube documentaries Sheep Among Wolves. Millions of people have watched these accounts of how the gospel is flourishing under the noses of the ayatollahs and the Taliban, but what is happening in Iran and Afghanistan is merely the tip of a far larger iceberg. 

A report for the Fourth Lausanne Congress on World Evangelisation, held a few weeks ago in South Korea, identified more than 3,000 similar disciple-making movements, mostly in regions which have historically been highly resistant to the gospel. The Lausanne Congress estimates that these movements are currently gathering more than 100 million new followers of Jesus in more than nine million house churches. Most of these churches are small but, put together, their global impact is staggering. It means that disciple-making movements now account for more individual churches worldwide than every traditional church denomination put together.

A new direction

When I asked the leaders of these underground house churches across the Middle East and Asia what made them turn their attention to the West, I am given a simple answer: Covid-19. 

When the world was forced indoors and onto Zoom, these leaders sensed the hand of God upon their situation. For a long time, they’d experienced a one-way relationship with church leaders from Europe and America, who tended to teach from platforms on how to build successful churches. They were astonished to discover that the pandemic was provoking many of these Western leaders to question whether what they were doing was actually what Jesus commanded his followers to do. 

Instead of presenting themselves as a model for the rest of the world to follow, Western church leaders seemed imbued with a fresh sense of honesty and humility. They freely confessed that many of their churches were declining. They were struggling to retain their own young people, let alone make new disciples in their post-Christian world. Through mass immigration, the Lord had brought the unreached nations of the world to Europe and America, but church leaders confessed that they were struggling to know how to reach them, just as David Watson had struggled to reach the Bhojpuri people 30 years earlier. 

If the Great Commission matters so much to Jesus, he wouldn’t have left it up to us to work out how to go about it

For the past two years, I have had the privilege of walking with some of these underground church leaders from the Middle East and Asia. I have listened to their stories of gospel breakthrough amid fierce persecution, and I have been astonished by their level of faith that the time has come in God’s perfect plan for similar disciple-making movements to sweep through Western nations too. 

As I have recorded their testimonies and collated their insights for my new book The Forgotten Manifesto of Jesus (IVP), I have found myself challenged to the core. As church leaders of the East speak faith over backslidden Britain and agnostic America, I have found myself dreaming about what the future of the Western Church might look like, if we were to take Jesus’ words in Luke 10 as instructions for teaching our own nations to love him, too. 

Learning from the East

What would happen if we truly believed that the fields of Europe and America are as ripe for gospel harvest (Luke 10:2) as those of the Middle East and Asia? What if we believed that God has prepared people “of peace” (v6, ESV) for us in every community – non-believers who will who come to faith when we approach them in the way that Jesus taught us, and who will succeed in reaching their communities for Jesus from the inside, where outsiders have previously failed? 

What would happen if we truly believed the words of Jesus, that weakness is the superweapon for our mission (vv3-4)? What might occur if we were willing to learn from our brothers and sisters in the global East, that it was only because Jesus was thirsty that he was able to connect effectively with the Samaritan woman at the well (John 4); that it was only because he needed a fishing boat from which to preach that he was able to invite Peter to begin partnering with him in ministry (Luke 5); that it was only because he had nowhere to stay in Jericho that he was able to turn the home of Zacchaeus into a centre for fresh missionary activity (Luke 19)? 

What would happen if we listened to the poor and persecuted believers who tell us that the problem with our churches in the West is not that they are too weak, but that they seek to be too strong? What would happen if we allowed our self-reflective humility during Covid-19 to become more than a temporary phenomenon? What would happen if we stopped expecting believers from the East to learn from the declining churches of Europe and America, and if instead we sat at their feet and asked them to train us in the principles of their disciple-making movements? 

Disciple-making movements now account for more individual churches worldwide than every traditional church denomination put together

We have good reasons to believe that this will happen. The modern-day successors of William Carey and Henry Martyn appear to be responding fastest to the challenge of the changing Christian world. Mike Jones, the British director of Frontiers, sees disciple-making movements as: “the heart of Jesus’ strategy for reaching the lost, a strategy which is bearing fruit in multiple places in the Muslim world today.” He insists that the instructions of Jesus to the 72 in Luke 10 are: “a must-read for anyone who wants to make disciples and see churches that multiply”. 

It remains to be seen whether this willingness to learn from believers in the East for the sake of reaching the East will be matched by a similar willingness for the sake of reaching the West. It may prove easier for us to allow them to reshape our thinking in pioneering contexts, where there is little Christian legacy, than in our own post-Christian context, where the legacy of Christendom continues to dominate many of our ways of thinking.

For my own part, my conversations with leaders across the Middle East and Asia have convinced me that we have much to learn from our brothers and sisters. The direction of travel is reversing within global Christianity, and I am persuaded that this is going to bring us massive blessing.