“We need a martyr to wake up the church. I am willing to be that martyr.” – Wagdi Iskander (Renov8 #rv8)

(All of my posts from Renov8 can be found here)

The impact of Wagdi’s talk has been immense.. here are a few more details about his story, as told in the session yesterday:

- Memorized entire Koran at 6-yrs-old. All by memorization, didn’t know how to read/write
- He was told: Burn Christians before they burn you.
- At one point made a pact with his friends to kill a Christian. He agreed to do the killing of someone who had been trying to convert him.
- He beat someone but it was the wrong person… the guy was paralyzed for life.
- Hatred pumped into him as a child, and when a Christian tried to proselytize as a young adult all of that hate resurfaced
- He was shunned after mistakenly tasting alcohol and was beaten by 800 people and thrown out of his Mosque
- During this time he began to be disillusioned with Islam and would renew his shunning every 40-days by touching alcohol. Also during this time, he reconnected with the friend he had previously tried to kill and accepted an invitation to go to church with him. After hearing people’s prayer requests, Wagdi suggested they answer their prayer requests with violence. Company not paying you? Let’s bomb it! They showed him the Sermon on the Mount and he began to read the entire NT.
- Was told by a pastor, “If you do not allow the Spirit into your life you cannot practice what it says in the Bible.” and eventually he was converted
- Because of this he had to go to court because it was illegal to convert to Christianity in his country. He was thrown in jail, where other converts taught him what he needed to know about following Jesus. The judge’s verdict was execution… His two friends were hanged, but he was spared when a war broke out. The prison was bombed and he escaped.

Wagdi told us that because of the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons , many Muslims wanted to know about Christianity and he was very busy discipling them. Unfortunately there were not nearly enough people able or available for this great opportunity to share the gospel with Muslims.

“The only ones that can help the Muslims,” he told us, “is the Christians and the church.”

Muslim ministry is at zero while Islam is growing exponentially in North America. He urged us to pray for them. At the end of Ramadan, many Muslims see Jesus in visions and dreams, and this is a glorious opportunity that goes to waste when we are not prepared and positioned to speak.

He asked us to set aside at least one day a year to pray for Muslims in our cities/areas, informing us that Muslims have the goal of converting Christians. They are missional about making new Muslims. We should be equally missional towards them. Islam is not a threat, it is a golden opportunity and churches should adopt a mosque to pray for.

Wagdi brought the talk home with stories of the blood of martyrs being the seed of the church. This is the part that wrecked a lot of people in the auditorium. The stories themselves were gripping enough, but Wagdi ended the talk by saying,

“We need a martyr to wake up the church. I am willing to be that martyr.”

Wow. How many others are willing to say that?

As far as I can tell, Ragdi’s talk is the only one that explicitly embraced the biblical idea that some of those to whom we are sent will hate us to the point of wanting to murder us. Every other talk has a flavor of “If we would just do THIS or THAT correctly, everyone would fall in line and the Kingdom of God will be ushered in.”

The average Canadian may be less violent than the Muslims Washdi evangelizes, but many of them will hate the gospel and its messengers no less.

Have you heard anyone else at this conference talk about being hated by those to whom we are sent?

***

Here is a sampling of Twitter statuses posted after the talk:

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