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Osama Bin Laden is responsible for more Muslims following Jesus than anyone else alive* today, according to Patrick Johnstone, the founding author of Operation World.

His claim, backed up by years of research, is made because the atrocities that are being committed by radical Islamists seem to be backfiring on them.

By that I mean that while Islamists are inflicting judgement on non-Muslims for their secular materialism, moderate Muslims see what is being done in the name of Islam and are saying to themselves, “If this is the truest expression of Islam, I don’t want it.” Some such moderates are choosing to find other ways of submitting to God, including the option of turning away from the ‘way of the Prophet’ (i.e. Muhammad) and instead following Islam’s second most prominent prophet – ‘isa al-masih (Jesus Christ).

Johnstone’s claim is supported by analysts such as David Garrison, who goes even further, saying that, “More Muslims have come to Christ in the past two decades than at any other point in history.”

Brother Andrew has stated, “We must start spelling Islam ‘I Sincerely Love All Muslims’. We need to take time to get to know Muslims and show them real love.”

Taking this stance does not mean we have to become politically naive about the agenda of radical Muslims. I have always been concerned about the potential of such radicals especially when they become politically subversive or organise themselves into the networks that are sympathetic to Al-Qaeda’s vision. The Christian response to this sort of Muslim is the power-encounter which comes through concerted intercessory prayer. However, the Muslims who are turning to Christ are not from the radical core but the moderate fringe. These are the ones I call ‘ordinary’ Muslims. My optimism for Muslims comes not from the popular lack of understanding that is usually based on shallow news-coverage, but from firsthand experience of living and travelling in the Muslim world. It is my personal knowledge of Muslims, both radical and ordinary ones, that has brought me to the place where the love of God can come in and dissipate fear. The Bible is clear that love and fear cannot coexist (1 John 4:18). As a result, my instinctive reaction to Muslims is no longer one of fear or anger but compassion.

In the past I felt a sense of isolation amongst western Christians due to my belief that Muslims could – and would – follow Jesus, but now many others believe the same. Destructive fear is turning into constructive prayer. This is a trend that has been paralleled over the past twenty-five years by a marked increase in the activity of God’s Spirit among Muslims around the world. Take, for instance, a Pakistani-born British Muslim woman who became a follower of Jesus in Leicester. She told me that when she visits her extended family in her Pakistani hometown, she finds more Muslims following Jesus there than she does in the UK. Logic says this should be the other way around but these are the upside-down ways of God.

It seems that the early twenty-first century is likely to be a time in which hundreds of thousands of Muslims choose to follow Jesus. According to the research of Reverend Dr David Barrett, in one area of India up to fifty thousand Muslims are believers, and hundreds of thousands of Muslims are choosing to follow Jesus in Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Bulgaria, Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Iran, Palestine, Iraq, Turkey and across North Africa.

It is time for the western church to make a connection between the patient ‘tilling of hard ground’ over the centuries and the present movements of Muslims to Christ. New technology (such as satellite TV and the Internet) is also reaching the once-isolated areas to reap a harvest. Sources in the Gulf report seeing the DVD of the Mel Gibson film The Passion of the Christ selling out of the boots of cars in areas where there were no cinemas because of the strict Wahabi Islamic laws. The Spirit of God is also working through dreams, visions, healing and deliverance. Jesus is appearing to Muslims in various places. Here are some examples.

• A group of Nigerian Muslims saw Jesus as they were performing the hajj pilgrimage at the ka’aba in the heart of Mecca.

• Jesus told a string of individual Gulf Arabs the exact name and address of a Christian bookshop in a neighbouring Middle- Eastern country where they could buy the Bible. The shop owner told me that one of them walked in and pointed to a picture of Jesus on the wall and said, “He told me where I could buy the injil (Gospel).”

• Minaz is from the isma’ili group within Islam, and owns a luxury-car dealership in the north of England. One day in 1999, a light came into the room. The face of Jesus appeared in the light and He spoke to Minaz for about ten minutes. During this time Minaz felt the love of God enter his body, cleanse him internally and heal him. He began to follow Jesus that day and soon afterwards his wife joined him. They now run an outreach to others.

• Jesus appeared simultaneously to an Islamic cleric in the Middle East and at the foot of the hospital bed of his dangerously ill daughter in Germany. As Jesus told the cleric He was healing the girl, she was instantly cured. When the father received confirmation by phone of the miraculous healing, he left the country with his family in order to follow Jesus.

• Sources in Iran say that since the Iranian Revolution in 1979, tens of thousands of Iranian Shi’ite Muslims are following Jesus Christ inside Iran, in spite of sporadic persecution. Thousands more Iranians around the world are following Jesus.

• A North African nation has one of the fastest church-growth movements in the Muslim world. An estimated fifty to eighty thousand Muslims are following Jesus and an estimated fifty home fellowships are being set up every year. Believers are meeting in homes daily in spite of opposition. They also experience dreams, visions and healings. Even former terrorists and Islamic sorcerers are now following Jesus.

• One Christian organisation reports that over five hundred Muslims are visiting its Arabic website each month to enquire about Jesus. It is also reported that over the past ten years a thousand home fellowships of believers from Muslim backgrounds have been set up across the Middle East.

• Amer is from a nation that borders Israel. He was a radical who became a violent jihadic activist. He ended up in Khartoum, the capital of North Sudan. One evening he was praying alone in a mosque and the voice of Jesus boomed into the mosque asking, “Why are you persecuting Me?” At the same time the glass window high above Amer shattered and Qur’ans toppled off shelves. This supernatural intervention triggered Amer’s search for Jesus. He soon took the dangerous step of becoming one of His followers.

The Great Commission contains no exclusion clause for Muslims. God loves them as much as anyone else, and His grace is actively seeking them.

Beware – God is at work! God is not only touching Muslims but He is also gently creating a new climate of faith for them among Christians.

Open Doors with Brother Andrew ended a seven-year prayer initiative for the Communist world in 1989 – the year the Berlin Wall came down. They then embarked on a ten-year prayer initiative for the Muslim world. In 2000, I visited the World Prayer Centre, directed by Dr C. Peter Wagner in Colorado Springs, to familiarise myself with their state-of-the-art technology. It is used to track the millions of Christians around the world who are praying for Muslims, especially during the Ramadan month of fasting. Shortly after my visit to the Centre, Peter Wagner reported that the intercessory networks for Muslims around the world were growing so fast, they had become impossible to count and were therefore humanly ‘out of control’. God is initiating this prayer thrust for the remaining unreached.

What began as droplets of Muslims following Christ in the 1980s became a trickle in the 1990s and a tiny flow around the turn of the millennium. The attacks in America on 11 September 2001 proved to be another factor that compelled Christians to pray; they also loosened the heart allegiance of thousands of Muslims from their traditional structures, causing them to turn to Jesus Christ.

The flow is not yet a flood; nevertheless, Christian leaders in the Muslim world tell me that the phenomenon of Muslim enquirers who want to talk about spiritual issues is now a daily occurrence. The baptism of believers from Muslim backgrounds has also become a regular feature of local church life in several Muslim lands.

The Great Commission contains no exclusion clause for Muslims. God loves them as much as anyone else, and His grace is actively seeking them right where they are, both within the Muslim world and the West.

Steve Bell is National Director of Interserve England and Wales. This article is extracted from his book, Grace for Muslims?, published in 2006 by Authentic Media. If you would like to buy this book, please contact our office.

* Osama Bin Laden was killed in May 2011.

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The convoy of four-wheel-drive vehicles was coming his way. Amazingly, it was almost exactly to the minute that he had sighted them the previous week. They were making towards one of the wadi valleys at the foot of the mountain range behind him. As luck would have it, the last fork in the track took them to the wadi right below him. He was in the perfect position to observe their activity.

Drawing to a stop at a point in the track where only the reckless would drive further, the group began to emerge from their airconditioned cocoons. The sound of closing doors and distant voices drifted up to the spy’s hilltop shelter. Greetings were exchanged; some folk were clearly old friends while a few others, passed around in a circle of introductions, were obviously new. The whole process was almost obscenely rapid by local standards. But, even in the late afternoon, the sun still had considerable power and people were restless to move up into the shaded steeper parts of the valley.

It was the first time the spy had seen them this close. He was confused. He had thought he would be able to categorise them immediately into one of the expected social strata he was accustomed to in his country. Instead, the variety staggered him. Wishing he had a camera, he quickly scrabbled for a notebook to capture the details: Arab, Asian, African and European. Almost a third were his own countrymen, cheerfully removing national garments to reveal shorts and T-shirts. There were even a couple of national women in modest clothing suitable for hiking. His keen eye, used to supervision of his sister’s social activities, appreciated that they came in cars with other women.

Amongst the others there was a wide range of nationalities – many he would not expect to see together. In the fragments of speech that rose up to him, he could detect British, American and South African accents, along with various Asian ones, and some others he could not identify. The wide range in ages, too, was perplexing: some people were clearly of retirement age, others were in their thirties, and there were even some teenagers and children.

After tightening bootlaces and adjusting day packs, the group seemed ready to go. One voice rose over the others; the spy observed the speaker point generally up the wadi and, after just a couple of sentences of instruction, the group moved off. How he wished his own briefings could be so quick. The spy realised that, from his vantage point, he would have them in sight for some time. This allowed him time for some deeper reflection. What on earth could bring such a disparate group of people together like this? There was certainly no militaristic discipline to the march. Some leaped ahead like gazelles over the rocks (he was pleased to note that the majority with this skill were his own countrymen), but others were clearly struggling with the difficult terrain and were being guided by more experienced members.

As the people wove their own tracks up the wadi valley, he noticed that conversational groups seemed to form and reform without regard to nationality, gender or age. It was a sharp contrast to the strict gender segregation he had been brought up with. However, he felt strangely undisturbed by the sight. Even at this distance he could observe the body language of respect and deference among the group. Hands that would probably never join together in any other situation were held out in offer – or receipt – of help over difficult parts of the track. The spy wondered why he could not summon any moral outrage at the sight. Even the contrasts of the wider scene began to speak to him. Here among the ancient fossilised rocks was a trickle of happy human life. Was this a new form of community emerging from the hard and rigid traditions he and his people had lived with for centuries? What were the possibilities?

Among the last traces of voices fading in the distance was the occasional gleeful shout of discovery. Had the spy been closer, he would have heard some of the people marvelling at the ‘creation’ around them. Again he would have been puzzled. His experience with politically correct textbooks and media had led him to believe that the whole Englishspeaking world could only relate to a godless ‘nature’.

Just on dusk, the spy was roused by returning voices; he was able to see by the clusters that there was still no distillation of the group into expected social categories. As people eagerly gathered around a small cool box at the rear of one of the vehicles, the spy raised his binoculars again. At last – something to report! What illicit substance were they getting out of it that led to such cries of delight? Disappointingly, however, the box just contained chilled, damp facecloths, that brought great refreshment to the hot and weary hikers.

Waiting until after the last of the group climbed back into their vehicles and drove away, the spy finally unfolded his cramped limbs, grimacing in discomfort as he did so. He was puzzled by what he had observed, and suspicious of the unusual camaraderie and acceptance he’d witnessed within the group… but also strangely drawn to it. There was no other option: he would return.