The Role of History in Pastoral Care for Christians from a Muslim background

A paragraph from my latest article:

It is common for apostates from Islam, and especially for converts to Christianity, to be construed as betraying their people. This reality comes across quite clearly in the many autobiographical books written by CMBs, that there was a genuine struggle for them in formulating and explaining that while they had left Islam, they were still loyal citizens of their nation. The intention of the two pastors in selecting Church history was, I suspect, to provide the CMBs with the historical resources whereby an intelligent and informed answer could be given to the question, “Why have you betrayed your people by leaving Islam.”

Get the PDF at academia or read it in two parts at the New Wineskins blog (part 1, part 2).

Don Little on Discipleship of ex-Muslims and the Church

Beautiful observation here from Don Little‘s 2009 doctoral dissertation at Gordon-Conwell (p. 122):

This idea of bringing together both sides of the identity into a new, firm convert identity is really at the heart not only of discipleship but all pastoral care for Christ’s converts from Islam.

Forming a firm identity: The pastoral challenge for ex-Muslim Christians

Photo by AMISOM Public Information – Flickr, CC0, Link  Mogadishu, Somalia

I recently attended a consultation in East Africa. Our goal was to formulate a strategy for evangelizing the unreached of East Africa and the Horn Africa, almost all Muslims. This talk was my own contribution to the consultation and was well received. It is an expansion of an earlier talk I gave in November of 2017.

I begin by arguing that persecution is not the main pastoral challenge for converts, rather is the formation of a firm, new Christian identity. I found this in my own research presented in Living among the Breakage (2016), and earlier research by Kathryn Kraft (2013) and Seppo Syrjänen (1984) contain similar findings.

Here I present ten points that can be used for people counseling and providing guidance for Christ’s converts from Islam:

A Firm Identity in Christ: The Pastoral Challenge for ex-Muslim Christians

Pastoral Care for Christ’s Converts from Islam

During my time in Denmark I delivered this talk at St Nathaniel’s Evangelical Lutheran Church in Copenhagen. More details can be found here.

This is the fourth of four Copenhagen lectures, all of which are now available at YouTube.