Thesis Twelve: Among the tiny percentage of Protestants determined to “preach the Gospel to every creature”, extremely few considered residential efforts to ‘make disciples’ among Muslims to be advisable or even possible.

Thesis Thirteen: Missionaries among Muslims have been typically only ones and twos-‘lone ranger’ types with significant gaps of time between them and the next ones to take up the task.

Thesis Fourteen:  Those missionaries most gifted in evangelism went to Latin America or Africa, where they were welcome. The few taking up residence among Muslims, historically, have tended to be gifted as scholar-teachers or medical personnel.

Thesis Fifteen: Because missionary visas were created by colonial powers, Muslim countries gaining independence withdrew such visas.  From 1945 to 1975, countries not issuing missionary visas were considered “closed” and therefore off limits for missionary endeavor by church and agency leaders. 

Thesis Sixteen: In both the Catholic efforts and in Protestant era between 1790-1900, what Latourette calls ‘the Great Century” missionaries sailed PAST the Arab world, Turkey, Persia. In Russia, China, India, and Southeast Asia, they avoided the Muslims to concentrate on Tribals, low-caste Hindus, Chinese, or non-evangelical Christians.

Thesis Seventeen: Historically, even where there has been some witness TO Muslims, there is little precedent for attempting to establish churches wherein the Muslim background believers were the majority. There was failure to recognize the H.U.Principle…Muslims did not want to associate with Hindus, or nominal Christians.

Yet, unless seekers can experience a new ‘family’ committed to seeing their needs for a spouse, house, work, education, and protection provided, it has been considered unsustainable to identify with the Christians.

Thesis Eighteen:  Until very recently, existing churches in countries with a Muslim majority have NOT welcomed Muslim seekers, assuming their motives to be sinister and/or that allowing them fellowship would bring violent retaliation from other Muslims.

Thesis Nineteen: Historically, due to poor communication methodology, even where some daringly proclaimed the “Good news”, it was not heard as good news, but rather as BAD news. E.g. “do NOT honour your father and mother” or “reject your community’s traditions”.

Thesis Twenty: Because Muslims have tended to react violently or at least with violent threats, Muslim believers historically have been ‘sent away’ to a safe place; extracted from their community, usually never to return. This practice intending to be good shepherding resulted in missionaries getting a reputation as ‘kidnappers’, and breakers up of families.

Thesis Twenty One:  Missionaries have tended to invest in the first available seekers. These tended to be persons already marginal in their society unable to influence others and/or persons with the wrong motives.

Thesis Twenty Two: Unless there have been a sufficiently large group of Muslim believers, [critical mass] fear both among the handful of converts and the messengers has prevented the believers from meeting openly enough to invite or attract other Muslims. Hence reproduction or church growth/reproduction has typically been thwarted.

Thesis Twenty Three:   The doctrine of the worth of the individual believer, unintentionally produced an individualistic, unaccountable missionary who if s/he won a Muslim, discipled him also as one with little accountability or commitment to the rest of the believers. Only community can reproduce community.

Thesis Twenty Four: A corollary of individualism has been the Protestant insistence on individual confession and baptism. Muslim societies however, tend to make corporate decisions including religious alliances. It is not considered noble to ‘stand up against the crowd’ in Eastern societies.

Thesis Twenty Five: Since the 1970s, church growth theory has encouraged workers to ‘go to the responsive’. This notion automatically excludes most Muslims peoples from receiving church planting teams.

Thesis Twenty Six: Historically, those missionaries intrepid enough to venture into Muslim communities most often had no models and therefore little idea how to proceed in church planting among Muslims. Coaching has been minimal.

Thesis Twenty Seven: The specific goal of establishing separate MBB churches with their own leadership in the same areas where churches of NON-Muslim believers exist was NOT endorsed by agency leadership until the 1980s.  To avoid bringing the MBBs into the non-Muslim background churches was considered violating the unity of the Church by Western missionaries.

Thesis Twenty Eight: Missionaries, historically, were unwilling to take animistic practices seriously, [e.g. that jinn (demons) are part of a Muslim’s everyday life] thus they often seemed irrelevant in their message to folk-Muslims. Protection and power, not forgiveness, has been the felt-need.

Thesis Twenty Nine: Too few messengers has taken up residence among Muslims because of a weak theology of suffering. If one has the goal of avoiding suffering, s/he will avoid proclamation to Muslims.

Thesis Thirty: the 1960-70s, birthed a fresh concern for the peoples of the world among evangelicals. Since the oil embargo of 1975, and especially after the end of the cold war with Communism, evangelicals have become aware of the many Muslim peoples of the world as never before in history. Awareness breeds concern which leads to involvement.

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Why didn’t the Reformation produce missionaries beyond Europe?

Although the Reformers could see the logic of preaching salvation by faith alone to all creatures, they had difficulty seeing HOW it could happen because:

1. The priesthood of believers was not practiced. No models.
2. There was no ‘Orders’ of single people to go as the Catholics had.
3. There were too few preachers even for Europe
4. Travel was only beginning to be something ‘one could do’; most people never left their parish or region where they were born.
5. Learning other languages was not envisioned beyond Greek, Latin, and their own!
6. There had been very little merchant ‘middle class’ or the option to do something other then what one apprenticed for…
7. Muslims were considered a lost cause.  Futile. Unconvertable.

Keys to progress in mission:

1. It took the birth of science & the industrial revolution to provide transport, communication, printing, and medicine.
3. Pietist movement, evangelical preaching, the realization that if I need to be personally converted, so does everyone else!
4. Allowing the pendulum back to ‘multi-individual’ decisions, or conversions by families and clans.
5. Heeded leadership telling the churches “this must be done” Simeon, Jon. Edwards, and in Europe:
6. Models in Brainard, Elliot, Martyn, pietistic Germans, and William Carey
7. Travelers wrote books about peoples in the East