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Welcome to missions article page 4 of The Fountain Gateway. Below you will find recent articles concerning  missionaries or from missionaries around the world. Please read what they have to say and "we ask" that you be in prayer about what they request! This is as God would have us to do. Thank You from the webmaster Mark K. Doty. If you have a missionary article or concern that you would like to have posted here please contact the webmaster at the following email address: tfg@fountaingateway.com. 

The Unfinished Task: Loving the Lost #8 - War-softened Cambodian hearts yearn for news of God's love By Kay Moore

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia (BP) -- More than two decades have passed since daily headlines detailed news of American bombings in Cambodia. But when Phil Wardell confronts Cambodians whose lives were forever changed by the Vietnam War, the hatred among many is raw and fresh.

Wardell, a Southern Baptist living in Southeast Asia, finds it challenging to tell Cambodians about Christ when his hearers hurl back, "Your people bombed our villages!"

For Cambodians, 94 percent of whom are Buddhist, "forgiving a transgressor or forgetting how they have been transgressed" is a thoroughly alien concept, explains Wardell (not his real name). Fewer than 1 percent of the Cambodian people are Christian.

When Cambodians do confess faith in Jesus Christ, they often query Wardell and other Christians, "Why has it taken you so long to get here with the gospel?"

A major issue: separating Buddhism from cultural identity among the Central Khmer, the people group that Wardell and his wife live among. Central Khmer make up 90 percent of the country's total population.

"To be Khmer is to be Buddhist," Wardell says. "It is difficult to persuade the Cambodian people that they can be Khmer and Christian at the same time." Forsaking their family's religion to embrace the Christian faith portends swift, permanent rejection by loved ones.

Once, after Wardell witnessed for two hours to a Cambodian village leader, the man said, "We will consider becoming Christian, but first we must talk with our families and the other village members." When salvation does occur, a local body of baptized believers becomes the "adoptive family" of the new Christian, since other family members often shun him.

Wardell sees such situations as he directs a registered, non-governmental organization that seeks to minister to the most important needs of the Cambodian people. Such needs include AIDS education and awareness, digging clean water wells or restoring others, developing water purification systems, teaching people to grow their own food, and constructing toilets for local villages and schools, since most Cambodians do not have these facilities.

Other activities include conducting rural medical clinics and distributing medicines.

"Most Cambodians do not have access to medical care," Wardell explains. "Further, they would not necessarily seek medical treatment, as many would fear they had displeased a local spirit in the area. In their belief system, the offended spirit will have inflicted the person with the disease."

As he demonstrates Christ's love in all these ways, Wardell often encounters direct questions, which he then can answer.

For example, during one AIDS awareness training program in a village previously controlled by the Khmer Rouge (Communist rebels), the project director told participants that the program sought to instill principles of morality, marital faithfulness and abstinence in their lives. The village leader stood up from his seat, walked directly toward Wardell, and asked, "Are you a Christian?" Wardell was able to respond affirmatively and elaborate on tenets of his faith.

Southern Baptist representatives who work in Cambodia alongside Wardell and his wife sidestep high-profile roles and remain behind the scenes as they support, mentor, and provide role models for local believers, who have planted more than 70 percent of the Baptist churches in Cambodia. Local church leaders are experiencing explosive growth, having established 100 new churches since July 1997.

"If Christianity does not rapidly advance throughout the country, the people will likely return to Buddhism for stability," since it represented what purported to be a peaceful way of life before the war in Southeast Asia, Wardell says.

He describes the core issue in reaching Cambodians for Christ as "leading them to believe they are sinners and they cannot save themselves.

"We have to speak of repentance in terms of renouncing allegiance to any other thing (such as spirits or gods) and trusting Christ alone for their salvation," he says. "This offers more hope for the present and future than Buddhism, which appears to have failed the people time and time again."

Besides Buddhism, other elements in the Cambodian religion include animism, Hinduism, and even Marxism, Wardell says.

The bonds between nationalism and Buddhism have loosened because of years of civil war, prolonged suffering, and social upheaval in the country.

"A Cambodian proverb states, 'When the blood flows, the heart grows softer.' Most Cambodians have lost at least one family member, friends and neighbors from years of war within the country," -- a lifestyle disintegration that has lessened Cambodians' ties to Buddhism and made them more open to religious change than at any other time in their history, Wardell says.

Personal relationships pave the way for openness between the Wardells and their Cambodian neighbors. Their blunt questions to friends -- "What is it about us that makes us really offensive to the Cambodian people?" -- have at times yielded blunt answers -- and required painful, major changes, Wardell says.

For example, Wardell has learned to take the back seat of a vehicle, allowing his Cambodian Baptist counterparts to sit in front, during visits to local villages, to show support for the Cambodians' leadership. "The Father has had to work in our lives significantly ... [to] change our attitude and actions about these things," he says.

To gain acceptance among their Khmer neighbors, the Wardells have learned to sit lower than elderly people in their company to show respect, guard language carefully and avoid the use of first names in the Cambodian language, instead using terms for brother, sister, grandma, grandpa,  uncle and aunt to address others within their circle of relationships. Practices like this have "warmed our hearts for each other" and provided fertile ground for ministry, Wardell says.

The Lottie Moon Christmas Offering for International Missions has provided funds to construct an office building, house and guest rooms for Wardell and other personnel who work alongside him. It also funded vehicles for four new families who have arrived within the past 18 months to minister there, as well as helped provide the salaries that allow them to give their full attention to witness and ministry.

Goals for the Cambodian people revolve in part around literacy -- training volunteer teachers who teach students to read and write the Khmer language. More than half of the 4,000 students in the program have come to faith in Jesus Christ because of the Bible-based curriculum or outreach efforts. Wardell and other representatives like him seek to expand this project into more provinces and into the largest military hospital.

In a land that has been controlled by the devil for hundreds of years, Wardell and fellow workers are laboring to lift the veil of Buddhism so the Khmer can "see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God" (2 Co. 4:4).

He prays for more long-term laborers who will come and help rapidly advance the gospel among the Khmer.

IMB News Stories
International Mission Board, SBC December  10, 1999

The missions millennium - Ours was the age the gospel broke out of its 'ghetto' - By Erich Bridges

RICHMOND, Va. (BP) -- If you were a European Christian on the eve of 1000 A.D., you had bigger problems than Y2K's impact on your holiday plans. You faced threats like starvation or extinction at the hands of barbarians.

And that was on good days.

The Dark Ages in Europe didn't get their name for nothing. Rape and pillage were big; civility wasn't.

"The Northmen cease not to slay and carry into captivity the Christian people, to destroy the churches and to burn the towns," reported a witness to the grim time. "Everywhere there is nothing but dead bodies -- clergy and laymen, nobles and common people, women and children."

The church itself was weak, riddled with error and corruption in the West and marginalized in its Mideastern birthplace by several centuries of Islamic advance. Christendom's next systematic push beyond the borders of its European "ghetto" -- nearly two centuries of Crusades against Muslims beginning in 1095 -- was at best a "pathetic misunderstanding of the Great Commission," says evangelical missiologist Ralph Winter. At worst, it was a greedy grab for land and mindless slaughter of Muslims, Jews, other Christians and anyone else in their path.

The "BO-BO" theory

But Winter urges us not to subscribe to the "BO-BO" theory of church history: that Christian missions somehow "Blinked Off" after the New Testament era and "Blinked On" again at the dawn of Protestantism. God didn't take a 1,500-year nap, and He had plenty of servants who carried the name of Jesus far and wide during those centuries.

Some went willingly, others in chains. Christian slaves dragged away to northern Europe by the Vikings carried the gospel with them and won over many of their captors. Some among the great monastic orders heroically attempted to purify the church and evangelize the world -- all while preserving Western civilization from destruction.

Even after the Protestant Reformation geared up in the 16th century, Catholic missions continued to take the lead outside Europe. "By and large, the Reformers were not focused on missions," observes Avery Willis, the Southern Baptist International Mission Board's chief of overseas operations.

Some of the early Reformers believed the Great Commission applied only to the Apostles. They also were preoccupied with a life-and-death struggle with Rome for spiritual and temporal power in Europe. In any case, with some exceptions, Protestants did little to reach the world for more than two centuries after Luther.

Carey: Missionary of the millennium

Little, that is, until William Carey (1761-1834) burst onto the scene. Carey, the "father of modern missions," may be the man of the millennium when it comes to obeying the Great Commission and inspiring others to follow. When this English cobbler rose at a Baptist ministers' meeting in 1789 to ask whether Christ's command "to teach all nations" still applied, one leading minister was said to have replied: "Sit down, young man .... When God wants to convert the world, He can do it without your help."

Undaunted, Carey persisted. His revolutionary 1792 call to obedience, "An Enquiry into the Obligation of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens" -- and his own four decades of service in India -- stoked the fire. So did the great spiritual awakenings in Great Britain and America.

The "Great Century" of Christian missions followed throughout the 1800s, with advance upon advance. The "First Wave," pioneered by Carey, swept the world's coastlines. Robert Morrison, first Protestant missionary to China, arrived in 1807. American Baptist missionary Adoniram Judson went to Burma in 1813. Later in the century, J. Hudson Taylor and his China Inland Mission -- along with giants like David Livingstone of Africa -- modeled the "Second Wave," pushing the gospel into the interior.

Missionary denominations took shape in America and Europe, including the Southern Baptist Convention, formed in 1845. The convention immediately created Domestic and Foreign Mission boards and began work in China and Africa. Southern Baptists had sent a cumulative total of more than 13,000 missionaries overseas by the 1990s.

Lottie Moon (1840-1912), appointed to China in 1873, epitomized the mission spirit, giving her life for China and sending epistles home challenging Southern Baptists to send reinforcements to reach China's lost millions.

The tireless work of the Southern Baptist Woman's Missionary Union (formed in 1888) and other great women's mission movements founded during the century provided crucial spiritual and material support to answer the cries of Moon and others for help.

The "Christian century"

The Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions formed in 1886, eventually sending more than 20,000 missionaries abroad. Many mission leaders thought the task of world evangelization would be completed by 1900.

It wasn't, but they remained convinced the "Christian century" was dawning. The historic 1910 World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh, Scotland, declared the "Church is confronted today with a literally worldwide opportunity to make Christ known."

Then came World War I, communism, global economic depression and World War II bringing missions nearly to a standstill. After World War II the Western colonial empires quickly receded, but missions exploded like never before.

"After 1950, you have this tremendous surge of missions, much of it coming out of the fact that Americans were introduced to so many parts of the world during the war," says Willis. Even more than the 19th, "this has been the 'great century' of missions advance. It's also been the great century of population advance. It took until around 1800 to get the first billion people and 1927 to get the second. Now we're at 6 billion. We must have great advance in missions just to reach the numbers of people we're dealing with."

Correspondingly, missions strategy has shifted once again -- or returned to its biblical roots, if you analyze what Scripture from Genesis to Revelation says about reaching "the nations." The great "Third Wave" of missions transcends geography and focuses on evangelizing entire untouched people groups--not just lost individuals--and working with God to spark church-planting movements among them. Southern Baptists have caught the front of this strategic wave over the last decade and a half.

Since the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, and the Soviet empire collapsed, huge harvest fields in the former Soviet bloc also have opened to the gospel.

In China, radical communists failed in their 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, "history's most systematic attempt ever, by a single nation, to eradicate and destroy Christianity," according to one mission researcher. Christians have expanded by the millions. Periodic persecution continues, and the Chinese church continues to grow.

Cracks in the wall of Islam also have appeared, and Christians are responding this time with love. The 900-million-strong Hindu world, likewise, shows significant signs of opening up to Jesus. Major new inroads among the world's tribal peoples also have liberated millions to follow Christ.

"Surprised by God"

Evangelical faith, meanwhile, has swept Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia in recent decades. That movement, observes mission researcher Patrick Johnstone, has "decisively shifted the center of gravity of evangelical Christianity away from the lands that were for centuries its birthplace, haven and prison."

The "Two-Thirds World" missionary movement has taken hold as former missionary receivers become senders of thousands of workers, while Western evangelicals unite to work beside them through prayer, church mobilization, new technology and other advances. As these trends approach critical mass, the number of unreached peoples continues to decline.

What does it all mean? Is the Lord's return nigh, as many of our spiritual forebears expected a millennium ago?

"One thing we know: We're closer than we've ever been before to the Second Coming of Christ," Willis reflects. "It has become a motivation for Christians to get the job done. Obviously none of us knows what God has out there. You could write a history of missions called 'Surprised by God.' He keeps doing things we could not have anticipated. But He also puts us in position to be ready for them.

"My own personal interpretation is that the Lord doesn't have to come back the minute we get the gospel to the last people group. He does say (in Matt. 24:14), however, that it will have happened before He comes back. I don't think it's happened yet.

"But it will. It will."

The Unfinished Task: Loving the Lost #9 - No country closed to God's love, missionary says - By Kay Moore

KHARTOUM, Sudan (BP) -- The Arab Muslims of the Sudan: Could they be the "poster kids" for lostness?

Baptist representative Mike Sanford has good reason to think so. Based on Mike's description, one could easily conclude that the home of this people group in west central Africa is one of the most closed to the gospel of any place on earth.

To begin with, only a handful of Christian believers exist among approximately 25 million people living in the north, east and west parts of Sudan, Africa's largest country. Some groups have no believers at all -- since becoming a Christian is against the law for Muslims there, says Sanford (not his real name.)

Additionally, these Sudanese Arabs, who form one of the largest unreached people groups, never question, he says. When asked if they ever wonder if the Koran is true or if they ever think about truths presented in the Bible, they quickly bellow, "No!"

"Muslims love to talk about God and religion, so dialogue is not an issue," Sanford explains. "Questioning is the issue."

Several Muslim groups in Sudan like the Beja and the Nubians have no written language and until now have had no Bible, "Jesus" film, tract or radio broadcast in their own language. Others are virtually inaccessible to the gospel because of their remote location or tight government security, Sanford says. Travel is highly restricted and always requires a permit, with some areas, like the Nuba Mountains, prohibiting any travel at all.

Fear of opening the door to anything that questions Islam is staggering.

Sanford describes speaking with a young man who worked alone at a remote, desert "tea shack" (rest stop) in the north of Sudan. After determining that the boy could read, Sanford offered him a Bible in Arabic to occupy him at this lonely outpost. "He asked (our Sudanese) driver if he should take the Bible, and the driver said 'no,'" Sanford recalls. The mere presence of this man kept the boy from accepting Sanford's offer of God's Word, he says.

Into this despairing milieu, Sanford began planting his life almost a decade ago, leaving behind his work as a Baptist leader in the United States when he learned that 2 million people in eastern Sudan had never heard about Jesus.

"How could I not go? I was drawn because of (the Sudanese) lostness and the darkness that could only be broken by Christ," he says.

That Christless darkness is exemplified by the Koran's teaching that Jesus was not crucified -- rejecting the cross and the real nature of the person of Jesus, Sanford says.

A Muslim friend asserted to Sanford that Muslims actually treat Jesus better than Christians do. "In Islam they have a god who would never let Jesus die on a cross," Sanford said the man contended. He says living among a people who teach, preach and believe that the cross has no value keeps him passionately focused on telling others.

To accomplish this, Sanford and his family live not in Sudan but in a neighboring country -- "sitting on the edge" of this closed Arabic area where the gospel cannot be shared publicly. He may work with two or three Sudanese converts who have become strong witnesses and evangelists. These, then, become the ones to reach their own country. Sanford has discipled two men who, in turn, have started seven Sudanese Christian "centers," reaching a number of Muslims.

"As Muslim-background believers, they have success in teaching and preaching. They are able to move freely without undue attention drawn upon themselves. As a foreigner, I would immediately bring attention and suspicion on Sudanese that I might want to visit." Some Sudanese have been beaten and tortured because Westerners have visited them and prompted security officials to interrogate, Sanford says.

"Sudan is not a place where a foreigner can drive up to a village and start preaching under a tree," he says. "Our work must be done with as little attention as possible for the sake of the few Muslim believers more than for our safety."

Some U.S. Christians can enter Sudan through relationships with the Christian church in the south of Sudan and remain problem-free as long as they minister only to those southern Christians, Sanford says. In other areas of the country, the situation for Christian workers is more serious.

Sanford and others who love the Sudanese see hope as the Holy Spirit leads these Arab Muslims to experience dreams and visions of Jesus that cause them to question. He says these Sudanese "will only come to Christ as the Holy Spirit draws them."

The Lottie Moon Christmas Offering for International Missions provides funds that Sanford and other workers use in developing and carrying out strategy to reach Sudanese Muslims and for converts to reach other parts of Sudan. LMCO funds buy cassette tapes, videos and Bibles for use in Sudan (an audiotape with Beja music and stories about Jesus is now available for this group with no written language) and paid language helpers for Sanford and other workers to improve their Arabic.

Other purchases: medicine and food for needy Sudanese, cookies and crayons for children of Muslim converts, Bible classes for converts themselves and high-tech digital recorders to collect Bible stories for distribution later by cassette or radio means.

Sanford acknowledges that work in Sudan is discouraging when only one or two people come to Christ compared to every 1,000 that respond in "harvest-field" places like Brazil, Tanzania or Kenya.

He says he's reassured when realizing that "the harvest fields were not always harvest fields," with conversions once occurring more slowly, like those among the Sudanese now.

He likens the work in Sudan to someone drilling a hole in a hard surface.

"As you start to drill, the bit may dance atop the hard surface for a moment before finding a small niche and eventually digging in, straining to make a small hole," he says. "The harvest fields today are a result of people who faithfully kept 'drilling and drilling' until today we see hundreds responding to Christ. In Sudan we are making little holes that will be followed by bigger ones until one day we will see the glory of the Lord break through and hundreds respond."

His goal for the near future is to have personnel like himself assigned to each of the major people groups of Sudan, and to have Baptist workers on site, engaging these people and training their leaders. A related goal: to have Christians from other countries engaging these Sudanese, since many of them can more easily access Sudan than American Christians do. From these efforts, Sanford envisions bodies of believers emerging across all of Muslim Sudan.

Sanford's work among these that he describes as "poster children for lostness" is a reminder to Southern Baptists that God's activity assures that no such place exists as a "closed country."

Fresh movement of God's spirit the real story of the century - By Erich Bridges - 12/13/99

RICHMOND, Va. (BP) -- Precisely at the midpoint of the century now ending, William Faulkner received the Nobel Prize for literature.

"I decline to accept the end of man," he declared in his Nobel speech. "I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance."

It was a startlingly hopeful utterance from the Mississippi master, who powerfully portrayed human failings in his novels. Moreover, he was speaking to a world still clearing the rubble of World War II, yet apparently rushing toward atomic destruction.

Almost 50 years later, Faulkner's hope has been vindicated. But the source of it is misplaced. Man has endured, yes, but not prevailed. If the bloodstained 20th century and the millennium of "reason" it closes teaches us anything, it is that.

The tumultuous 20th staggers to an end this month in most people's minds, if not in mathematical fact. Historians will recall many things about it: two world wars, the fall of old empires and rise of new ones, the devastation wrought by communism and totalitarianism, the Holocaust, the spread of democracy and capitalism, man on the moon, the computer, the Bomb.

Their central theme, however, may be this: the lightning advance of technology, and the ways we have used it to improve life and to inflict suffering and death. Faulkner himself admitted in 1950: "There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only one question: When will I be blown up?" Yet the "problems of the spirit" Faulkner spoke of remain the source of our struggles. After the savagery of our time, we still have spirits "capable of compassion and sacrifice" only by the grace of God.

The real story

The fresh movement of God's Spirit, in fact, is the real story of the century. How else to explain the staggering growth of the church, the gospel's spread to countless places worldwide not just in the West and the glorifying of God's name among peoples who've never heard it until now?

And God isn't finished with us. Remember the scriptural antidote (prescribed in this space last January) to the millennium hysteria infecting some believers: "(T)his gospel   shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come" (Matt. 24:14, KJV). Then and only then.

He isn't finished, but His Spirit is quietly, inexorably, powerfully moving like a vast, unseen river. We have glimpsed some of its tides this year in selected "trends for the millennium," including:

• -- Prayer movements Millions of Christians now unite to pray for world evangelization. "The decade of the 1990s has been a period like no other," contends International Mission Board prayer strategy leader Randy Sprinkle. "The spirit of prayer is upon the earth."

• -- The great people-group awakening The overdue realization among Christians that the "nations" of the Great Commission are ethnic peoples, not political states, and that more than 2,000 of them comprising nearly a third of humanity remain unreached.

• -- Church-planting movements The "spontaneous, rapid multiplication of churches among a people group that enables them to reach their entire people then to reach out to other peoples." They're indigenous, lay-led, "out of control," passionate and powerful and they're happening where God is at work.

• -- Global mission force The steady movement of Christianity's "center" to the east and south, and the emergence of tens of thousands of missionaries from Asia, Africa and Latin America.

• -- Chaos, suffering and persecution God opened many doors this century for the rapid spread of His name amid war, disaster and suffering. Example: the explosive church growth in China during and after the destructive Cultural Revolution of 1966-76.

-- The new student volunteer movement The growing waves of college students and young people going to the ends of the earth not necessarily because they intend to be career missionaries, but because God has called them to worship Him and lift His name among the nations.

God's great unseen river will surface one day. On that day, all knees will bow, all tongues confess that He is Lord. Until then, we wait and serve expectantly.

Come quickly, Lord Jesus.

IMB News Stories International Mission Board  

Partners in the harvest: Honoring God, celebrating His blessings  - By Jerry Rankin  SBC Wednesday, January 05, 2000   

RICHMOND, Va. (BP) -- It was 75 years ago that God led Southern  Baptists to adopt an amazing system of missions support called the Cooperative Program. Not an end in itself, it became a means  through which every church could have a part in the larger mission of reaching the lost throughout our nation and around the world and providing support for denominational ministries.

God has blessed this voluntary means of denominational support,  which respects the autonomy of the local church as each church  determines the percentage of its gifts which goes beyond its local ministries. It is a means of cooperation between state conventions and the agencies of the Southern Baptist Convention in which funding is provided without churches being subjected to competitive appeals.

The annual Annie Armstrong Offering for North American Missions and Lottie Moon Christmas Offering for International Missions supplement the Cooperative Program, enabling us to send out the largest number of missionaries of any U.S. evangelical career missionary-sending agency without their having to raise individual support. State mission offerings provide for church starting and missions outreach in respective states and help keep evangelism the focus of who Southern Baptists are.

As we enter the year 2000 and celebrate God's blessings in this anniversary year of the Cooperative Program, Southern Baptists are being challenged to give $750 million to the Cooperative Program and these combined mission offerings. That represents a significant goal -- but one well within our means.

In 1998 Southern Baptist churches received $7.5 billion in offerings for all causes. More money went toward payments on indebtedness for buildings and facilities than to all mission causes combined. An average of 92 percent of all undesignated receipts were kept and used by the local church.

What if we had a vision to work with our state conventions to saturate our states with new churches, a vision to win North America to the Lord and a vision to reach the nations of the world with the gospel? What if we realized how bountifully God has blessed us and were willing to channel our resources as partners to fulfill the Great Commission?

Southern Baptists traditionally have been guilty of an "ends/means" inversion. We often promote the Cooperative Program or focus on the Southern Baptist Convention as if they were ends in themselves. Even the International Mission Board is just a means for serving God's purpose of winning and discipling the nations.

The harvest is accelerating all over the world. We have an unprecedented opportunity to be on mission with God at home and overseas. God has blessed us with resources, but the Cooperative Program and mission offerings are not an end in themselves. They are a channel through which we all can be partners in the harvest.

As Americans revel in unprecedented economic prosperity, it is a time for us as Christians to acknowledge God's blessings in a renewed commitment to biblical stewardship and dedicated giving. This year, we have opportunity to reflect the seriousness of our dedication to God's mission as Southern Baptists.

Each family and church member can be faithful in tithing and giving generously and sacrificially to mission causes. Each church can increase allocations to the Cooperative Program. We all can be partners in the harvest. God will be glorified when we honor His lordship over our wealth and celebrate His blessings as Southern Baptists together.  

Iran inching toward freedom, but Christians still oppressed from International Missions Board SBC. 03/16/2000  

TEHRAN, Iran (BP) -- Iran moved another step closer to freedom nearly a  generation after the nation's Islamic revolution when reformist President Mohammad Khatami and his allies won major victories in February's parliamentary elections.

But Iranian Christians have some advice for outsiders expecting a new birth of religious liberty in post-revolutionary Iran: Don't hold your breath.

"I've seen a lot of indications of change, and I believe (Khatami) wants change," says a Christian worker in close touch with Iran's much-persecuted evangelical minority. "But make no mistake. Even though the rhetoric is moderation, it doesn't necessarily mean there is more openness for what we want to do."

Just a week after the elections, Iran's "religion police" were searching apartments in Tehran, Iran's capital, for forbidden satellite TV receivers. The dragnet illustrated the continuing power of Islamic fundamentalists -- regardless of public support for more freedom -- to intimidate average Iranians. Iran's small evangelical Christian community and other religious minorities can expect the same and probably worse.

"Among the Iranian Christians we talked to there is no real sense that anything is going to change for Christians" in the near term, says another long-time Iran observer. "They do not feel Muslim converts (to Christ) are going to have any better deal in Iran. In fact, after Khatami was first elected (in 1997), when the world rejoiced, there was a new wave of pressure put on the church in Iran. So what you see is not what you get."

Iran's Islamic religious authorities retain ultimate power, including the military and the right to veto any legislation passed by parliament. The ayatollahs have shown no sign of greater tolerance toward certain religious minorities.

Converts to Christ and those who lead them to faith can still face harsh persecution -- including death.

"Authorities have become particularly vigilant in recent years in curbing what is perceived as increased proselytizing activities by evangelical Christians," notes the just-released 1999 Report on International Religious Freedom from the U.S. State Department. "Government officials have reacted to this perceived activity by closing evangelical churches and arresting converts."

Christians also must carry church membership cards and present them on demand, according to the report. Church leaders must inform the Ministry of Information and Islamic Guidance before receiving new believers into their congregations. Reports of ongoing harassment include the posting of Islamic Revolutionary Guards outside Christian churches to "discourage" Muslims or Muslim converts to Christ from entering.

Up to 23 "disappearances" of evangelical believers in Iran were reported in 1997-1998 alone.

Despite such conditions, Iranian believers inside and outside Iran are cautiously optimistic about the political changes -- and hoping for more.

"They feel it's a very important time to pray that the relationship between the United States and Iran might change," says a Christian worker. "The Iranian Christian community (in the United States) is praying and indeed is beginning to write letters to the White House asking President Clinton to reconsider the U.S. economic embargo against Iran. They feel that if America takes a softening stand, Iran will respond."

More than 60 percent of Iran's population of 66 million is age 30 and under. Many of them seem more interested in economic opportunity and stability than ideological war with the West.

"They don't remember the revolution," says one insider. "They don't have any bones to pick. How many kids in the U.S. remember Vietnam? They're interested in being more tolerant, having a better economy. They have a right to be angry about some of the things the West has done to them in the past, but at the same time they would like to get on with being in the 21st century."

They also are increasingly open to the Christian gospel -- especially those who travel or live outside Iran. Four million Iranians now live in other countries; half of them are in the United States.

"When I go to American churches I ask how many people know an Iranian personally; in a place like Washington, D.C., 20 or 30 people will raise their hands," says a worker. "There's probably an Iranian in your sphere of life and that Iranian is very possibly more open to the gospel than your average American friend."

The worker described a recent meeting in the United States with an Iranian Muslim who had left his homeland:

"He said, 'I would walk by a church building in Iran, hoping that a curtain was open just enough that I could look inside. I was desperate to know what was going on inside a church, but I was totally fearful.' When he came to America the first thing he did was get on the Internet, find the Gospel of John in Persian and read it. Two weeks ago I led him to Christ. There's incredible thirst."

That's happening all across Asia, Europe and the Americas, the worker adds. And expatriate Iranian believers are sharing their spiritual discoveries with family members and friends back home through telephone calls, letters and increasing personal visits.

"Iran is welcoming (expatriate Iranians) back to spend their dollars in Iran," the worker says. "In the last few months I've talked to seven or eight Iranians who've gone back, shared the gospel and led people to Christ. I know a fellow who went back and showed the 'Jesus' film to his whole village. It's like putting dye in a stream; it goes downstream and touches the whole ocean."

So why are Iranians responding to the gospel now?

Many Iranians have been pushed into a search for truth by the suffering and dislocation of the 1979 Islamic revolution, the long Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s and other hardships. A massive prayer movement among Christians worldwide for Iranians apparently has increased the intensity of their search -- and led many to find Jesus Christ.

"Iranians are having incredible dreams about Christ," says one awe-filled observer. "I ask them, 'How did you know it was Jesus?' And they say, 'I know without a shadow of a doubt it was Jesus.' Sometimes they'll say, 'There were nail holes in his hands' or 'There was a crown of thorns on his head.'

"God is seeking out the Iranian people by His spirit at this moment in history."

(BP) GRAPHIC posted in the Baptist Press area of the Southern Baptist Convention website (www.sbc.net) by the Richmond (overseas) bureau of Baptist Press. File name: iran.jpg    

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