Click here to buy the book.
I remember coming back from Spain in 2006 and almost immediately ending up in Luke 10 church planting in the San Francisco Bay Area of California, like I had been doing in Spain. People started coming to Christ and my friends and I began to plant churches among these people. Yet every time I talked to someone who had never seen this kind of ministry the response would inevitably be the same, “that can work overseas but not here in America.” Funny, in Spain they were always telling me “that stuff can work in America, but it won’t work here.” I’ve done this in both places with similar results.
With that in mind I’d like to introduce you to a practical book about Luke 10 church planting among Muslims. If you think wherever you are is rocky soil you’ve never worked in Europe and you’ve never worked in the Muslim world. We need to learn that the problem is not with the harvest field. Jesus told us, “The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field” (Lk. 10:2). Wherever we are the fields are white unto harvest, we just need to see how Jesus sees and do what Jesus did, under his lordship.
And as a second practical resource on how to do that I’m going to suggest Jerry Toursdale’s book. This is a book filled with wonderful stories of God’s supernatural power in ministry fields that are most likely tougher than where you live.
Miraculous Movements: How Hundreds of Thousands of Muslims Are Falling in Love with Jesus
As I did with The Luke 10 Manual in the previous post, I’m just going to whet your appetite with the table of contents.
About the Team and Author
Introduction
1. Unprecedented!
2. Jesus’ Counterintuitive Disciple-Making Strategy
3. Pray the Lord of the Harvest
4. Inside Islam: Disillusionment and Discontentment
5. Engaging Lostness
6. Discovery Bible Studies and Obedience-Based Discipleship
7. Simple Churches, Dramatic Transformation, Rapid Replication
8. Dreams, Visions, and Miracles Among Muslims
9. “Of Whom the World Is Not Worthy” Learning from Heroes and Heroines of Faith
10. The Hardest People Yield the Greatest Results
11. Ordinary People Achieving the Impossible
12. Seven Paradigm Shifts
13. Getting Started: Biblical Practices for Engaging Lostness
Appendix 1 (List of Bible Studies for Non-Christians)
Appendix 2 (About City Team International)
Before you say, “Hey, the people I work with are just too hard for this to work,” note the title of Chapter 10: The Hardest People Yield the Greatest Results. Are the people you work with hard? Good. And before you say, “the people in this book are special people, I could never do that,” pay attention to the title of Chapter 11: Ordinary People Achieving the Impossible. Are you ordinary? Good. Now, consider buying this book then following Jesus into the harvest.
Pick a question and respond:
- Why do you think almost everyone thinks their context is hard soil?
- Beyond the resources that this book provides, what else would you need to get started?
- Both The Luke 10 Manual and Miraculous Movements emphasize prayer. Why?
- Why do you think we don’t see more people doing this kind of ministry in the West?