Testimony of workers in the Middle East
Joe and Jane (not their real names) met at a funeral of a mutual friend a few days after Jane had become a Christian. She was 17 and Joe 18, both from Vancouver Island. The first day Jane attended church as a believer, Joe’s mother approached her and said, “You don’t know me but God just compelled me to tell you that He has great things planned for you.” God would later remind Jane’s mother-in-law of that little promise.
Joe and Jane attended Briercrest, with the plan of moving to Yemen once they graduated – Joe with a degree in missions and Jane a degree in Teaching English as a Second Language. As they started to discuss intern options, their contact with the mission organization they planned to join suddenly informed them that they should not go to Yemen, but to another Middle Eastern country. He then introduced them to our WEC representative because WEC worked in the suggested country. Joe and Jane were not impressed about going to the Middle East. Then God sent another blow their way. He spoke very clearly to Joe and Jane separately that they should let the pursuit of degrees go. This was hard. They had given themselves completely to this goal and felt that without a degree they would have nothing.
Eventually after much prayer, they surrendered their degrees to God. A few days later while having fellowship with the WEC reps, the Holy Spirit spoke very clearly in Jane’s heart saying, “Go
now to the country I have called you to in the Middle East.” Jane knew without a doubt it meant dropping out of the degree program. They were in that country nine months later. During those nine months, they attended the Candidate Orientation at WEC, spent time with their home church and Jane gave birth to their second child. (They now have three boys.)
” Jane says, “We’ve been in this Middle Eastern country for over five years now and our vision for this land is a wildfire that once it catches on will be unstoppable. We have an enormous amount of hope in what God will do here. We have had it since the day we arrived but only recently have we started seeing glimpses of a spiritual harvest that will be an unstoppable wildfire. Here are some stats: We moved to a new city six months ago in order to reach five provinces that are unengaged and we have 1700 people who have requested a Bible and are waiting for us to follow-up with them. We are slowly chipping away at this list and in such a short time we have seen people make the decision to follow Jesus and start going through pre-baptism lessons with us. Some of these new disciples give out dozens of Bibles every month as they share the good news with anyone who is interested. Some are a source of light to their friends and community as they invite people to join Discovery Bible studies. Some are professional decorative mosque-painters, others come from extremely conservative Muslim backgrounds, others read the Quran and rejected it, others did the Hajj to Mecca and rejected Islam, others get fired at every new job for sharing the gospel too much…
It’s gaining momentum and we feel privileged to be co-workers with Christ.