Authentic biblical faith has always been transforming faith that took place within God’s appointed means for the change, his set apart people, the visible church.  The people that get that are Muslim background Christians. They both realize the utter necessity of the visible church and the necessity to leave false religions such as Islam in order for gospel transformation to actually take place

Fundamental questions

I would like to take some time with you in this hour to address the question of how the gospel penetrates life and culture. The thing about it is that “gospel” is one of those words that everyone affirms, but rarely examines. We all embrace it, but what are we embracing. I hope to show the fundamental differences between insider movements and more traditional approaches to evangelizing Muslims centers around the meaning of basic terms we use that serve as essential building blocks of our faith. Terms such as gospel, church, and salvation all shape what we think authentic faith is. I believe that the question of how the gospel works transformationally will help clarify the real differences between insider movements and what I believe are more biblical approaches. I also hope to demonstrate to you along the way that the differences between insiders and non-insiders are not differences of degree but differences in kind. All too often we discuss insider movements as an internal debate between missionaries about what degree of contextualization is appropriate. I think this is misguided. The differences between insider approaches and their opponents are fundamental and not incremental. Let me show you why.

A key question we can ask that helps illuminate our different understanding of gospel and salvation is what does it mean for the gospel to penetrate life and culture?  Let’s look at what the Word says. 1Cor 15:1-11, as Dave Garner so powerfully reminded us is the salvation accomplished, applied and declared to sinners by God alone that must be reflected in our thoughts, words, and lives. Matthew 4:23 tells us that the gospel is a kingdom proclamation of God’s sovereign reign over creation. It is not just an appeal for a decision. It is common to describe the gospel as bare facts we affirm about the life, death, resurrection, ascension and return of Jesus. To believe the gospel, therefore is to trust these truths. The gospel as described in the Bible, however, goes further and deeper.  It is foremost a statement of sovereign reality and will. It is also a holy calling to follow the pattern of sound words, the deposit guarded by the church. (2 Tim 1:8-14). So, it is not simply a few words, a formula, but also a pattern of teaching that is given to the church for its safekeeping. So, the gospel cannot be abstracted from the whole body of God’s Word. Finally, it is a life to be obeyed that leads to suffering (1 Pet 4:17).  This implies its utter incompatibility with any other competing truth systems and truth claims. The gospel in this way is not just a string of propositions. It is an encompassing worldview and a salvation accomplished. It is the miraculous, loving, all-encompassing embrace of God for unworthy sinners that changes everything, in every way, everywhere.

The gospel is also a transforming miracle. It changes and overturns everything with which it comes into contact. “It is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jews first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith, as it is written, “The righteous shall live by faith. For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men” ( Rom 1:16-18). In other words the gospel transforms how we live, not just what we say we believe. There is no genuine work of the gospel that also does not change its recipients.

It penetrates the most impenetrable barrier of all, the sinful heart, and transforms it into the likeness of Jesus. It means leaving your own family to follow Christ (Mt 10:34-39). It breaks down apparently permanent cultural barriers, such as that between Jews and Gentiles, turning two communities into one (Ephesians 2:11-22). Here there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free; but Christ is all, and in all.” (Col 3:9-11). It gives us a whole new identity that immediately starts to remake us.Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself (2 Cor 5:17-18).

It is this new identity we have that generates our ethical transformation. “Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator.” (Col 3:10) Gregory of Nyssa, the early church father illustrated what difference a gospel-produced identity makes. On what it means to call oneself a Christian (Gregory of Nyssa)

They say that a certain showman in the city of Alexandria, having trained a monkey to dance with some grace, and having dressed him in a dancer’s mask and a costume suitable for the occasion, and having surrounded him with a chorus, gained fame by the monkey’s twisting himself in time with the music and concealing his nature in every way by what he was doing and what he appeared to be . He threw onto the dancing place some of the nuts which arouse the greediness of such animals; whereupon the monkey, forgetting the dancing and the applause and the elaborate costume, ran after them and grabbed what he found in the palms of his hands. Therefore, just as the assumed form was not sufficient for that creature to be considered a man, once his nature was disclosed in the incident of the almonds, so those individuals not shaping their own natures by faith will easily be disclosed in the toils of the devil as being something other than what they were called. The marks of the true Christian are all those we know in connection with Christ.

 Gregory was pointing out that the gospel works by transforming us from the inside out. It is this inward change that marks genuine conversion.

Insider movements and Gospel transformation

Insider proponents claim that one can and indeed should remain within Islam as a more effective way of penetrating the lives of Muslims with the power of the gospel. This is what the proponents claim drives the insider movement’s success. John Travis says, We never speak of Muslims “becoming Christians” in our ministry. Instead, we speak of those who have “experienced life-changing faith as followers of Isa.”^[i] That Christ spreads through insider communities like yeast in dough.  According to Travis and Dudley Woodberry, “Today numbers of Muslims have accepted this good news, allowing the yeast of the Kingdom to transform their lives and their families, while remaining a part of their own Muslim communities.”  Additionally: “It is because of this strong fusion of family, community and socio-religious identity that some Muslims who have received the gospel, in an effort to keep their family and social networks intact, choose to remain Muslim, so long as they can be true to Jesus, the Bible and the leading of the Spirit.” ^[ii]

What, however, is the means by which our lives are changed? The assumption seems to be that the professed faith in Christ believed in the mosque community somehow serves as a sufficient leaven to make community dough rise. Rebecca Lewis similarly states that the Gospel takes root within a pre-existing community and, like yeast, spreads within that community.^[iii] Lewis terms this the “transformational model.” She adds, “When the gospel is implanted in this manner, the families and clans that God created are redeemed and transformed, instead of broken apart.” Rick Brown believes that the Kingdom of God spreads in and through social networks. It is like yeast in the dough. As such, we can and should expect that in many situations men and women and families and friends will come into the Kingdom together, as “pre-existing webs of relationship.”^[iv]  Insiders such as Rick Wood easily acknowledge that Muslim followers of Jesus need to discern and reject things from the surrounding culture. This should work for them since they claim to be the yeast in the dough.^[v]

These insider approaches to the “gospel” and how it spreads are characterized by the following:

1. It is minimalist. It addresses the basic redemptive story and says very little about how change takes place within the community. Relatedly, It is a methodology that is startlingly deficient of any real engagement with the power and extent of sin. So it tells us that change happens, but does not describe the nature or process of it. The genuine gospel does both.
2. It assumes that the gospel can transform people and their communities, but it is also very unclear about what has to change since it does not think that Islam is out of bounds. Since insider movements do not challenge the institution of Islam, one assumes that the transformation it describes deals fundamentally with inward and personal life.
3. Since it believes that transformational change takes place in believers within Islam by people who self-identify as Muslims, it must necessarily view Islam as something other than a false or Satanic religion; whether that means it is on parr with Christianity, as both partly right and deficient without Jesus, preparation for the gospel, or something else. In other words, insiders have to believe that remaining in Islam is not harmful to new followers of Jesus.

Islam, in fact, may not only be no barrier to the gospel being located within it. It may even be its best vehicle. So, while insiders commonly point to their method as necessary to overcome the insurmountable aversion of Islam, to Christianity, Islam is no real impediment to the gospel and its transforming power.

How does actual transformation take place?

Insider proponents believe in the importance of a community of believers. These are Muslims who profess Jesus and remain together as transforming yeast in the dough of Islam. In other words, they choose to follow Christ and then choose to do so as continuing Muslims.

How does this gospel change take place and what does change actually mean?  Are we changed as we voluntarily choose a social group that maximizes our effective witness?  Hasn’t transformational change actually come through God incorporating us into a new family of his own choosing; one with God-given structure, norms, practices, and authorities given to the believing community? Isn’t this how God has always shaped his people? It is true that people grow and learn in community; but what community? Whenever people made voluntary associations through which to find God, the best they could manage were Golden Calves and a Tower of Babel. God created church when he chose the least of peoples upon whom he set his love from amongst the idolatrous nations and he gave them a visible identity, a  unique Word that described who they were, who God is and how he would redeem them; worship that reinforced God’s unique work in them; and standards for life that set them apart from their neighbors. In Christ, he infused the Holy Spirit into them so they could be the different people he chose for himself.

Biblically, Transforming change does take place within communities, but not within non-biblical religions. Human religions are, by definition, human creations that fundamentally reflect the fall. God’s society is different because, in the first place, it comes from him. When God created a community, in the Israelites, he took the initiative to separate them from the surrounding influences so it could grow. He did not give them the choice of transforming their pagan religions from the insider out. When the gospel was taken into the heart of the Gentile world, the Bible describes it as Gentile branches being grafted into the covenantal olive tree. In other words, believing Jews and Gentiles became a particular people through the gospel. Therefore, it is fair to ask of those advocating followers of Jesus remaining in Islam: How then will transformation take place if the institutions, authorities, standards, and practices of the surrounding culture all militate against transformational change by the gospel? If the Qur’an contains a gospel, it is a false gospel.

We can of course appeal to the power of the Holy Spirit, but wasn’t the Holy Spirit given to a covenant people, a set apart, visible people who had a developed identity that set them apart from the surrounding cultures, a new identity in Christ; a highly developed ethic?  There is no biblical record of the Holy Spirit working in other religions, despite the strained appeals to Naaman, Balaam, and the woman at the well. Non-biblical religions are not incubators for transformed people.  Insider movements, however, seem to say that this sort of transformation can take place while they also retain an older, Muslim identity.  I ask again, Why then did God call out Israel from among the nations? Why did he segregate them theologically, liturgically and ethically from the nations if they would have been better off as yeast bubbling away within the surrounding culture?How is someone who is a professing Muslim, however,  supposed to contradict the life he claims to embrace?

The fly in the ointment: Muslim ethics

If insiders believe in a transforming gospel, it is indeed odd that they do not focus any effort on describing the effects of the gospel on ethics. If the gospel is transforming, what exactly is changing and how does it change? The most neglected aspect of the insider debate in my view is this subject.  It is all well and good to say “I am a Muslim who loves Jesus.” But, how is that expressed as you live day to day?  Fundamental to any understanding of Islam is the fact that to be a professing Muslim is to live as a Muslim. It is to celebrate Korbani, marry Muslim mates, register your children as Muslims in school, get buried in Muslim cemeteries. It is to love, hate, serve, forgive as your religious worldview dictates. Being a Muslim, one who obeys, is fundamentally about how you live not just who you say you are or who you you think you are inwardly. Every genuine Muslim I have ever known realizes that. Therefore, without an explicit rejection by the believing community of Muslim ethics, it means their general embrace. In Bangladesh, there is an epidemic of insider children marrying Muslims and raising their own children as Muslims. Whom, then, is leavening whom?

In interviewing insiders in Bangladesh, I found a consistent pattern of insiders not serving as yeast in the community. What I found was cultural accommodation. At its very best, I found people who systematically drifted back and forth between Muslim and Christian identities. Muslim ethics however, are not the same as biblical ethics. Aside from the rather obvious points such as being the husband of one wife, Muslim ethical presuppositions are flatly contradicted by the Gospel. Here are some examples:

In Islam, humans are not “essentially” sinners, rather, each human is born pure and is inclined towards goodness.  In Islamic theology, society bears a heavy responsibility for suppressing and distorting the natural goodness of each human.  In the end, however, every person should choose a life of goodness for themselves; this individual act of choice is the key to human dignity, and what raises humans above others of God’s creation.^[vi] Compare it to Gal 2:20 I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.

Muslim ethics is about forbidding wrong. Forbidding wrong is not a duty to help people in trouble, but rather to stop people from doing wrong.^[vii] Compare that to the Good Samaritan. Not only is the story highlighting the centrality of rescue to biblical ethics, it is a reflection of Christ’s on purpose.

Muslim ethics assume that changing or transforming the state of the heart from undesirable, unwanted, unacceptable-morals or habits to desirable good-habits is humanly possible. Islam does not order commandments that cannot be accomplished Compare that to the magisterial declaration of God’s gracious intention in Eph 2:8-10 For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that  no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.

Muslims profess one who causes others to rebel and cause the spreading of “fisk” (depravity) is called a “Fajir”. The sinner who is known as committing forbidden actions (Haram) should not be loved.^[viii] Compare: Mat 5:43-47 Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven.

The practice of insiders seems to not confront, let alone overturn basic Muslim structures, institutions and practices. There are at play one or two disturbing assumptions.  It seems as though the “gospel” promoted is a quietist gospel that deals exclusively with one’s spiritual state. All areas of material life are left largely unaffected. In other words, when one says “yes” to Jesus, the leavening affects how he or she feels about Jesus, not how he or she lives.  To be fair, this is not what insider enthusiasts claim. It is apparent however, based on the lack of insider engagement with community ethics. It also appears to assume that structures such as the mosque or practices such as Korbani are of no particular significance. Finally, it seems blind to the fact that one’s identity means everything to one’s witness. One may say that he is a Muslim follower of Isa, but the fact that he serves on a local mosque council or has a daughter married in a Muslim ceremony completely compromises his entire witness.  We live out what we believe.

The basic problem is that contemporary Muslim-oriented missiology commonly claims the need for the transforming power of the gospel, but those claims are undercut by shallow, decision-based methods of evangelism, an overly simplistic, two-dimensional Bible translation that never moves people beyond basic professions, and an inability to address public ethics. Peoples’ labels and stories change, but not their lives.

The result is all too often a profession of faith in Christ (a verbal choice or declaration) that sits uneasily on a Muslim person’s established life rather than a gospel that transforms the person from the inside out, redefining his inner identity, changing his core beliefs and his life lived out in community. Consider Mustapha^[ix]. He came to Christ in the 1980s through missionaries and Christian literature. He was baptized and began attending church. His new faith however did not provide him with a good job. An insider approached him and offered for him to join as a supervisor of house groups in the area on condition that he regain his Muslim identity. 24 years later, he walks out, briefly rejoins a church community and then suddenly deserts to become a member of a radical Islamic sect. In order to curry favor with them, he incites a riot that attacks a van owned by an MBC church going to visit a church plant, along with five American visitors. The failure to deal adequately with identity and ethics creates a disaster.

Almost 7 years ago, an MBC church planter, Awal,  headed up north in Bangladesh. He was stopped and hauled into the police, where he directly admitted his intention to plant a Christian church. The police let him go, stunned by his honesty, but not before warning him that insiders had told the police he was coming. In another instance, a former national leader of IM saw both daughters convert to Islam, marry Muslim men and raise Muslim grandchildren.

This is not the way the early church grew. It developed a strong sense of visible identity that distinguished it decisively from the surrounding cultures. When plagues swept through the Roman world, the Christians grew because their faith produced an ethic that believed it was essential to rescue the perishing, even at risk to themselves. While pagans cringed at the thought of the contagion, the Christians attended to the sick and dying, Christian or not. When they were threatened with extermination, most of them chose death over syncretism, or if you like, clarity over confusion. Gladiatorial combat ended, not by Christians working subtly in the Colosseum but when a Christian Telemachus jumped into the arena, and at the cost of his own life, shamed the audience in to stopping the blood sport.^[x]

Ethics as Gospel transformation

Fundamentally, we need to deal with the whole of a person’s life. The gospel is comprehensive. It is not a truncated message.  First, we need a whole Bible applied to the whole person and all of his or her beliefs. It is quite true that some ideas such as Trinity are too impenetrable on day one. Even the Bible acknowledges that. But it is Jesus that opens the door for a proper engagement of the Muslim with transforming biblical truth in all of its dimensions. No one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him (Mat 11:27)

Second, we need to nest gospel transformation exclusively within our new identity in Christ as part of his historic, visible body.  Christian mission has always depended on an identity that was anchored in a biblical, historical perspective. In other words, the church saw itself as in continuity with the children of Israel. It was part of the same olive tree that contained Jewish and Gentile branches. That meant that its heritage, its hopes, its actions and interactions were driven by that biblical identity. Believers are Abraham’s children and therefore heirs to the promises of God. Jonathan Bonk is an outstanding proponent of insider movements. His comments, though not held by all insiders, highlight a common affliction among IM: identity confusion. “Can the faith of someone from another religion be credited to them as righteousness? Is it possible for someone who has never heard of Jesus…to be saved? I believe the answer must be yes.”^[xi]

Third, We need the learning to take place within a visibly constituted church, whether that means above ground, or, if necessary, underground.  It is completely inadequate for an insider to embrace a transformed life from within the mosque. We must go to Jesus outside the camp (Heb 13:13). Worship and preaching are indispensable means for forming biblical ethics. Ethics is not something you develop in a crisis that requires a choice. It is almost an instinct that develops slowly in community, with deep and constant interaction with the Word and worship. I like the way Tom Wright expresses it: “Christian ethics is the lifestyle that celebrates and embodies that new creation. Living out a life of Christian holiness makes sense, perfect sense, within God’s new world, the world into which we are brought at baptism, the world where we are nourished by the Eucharist. Of course, if you try to live a Christian lifestyle outside this framework, you will find it as difficult, indeed nonsensical, as it would be for an orchestral performer to play his or her part, separated from the rest of the players, amid the crashes and metallic screeching of an automobile factory.”^[xii] it is simply impossible for that sort of change to take place within the confines of Islam.

Fourth, transformational faith requires a conscious confrontation of our life’s presuppositions. In other words, we need a worldview evangelism in Muslim witness; not simply a minimalist, non-offensive bumper sticker evangelism. Don Carson explains it this way:

You cannot make heads or tails of the real Jesus unless you have categories for the personal/transcendent God of the Bible; the nature of human beings made in the image of God; the sheer odium of rebellion against him; the curse that our rebellion has attracted; the spiritual, personal, familial, and social effects of our transgression; the nature of salvation; the holiness and wrath and love of God. Faithful worldview evangelism under these circumstances will sooner or later find the evangelist trying to modify or destroy some of the alien worldview and to present another entire structure of thought and conduct that is unimaginably more glorious, coherent, consistent, and finally true. The challenge of worldview evangelism is to make it clear that closing with Jesus has content (it is connected with a real, historical Jesus about whom certain things must be said and believed) and is all-embracing (it affects conduct, relationships, values, priorities).^[xiii]

Fifth: That sort of worldview confrontation is what we call theology. Theology and doctrine were integrally entwined with evangelism, worship and ethics from the start. The Didache, one of Christianity’s earliest documents carefully described the process of catechising new converts so that they themselves could affirm their faith in one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit at their baptism. Tim Keller notes, “The gospel of salvation doesn’t really relate to theology like the first steps relate to the rest of the stairway but more like the hub relates through the spokes to the rest of the wheel.”^[xiv] The thoughts underpinning IM, however, such as the church growth concepts of Donald McGavran, depend on a two stage system. In stage one, someone is introduced to and embraces a very simple gospel about Jesus without challenging the surrounding framework of beliefs that he or she has. It is only in stage 2, when a critical mass of converts is created in a community, secondary or tertiary ideas can be presented. In other words, the underlying assumptions governing the insiders’ understanding of transformation are undermined, both by their unbiblical ignoring of how profoundly the gospel actually changes everything and by their unbiblical idea that real change takes place within the realm of false religion.

Areas of encouragement

Let me mention three specific areas of encouragement that I believe are already beginning to swamp the fatal if untreated insider approach. First, Muslim background Christians are increasingly assuming positions of authority and influence throughout the Muslim world. To be sure, this is leading to clashes with older, expat driven organizations and methodologies. If mission organizations all too often embrace methods that have more to do with Charles Finney’s “right use of the constituted means” than they do with the Apostle Paul, then national pastors and church planters are beginning to reject these in favor of a full, though culturally nuanced confrontation with Islam as a theologically driven worldview. Expat organizations often attempt intrusions into relations between nationals; promoting homogeneous church planting and evangelism. Newer MBC bodies are beginning to form their own churches with their own national practices, but feel free to associate with other bodies such as traditional churches, Hindu background Christians etc.

Second, Muslim background Christians are helping us rediscover the importance of the visible church. MBCs find church intuitively necessary. Unlike us Westerners, they understand the importance of physical structures and build them when they can. When they cannot, they still gather as Christians distinct from Muslims and practice their faith, integrating theology, worship, and ethics rather than fragmenting them.  The process is difficult. The habits of a lifetime and pressures of a hostile community always threaten to unravel things, but still the work advances. It is a war, you see, and that means victories and defeats on the way. Slowly they develop deep theological engagement with the prevailing worldview. They are often deeply limited by a lack of resources, access to outside ideas with which to engage on the way to forming their own ideas.

Third, If at one time the church ignored the influence of the social sciences in mission, we are now beginning to see that its over-reliance is a sip from a poisoned chalice. Social sciences such as anthropology are not constructed on a biblical base and therefore do not share biblical values or a biblical trajectory. Grasped from within a biblically sound, theological informed and consistent framework, they can really help. But wielded in their absence, they are a truly false gospel. All of which points out that the icy fingers of disembodied, anti-church missiologists are being pried away from Muslim ministry. Once again, it is God building his kingdom through his visible church that is making a comeback. When we rediscover the church, we rediscover the importance of theology in missions.

Imperative

We must regain our full-orbed understanding of biblical terms such as “gospel”, “church’” and “salvation.”  We do that best when we realize that truncated, minimalist, lowest common denominator evangelism that spawned privatized, disembodied gnostic professions back home has never been accepted as authentic Christian faith. Authentic biblical faith has always been transforming faith that took place within God’s appointed means for the change, his set apart people, the visible church.

The people that get that are Muslim background Christians. They both realize the utter necessity of the visible church and the necessity to leave false religions such as Islam in order for gospel transformation to actually take place. Interestingly, they are also the one group that is utterly clear about insider movements. They do not approve. It is time we started listening to them.

Bill Nikides is a Teaching Elder in the PCA, serving as one of the directors for i2 Ministries and working alongside of Advancing Native Missions (ANM) supporting church planting in South and East Asia. He is a former moderator of the IPC and assisted in the development of the Presbyterian church of Bangladesh.  He has 30  years of experience working in with Muslims. 

[Editor’s note: Original URLs (links) referenced in this article are no longer valid, so the links have been removed.]