Making Peace In the Muslim Majority World

A few months ago, I wrote a short series talking about what we’re doing at Highland (the church I serve) to encourage all of our people to think globally about what it means to be a follower of Jesus in a globalized world.

And one of our 5 major initiatives in the next 5 years is to be peacemakers in the Muslim-majority world.

We plan to plant and work with existing churches in the 10/40 window (the Muslim-Majority World) who are proclaiming the good news of one who entered into violence and conflict with love and sacrifice. Our goal is to plant/partner with churches and organizations that are doing good work in peacemaking.

There’s so much confusion in American culture about Islam, what Muslims believe and who they are.

And since the mistrust is so deep here in the West, and the stories about radical Islam have saturated our news, we’ve decided that we as a church need to learn about Islam. So to that end, last Wednesday at Highland we invited Imam Samer Maltabaa from Lubbock (a city a couple of hours away) to come and talk to us about what Islam really is.

One great example of this was that Imam Samer explained that the word Jihad really just means struggle, and Islam teaches that the greatest Jihad is the one that each person has to take with their own impulses and desires. When our Missions Minister first explained to Imam Samer that we were trying to be peacemakers in this area of the world, Samer responded by saying “You all are on your own kind of Jihad.”

Well, I guess we kind of are.

I thought it was a fascinating discussion to hear Samer talk about how many things Christians and Muslims have in common and the points where we disagree. I want to share this video with the hope that it will do for others what it did for me…help humanize an entire group of people and open lines of communication between us.

If your church is interested in doing something like this, let me encourage you to call up the Imam in your local mosque and invite them to lunch, or maybe a good first step for your church would be to show your Bible class this video, or this one from Q Ideas.

One thing is for sure, the world needs Peace more than ever, and we follow a Man who when describing the Kingdom of God says “Blessed are the Peacemakers”

We have a hunch this is a step in the right direction.