Experiences often times shape the way we see the world. Don McCurry is no different. When a Muslim man saves his life he is changed forever.
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Here starts the auto-generated transcription of A Muslim Saved My Life:
They were gonna set our houses on fire and burn us. Once again, Muslim terrorists A terrorist attack. Extremist and people and it certainly is not irrelevant. It is a warning. Welcome to the truth about Muslims podcast, the official podcast of the Swimmer Center For Muslim Studies, where we help to educate you beyond the media.
Here are your hosts, Howard and Trevor. We are, in the studio today with, Don McCurry. Don McCurry was the founder, founding director of the Zwemer Center For Muslim Studies. Originally, it was called the Zwemer Institute in 1979. So, Don, start us off with a little bit about that because the Zwemer Center has, is the sponsor of the Truth About Muslims podcast and a lot of people don’t really know what the Zweymer Center is all about.
Way back in the mid seventies when, we came back from Pakistan, we were aware of almost a total blank, in the American churches about, Islam and Muslims And, that was a burden on my heart. And, when I was put on the student council of Fuller Seminary and we had a big banquet for all of us and faculty, Everybody was supposed to bring a, 3 minute presentation for their dream of world evangelization. They gave you 3 minutes? 3 minutes. Yes.
So I had 7 points on a 3 by 5 card. And one of those points was the committee on world evangelization needs to do a major consultation on Muslim evangelism because there hasn’t been one done since 1906. Wow. 70 years. This is 1976 when this happened.
So why do you think that is? Why did we go 70 years without talking about Islam at all? We put them on the shelf as long as we are isolated to oceans protecting us from all kinds of things, we’re going to go cushy. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That’s us.
Cushy. Alright. I like that. We we we call that Nerf life. Well, how about couch potatoes?
Yeah. Yeah. That’s that’s true too. Alright. So you’ve got, 3 minutes.
You say we need to focus on Muslim evangelism. Yeah, and, I don’t remember all the other points but the one that grabbed Pete Wagner who was the chairman of the strategy working group of Lausanne, grabbed it. And he said, hey. Listen, everybody. We’re Lausanne is gonna have a consultation on Muslim evangelism and Don McCreery is gonna go direct it.
And that was that. No. It wasn’t that. He said He he had a wonderful plan for your life. No.
No. It wasn’t that either. He said, I want you to write up a proposal. And this boondock missionary from 18 years in Pakistan said, what’s a proposal? Robert Douglas, who was my classmate, was standing at my elbow and Bob said, I know how to do that.
So we went to the refectory, and for 2 hours, I emptied my brain on creative ideas of what should go into a consultation. And his wife, June, took notes, and they formulated a 36 page proposal. Wow. We handed it to, Pete Wagner, and he said, great. You’re coming with me to Chicago, and you’re boiling this down to a 15 minute presentation to the North American Lausanne Committee.
So, we did it and it was accepted and impetuous Pete Wagner in his characteristic style said, okay, we’re gonna do it. Lausanne’s gonna do it and World Vision is going to fund it. And Stan Mooneyham was sleeping after lunch and he hears World Vision and he wakes up and he’s all arms and legs and he says, wait a minute. You can’t do that. I’ve got a board I have to answer to.
1st objector. That’s right. So a lot of people are probably wondering what is Lausanne? Not everybody’s gonna know that terminology. What is Lausanne?
In 1974, Billy Graham as the honorary chairman pulled together a consultation in Lausanne, Switzerland on world evangelism, and it pulled people together from all over the world. It followed Berlin in 1966 and there was a little one in Singapore in 1968 all all Asian Christian Leadership Conference but this is the biggie. This is when almost anybody who was anybody was brought to Lausanne, Switzerland. I I know we brought a large delegation from Pakistan, for that. And that was when Ralph Winter, for example, people groups and there were tremendous papers and they’re all collected in a book edit edited by by Douglas but that was the beginning of something really really big And, that set the tone then for other area consultations, including the the possibility of 1 on the Muslim world.
And okay. So and how did we get the name swimmer out of this this whole beginning. Oh, you’re touching a sore point in my heart. I am sorry. Oh, that’s alright.
I’m just gonna preface it with it would have been easier to take a name that’s not easily misspelled and and mispronounced. People are always asking is it Zweimer? Zweemer. How do you say it? And so here we go.
We need to hear it from you. Okay. We had a constituting committee of 13 people, being chaired by doctor Arthur Glasser, the dean of the School of World Mission. And my proposal for the name of the institute was the Southern California Institute of Islamic Studies. It was it was doctor Arthur Glasser who proposed the name of Samuel Zwemer that we name it after America’s earliest and foremost missionary to the muslim world and I didn’t like it at all.
They finally took the vote and the vote was 12 to 1. Only 1 to center. That was me. That was me. What What do they have against Southern California?
I don’t know, but you know the consequences of that poor decision. You know, Southern California could have fit too because now we’re in South Carolina SC. We could have kept the same domain name. It wouldn’t have been a big deal. Well, what happened was this, that no one thought of consulting anybody in the Zweimer family.
Oh. This got around. And I, the negative voter, had to travel the length and breadth of the United States finding Zweymer relatives and apologizing. Man, that’s a that’s an interesting job that you have to go and do that. How how was that like?
Let’s not talk about it. You have to destroy this podcast. Oh, no. This is going live. This needs to happen.
So it was a it was a rough start with the name. Okay. What what really happened before all of that was the Lausanne consultation that was held in Glen Eyrie, Colorado and that was fantastic. We divided everybody into 6 teams of 25 people each. On each team were anthropologists, Islamists, theologians, communication experts, mission executives, missionaries, 3rd world reps, and women.
Did they get along? Not very well. So, behind the scenes. Ed Ed Dayton, who was my management guru because this was all officed at World Vision, That day and said, by the middle of the second day, the 3rd worlders are gonna complain that this is an American management technique stuff and we better have plan b. And plan b was we broke everybody up into task force according to their own profession.
And we were ready. And so we we went with the flow on that and then it was the task force forces that that came out with the mandate. We need a research training Institute in Southern California that will cooperate with the Mission Advanced Resource Center, World Vision, with the US Center For World Mission and with the School of World Mission at Fuller Seminary. We need to pull all this together in a major training Institute and Research Institute for the Muslim world. Wow.
Now this wasn’t the first time this has happened in Christian history. This sounds like exactly what Raymond Lowell was calling for with the Catholic Church, you know, in the early what is that? The 12th century? The end of 13th century. 13th century.
Yeah. And so this is sort of a renewal of what God has been wanting the church to do from the very get go with Islam. It’s to understand Islam so that we might engage them with the gospel. That’s a nice connection. He’s my hero.
And that’s why you knew the date. I was gonna say, that’s amazing. Yeah. 1335 what? 1235 to 1305.
He he died just before he turned 85. Wow. And so the the the call was there. We need a research center. We need an Institute and originally it was called the Zweymer Institute and what was the vision?
What was the goal? The vision was to mobilize research on all kinds of Muslim people groups because that was the end thing, people groups. And at the same time to cooperate with the US Center and Fuller Seminary and the Swaimer Institute itself and and, putting forth training programs. So we started, Arthur Glasser said if you come to Fuller and start doing this, we will inaugurate training for Muslim people and we will never look back. And that’s how it started.
So we started with introduction to Islam and then Muslim evangelism, etcetera. Well, you did something really neat too. You you created what was called and branded the Muslim awareness seminar. And this is in the late seventies, early eighties, when there really isn’t much awareness going on in the United States of anything about Muslims or Islam. Exactly.
I I needed I knew that we needed to get GOL ownership across the country, that this was going to be the premier training center and I knew that the churches were apathetic, ignorant and uninformed and so we developed the first Muslim, the prototype of the first Muslim awareness seminar, and we succeeded in getting into a 100 churches in 7 years across the United States. Later that was followed up by a more advanced seminar called reaching our Muslim neighbors. I have a quick question. Where were where were the churches focused primarily on, missiologically? Where were they if there wasn’t the Muslim world at that time, was it anywhere?
Was it admissions? Was it not in the late seventies early eighties? I would say it was sprayed all over the map, you know, whoever felt the burden to do this or to do that. And it was not that there were not were no missionaries in the Muslim world, but because they were not bearing fruit, they were not attractive and so the tension kind of went where where does my buck do the most money? I mean do the most fruit.
Right. Return on investment. Yeah. So that’s right. So since nothing much was happening in the Muslim world that was a the dark area of neglect at that time and I just had a passion that this has to change.
And you were teaching this time at Fuller and so you had a a combination of academic, streams coming from Zweimer. You had churches, that you were equipping through the Muslim awareness seminar. And how about missionaries? Were there missionaries coming and training and doing research as well? When they heard about this they flocked there.
My early classes had a 100 students each of them. Wow. We trained something like 800 missionaries in 7 years. That’s that’s amazing to think about that many people having that much in that much interest that early on. And a lot of that research is now in the Zweimer Archives, which I frequent and get to go through and see some of these dissertations that are being written.
I mean, some of the master’s degree level students were producing work and they’re they’re actually, you’re the professor on almost all of these and I’ll take you over there and we can kind of look through them. How dreadful. It’s it I actually felt that way when I was looking at them thinking, wow, this is a master’s degree paper and this thing is intense, you know, this is PhD level work. And so the quality of the scholarship was impressive. Well, we put people’s feet to the fire.
If you if you’re gonna take God seriously, you’re gonna take the challenge seriously, we’re gonna we’re gonna we’re gonna encourage you to work. So, from these 800 missionaries that you guys have trained, what what happened next? What what was the next step in this movement? Next step in that was that they went to the fields and, we had some conflicts then. I had a conflict with doctor, Greg Livingstone.
Greg Livingstone was the co founder of Frontiers. We were very good friends. He he recruited 2 of my children to 2 different missions when because he belonged to 2 different missions. And the conflict begins. And this was the conflict, Greg, are you gonna send your teams to me for training?
He said no. He said, that’s the option of the team leader. The team team leader wants training, fine and if the team leader doesn’t, we’re not gonna require it. They had a 50% casualty rate for those early years because of that very decision. Was the thought that they would just have sort of an on the job training get out there and figure it out as they go and that the pre field training wasn’t of great value?
Yes. That was that that was not Greg’s opinion, but he opted to let every team leader decide. Wow. Half of them decided we don’t want any training, we wanna get there and they had that 50% rate in those early years of frontiers. Yeah.
I’m thinking about even in YWAM, that was our mentality as well. Just get out there get the job done and then I get out there and I start talking with people about Jesus and they’re going oh, we believe in Jesus and I’m going what? Muslims believe what? I had no idea. I just we didn’t have that training.
We didn’t have that emphasis. And so how valuable now today for missionaries? Do you feel like now that’s an important aspect still that they should get some pre field training, understand the religion amongst the people who they’re gonna work with? That that is even more so than before because now we are we are aware of the wide spectrum of the different kinds of Muslims there are. Shias, Sunnis, Sufis, Ahmadiyyas, Taliban, secularists, Marxists, black Muslims, and, every kind you could imagine and And now we have learned to say, where are you going?
What kind of people are you working with? Are you gonna do a little bit pre field research on this before you go? Are you gonna build on what other people already have learned the hard way? And, what about language learning? Which language are you gonna learn?
You gonna learn the hard language? You gonna learn the big official one? Or what are you gonna do? All of these things helped us refine how we train people today. Today, we find a lot of churches are, have negative views of Muslims.
At the time when you were first, helping churches to see, Muslims for the first time, did they have this negative view, or has that just been developed because of terrorism? Most of them had a negative view. That’s grown even worse, ever since then. And I would tell stories of how Muslims saved my life in life threatening situations. I’m gonna need to hear one of those stories, Doctor.
McCurry. Okay, that’s no problem. You said, you’ve got stories of Muslims that have saved your life. Yeah. Okay, here we go.
In the summertime we we would go up to the mountains, because I was involved in a student work, university work up in the mountains and camps at the Christian zone. Okay. We would shop in a little a little bazaar called Chikagali and my wife and children will be in a rental house up there on the hill. I come down and I sit in the veggie shop with a man named mister Khan, a a Muslim man. Wonderful, elegant, tall, white beard man, and I I would say, what do you call that in Peharti?
What do you call that? What do you call that? And we talk and and he’d ask questions and I said, do you know I wasn’t born a Christian? He said, what? So, immediately, I had a chance to share my faith with him and I would ask him what he believes and I’d listen to stories of his family.
We would, send doctors off to the villages to minister to the sick people, especially TB was endemic there, because of their lifestyle. And we built a relationship, a good one. And, for example, I had trouble getting a visa coming back after my first term. It was a long spell and when he saw me coming after a year and 3 quarters, he’d dash 50 yards up the road, embrace me, dance me in circles all the way down to the road to the nearest tea shop and he said, how are your sons? He didn’t ask about my wife or my daughters, okay?
That’s awesome thing. Okay. And I asked about his sons, okay? This was, an intimate relationship and believe it or not, sometimes missionaries run out of money and I said, mister Khan, I I don’t have any money to buy vegetables this week. That’s alright, we know you.
Whenever it comes in, you just give it to us. That’s the kind of relationship we had. Okay, we went to war with India. Pakistan went to war with India and the road to Kashmir went within 50 yards of our house And a total blackout. And Muslims are passionate when they go to war.
They are all for it. And, a rumor spread falsely among villagers that didn’t know us that we foreigners opened the door so light would shine on the road to Kashmir so the Indian bombers could bomb it. It was a false false rumor, and people got all excited. They came with all kinds of weapons that was before the Afghan war. So they didn’t have guns.
They had swords and axes. And what have you and torches. They were going to set our houses on fire and burn us. Alright. This week’s sponsors.
CIU. CIU. CIU educates people from a bib Biblical. Biblical World Review. Worldview.
Real world review. People from a biblical world view to impact the nations with the message of Christ. Mystery Klein was there, and he stood in the gateway before that path went up our hill and he said to these people, don’t do this, we know these people, they didn’t do what you said. They said, get out of the way old man. He jumped back in front of them and he said, finally, you’ll have to kill me first before you kill them.
And after he said that 2 or 3 times because he was respected really as an elder in that, little area. The crowd melted and gradually quieted down and went home. He stood between us and certain death. He saved my life. How did Christians respond to hearing a story like that?
You’ll have to ask them. I think sometimes we feel like, we we kind of have an idea of what Muslims are like because we see it in in the media. And, it sounds to me in your, you know, almost 60 years, I guess, working among among Muslims, you’ve encountered the full gambit. We have. And, there have been other incidences that are in the book that I finally put together called Tales That Teach.
Each story has only one lesson in it, an important lesson, And, there are 2 stories of of times when Muslims have saved my life. Could you share with us another story and maybe the point from a tale from Tales That Teach? And then we’ll put a link there in the on the website for listeners that would be interested in hearing a lot more of these tales. Well, there are lots of them. Let me put this one.
When I got in a slit, about the church, in Pakistan, and I said they don’t love Muslims. They’ve understandably, they’ve been persecuted. Their girls have been raped. They hate Muslims, etcetera, etcetera. The churches here is hopeless, so I’ll go to church on Sunday, but I’m going to spend all my free time with Muslims.
I went through that for 6 months like that, and I fell into deep depression, and finally I went to the leading man of, at that time, of the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, IFES, and I said, Coker, you probably wondered where I’ve been for the last 6 months. I said, I I got so fed up with the church that doesn’t love Muslims that I spent all my free time with Muslims and I did not seek any Christian fellowship with any Christians that Godly man leaped out of his chair and pointed across that table to me and he said, Brother, you sinned. And I received that rebuke and I learned the biggest lesson of my life missions and churches go together and you cannot separate them. They are two sides of the same activity. That was a big lesson for me to learn in Pakistan.
Yeah. It does seem like there can be a lot of lone rangers out there, and it seems like God has made it in such a way that we do go out as the body of Christ and that he uses that. And forsaking the fellowship of the body of Christ, it it really had some huge consequences for you. It did. It it first of all, you cannot abandon Christian fellowship because we need one another.
And secondly, God has mandated that his glory be manifested to the powers and the spiritual realms through the churches. Okay. Now you’re talking spiritual talk. Okay. We’re good Westerners and rationalists here.
So, God will forgive us. Help us understand a little bit about having lived a majority of your life amongst people that are not coming from that worldview, that secular humanist worldview, that Western worldview. What have they taught you, about these ideas, about the spiritual realms and how you view the world? I’ve had to rediscover the Bible because of them and through them. For example, Lauren Sandy, at that time, the vice president of Navigators trained me to train counselors for Billy Graham type crusades and I trained the counselors for TW Wilson and his crusade so I knew how to do that.
I’m in Pakistan and Doctor. Akbar Haq, the leading evangelist from India comes to Pakistan when it’s okay and his administrator knew me and said, Don, will you train our counselors for the big crusades and Raul, Pindi, Lahore and Fassilabad? Though they requested my mission to do that and the mission said, okay. I trained the counselors and in Fassalabad, in the middle of doctor Hock’s first message, a young man comes screaming down the aisle at the top of his lungs and falls unconscious at the foot of the platform. I’m reviewing my Billy Graham training manual.
Is this the first time Let’s see. Let’s see. Is this the first time confession of faith? Does he need some hand holding for assurance of salvation? Is this a backslider or is this other?
Other. Yeah. Yes. This is other. Turn to page 32 for other.
So as a a man who’s had 2 years of medical school studying in psychiatry and all of that kind of stuff before I came to Christ. I said, this is a medical problem. That’s a secular response. Everything’s a medical problem. Right.
I called the doctor. The doctor came, his pulse, breathing, blood pressure, heart, everything’s normal. He said, I don’t know why he’s unconscious. Doctor. Huck who was born in Sialko, just 90 miles away but also had a PhD in psychology from the University of Minnesota.
You know, he has a foot in both worlds. You can’t fool him. When he gets through the meeting and we carried the young man unconscious into this the house nearby, Doctor. Huck says Don come on over here this man has a demon we’re gonna cast the demons out of this man. He said it like that?
Yeah. Okay. And that’s pretty casual, like what was your thoughts at that point? It wasn’t thoughts, my eyes got very big. It wasn’t thoughts, it was responses.
Okay. So I stood be high beside him pretending I knew what was going on. Okay? Right. I had no training in my church, my seminary, or my mission, of what to do about this.
Okay. Doctor Hook jostled the young man’s shoulder and in a strong voice said, in the name of Jesus Christ, come out of him. Strange voices came out of this young man and doctor Hook demanded each demon to identify itself and then he commanded it to leave 1 by 1 in the name of Jesus and never come back. After 4 or 5 of these, this young man came into his right mind. I took his case study.
Brother, how did you get this way? Alcohol, immorality, drugs, the occult. He opened every door to the other spirit world and he was repenting that night. He really wanted out and he he came gloriously to Christ that night. I followed him up.
I interviewed his friends to make sure all this is is really true. This is not hokey. And, he became an outstanding Christian newspaper reporter. As this, unfolded, I asked myself, why did I have to come to Pakistan to learn the Bible as normal? Why did I not learn this in my own country?
And I had to finger the culprit. The culprit is the secular humanistic philosophy that was sweeping America. I remember back when I was getting a master’s degree in English education and I went to my professor at Temple University and I said in his class, may I write my paper on a Christian philosophy of education? He said, no, you may not, and he quoted John Dewey’s book on democracy and education published way back in 1905 that has molded every teacher training program in America since then and he said we are not, we Christians are not allowed to introduce a unique authority that discredits all other authorities into the public educational system. That’s secular humanism.
Removing the authoritative voice of the word of God, the revelation of God, and putting everything on an equal plane. This is your voice. This is your voice. We love one another. We tolerate one another.
This is secularism. You may do your thing, you may do mine, but you may not say you’re the only way. So, I got I got, my eyes awakened when in mid career, I got my master’s in English education at Temple University and that kind of milieu. So going back to that story where, you helped cast out, multiples of demons. How how did that affect the way you trained missionaries after that?
Because God opened my eyes. I opened their eyes. I teach focus on empower encounter. And I teach at the at the end of those several days of teaching exorcism and healing. They are part of the manifestation of the presence of the kingdom and if you did not have that manifestation, basically, what you’re doing is you’re pushing people back on on, medicine and other ologies, psychology, whatever, pharmacology, you name it, and they think, oh, you don’t have any power.
Therefore, I’m gonna go to the witch doctor. He has power. These people look for manifestations of spiritual power and if they do not find it in the missionary, in the area of of deliverance and healing and sometimes signs and wonders. If they do not find it there, they go to the people of power in their culture because they can feel it and it, kind of reassures them even if they don’t know it’s evil power. Right.
So what would you say to the cessationists that are coming like the, MacArthur who just finished that book Strange Fire? Do you find many missionaries that, that, you know, go to the mission field or planning to go to the mission field but have a kind of a cessationist viewpoint? Yes. John MacArthur is a brilliant bible expositor except when it comes to first Corinthians 13. I think that’s the only commentary of his I own actually because I was curious how he came to the conclusions he did.
Sorry. Go ahead. Okay. John, reads those words in 1st Corinthians 13, when that which is perfect has come, then that which is in part shall be done away. Tongues shall cease, prophecy shall cease.
He predicates that on on the post apostolic period and from that time forward, we do not think that the Bible is to be treated that way. And when you get out of your tree, and you start mixing up with other, people who have deep experiences, in the spirit of God, and you see the manifestation is properly exercised of all the gifts lifted listed in first Corinthians 12 and 14. And you study their lives and these people love Jesus and they spend their lives out in servanthood to other people and yeah, they have, the exercise of these gifts. Some of which are incredibly important like the discerning of spirits. Then you realize that what you were taught as a secessionist in your denomination is not true.
You test these people. You know, Anglicans, team missionaries of all things, that’s not supposed to happen in team mission. Presbyterians, Charismatics, assembly of God, all of them, they’re outstanding examples of godliness and fruitfulness and they have these gifts in operation. That’s an eye opener. So you’re looking at this as much more of a battle of not of flesh and blood but that of spiritual powers.
That’s with the way you were viewing the ways that God was using you and others there in Pakistan and also in other parts of the Muslim world. There’s a spiritual battle going on. A spiritual battle is not just the exercise of those gifts over there. The spiritual battle is right here. If you take Ephesians 6 12 seriously, we wrestle not against flesh and blood but against principalities and powers of etcetera.
There are spirit powers empowering secular humanists who attack the gospel and are trying to remove God from the public arena. That is not an innocuous secular kind of thing, that’s empowered even though they call it secularism. There is an enemy here as well as there. So answer the question that you asked earlier. Why did you have to go to Pakistan to find the Bible?
Is it just that secular humanism or is it a belief that we don’t believe in the spiritual powers anymore or is God working stronger in these contexts where there is no church? We’ve heard so many different viewpoints about why miracles, dreams, visions, spiritual manifestations happen in other parts of the world and not here. What are your thoughts? Well, I think it starts with German rationalism, that began to affect the the ideology that shaped our country. And when you look at the religious phenomena of a founding fathers, a lot of them were deist.
Fathers, a lot of them were deists. So, god is up there. He said everything in motion and and now it’s just kind of going on its own. There’s no room for the manifestation of spiritual power in that kind of a world view. Thomas Jefferson, for example, took the philosophy of John Locke, life, liberty, and the right to own property.
He modified it, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. So that was the the the embryonic form of the American dream, which where I use the expression, the cushy life. You, are all about eliminating pain from your life, and you, think you can do it materialistically and you forget that Jesus Christ is a healer and so you have to go overseas where people are unleashed to actually believe the Bible the way it is, and you see it in operation and you wake up. Oh, the Bible really is normal. Do you have any other stories that you could share that would open our listeners eyes or ears actually?
Okay. Well, they could open their eyes as they listen. Okay. Maybe raise them from the dead if they’re dead. Okay.
Some maybe, some maybe. Okay. Forgive me, audience. I I don’t wanna trivialize you. I love you.
Okay. Here. Okay. Look. A young man’s pounding on my front door.
Brother Don, brother Don, you have to come, you have to come to the hospital. Your friend, Nemet, is dying. So I rushed over to United Christian Hospital in Lahore, Pakistan, and it’s wintertime. There’s no central heating. It’s cold.
They lay all the patients out on mattresses in the sunshine. I’m walking through them, and I find my friend, Nana. I can hardly recognize him. Ted is the size of a giant pumpkin. His hands are swollen.
His feet are swollen. His arms and legs are like sticks. And I gasped, and I say, Nemet, what happened to you? He said, Brother Don, I have advanced TB of my lungs, and my kidneys have shut down. And the doctors have said the medicine for the lungs makes the kidneys shut down harder, and the the medicine for the, the kidneys makes the TB grow faster.
At that point in medicine, we cannot save you. You’re going to die. He looks up at me, and he says, Brother Don, would you pray for me? I felt totally inadequate. So the show wouldn’t be possible without sponsors.
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And what does the Zweimer Center do? Talks about lessons and and tells them on the computer that we love you. Very nice. The Swimmer Center equips the church to reach Muslims. The Swimmer Center has been educating people about reaching Muslims before it was cool.
I went over to meet my colleague, my missionary doctor. Dave Dave Williams, doctor Dave Williams, Dave, what’s the prognosis on this guy? He’s gonna die. We can’t save him, and he he he reiterated what Nemet said. I go back to, sit on the ground beside Nemet feeling totally impotent.
And I remember back at our college, Missus Sinclair, the wife of the, Anglo Indian president, had a gift a press a reputation for the gift of healing. So I said, Damon, I’m going back to the college, and I’m gonna bring missus Sinclair. And I grabbed some bibles, and as I did so, I remembered Romans 1017. Faith comes by hearing the word of Christ. So we sat beside Nemet, and I began to read every story of healing in the four gospels.
Why? That’s the word of Christ. I didn’t have any faith. Faith comes by hearing the word of Christ. And as we read these stories of healing and really got into it, faith began to grow inside of me.
Then it came time to pray, and we said, David, you’re gonna pray first. This guy’s a nominal Christian. And as he starts his prayer, it’s like stones falling out of his mouth straight to the ground. And I’m groaning and saying, oh, oh, God. Nothing’s gonna happen here.
And then suddenly he begins in a loud voice to confess all of his sins. The impression I think in pictures, the impression I got it was he’s like on the edge of a cliff ready to fall into the fires of hell, and he thought this is his last chance to get right with God. He poured out everything he could think of in his life. It was awful. We’re sitting there in a public area.
I separate my fingers and look crowds are gathering listening to this sensational, loud confession of sin. I close my eyes again, and, as he’s continuing to pray, faith is growing even stronger inside of me. Yeah. God can hear this guy. When we when he is through praying, we make sure he understands that Jesus died for every single one of those sins and took them into his own body for him, died on the cross and washed him clean by his blood.
And if he confesses and repents and accepts Jesus Christ as savior and Lord, he will be clean. And he was ready. That’s what he did. And when he was through praying all of that to the Lord, we said, okay, Navet. Now we’re gonna pray.
And I forgot all about James 5 where it says call for the elders and anoint with oil. I forgot it. So we did the obvious. We put our hands over his chest. Oh, God, rebuke the tuberculosis bacilli.
We put our hands over his kidneys. Oh, god, open up his kidneys. We put our hands over the edema. Oh, god, make the edema go away. Oh, we put our hands on his stick like arms and legs and said, oh god, make the muscles grow back.
And when we were through pain, god gave us the faith to say to name it. Name it, now you’re gonna get well. 3 days later, doctor Dave Williams called me back to the United Christian Hospital. Don, what did you do to that guy? He’s getting well.
Now what would you say to your missionary, secularized doctor colleague? Dave, in case you never thought about it before, Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, forever. He’s healing that man. Naman got well. It took a while.
He got well. He’s a transformed person, promoted in his job and promoted to post semester general in another city, Led an outstanding Christian life for about the next 15 years. Same question I had after doctor Hock’s deliverance ministry in Faisalabad. Why did I have to come to Pakistan to learn that Jesus heals like that today? Secular humanism.
Is God using this in drawing Muslims to himself as well? Have you seen God do miraculous things among Muslim communities to reveal Christ? I’ve seen some of it. I haven’t seen everything that, for example, example that David Garrison is talking about but I read about it in his book and Jerry Truesdale’s book miracle movements etcetera etcetera. I believe these reliable witnesses and I believe these things really are happening.
I have seen a minimum that my my ministry is largely teaching and training. Now I’m not out there as a practitioner doing this all the time everywhere, but my colleagues, have seen more of it, even more of it than I have. I believe that the Bible is normative. I know doctor McCreery that you’ve worked a lot with the Hispanic church in mobilizing them for Muslim ministry. Do you see that they have a much more open mind to working in the spiritual realms than some other Westerners?
Incredibly, you hit the the nail on the head, Trevor. I love when I do that. Yes. Because you’re a professor and you’re supposed to be sharp. Supposed to be.
Yeah. Okay. Hopefully, we’ll let listeners be the judge of that. Okay. I don’t want to flatter anybody because that’s a sin.
Okay? Before he tells the story, I did have him as a professor way back when and he still got the same gusto that he had then and it’s exciting to hear you share. So tell us what is God doing amongst the Hispanic communities with Muslims? Okay. I practically burned myself out at the Zwaymer Institute and my wife saw an ad in the newspaper.
5 days, Guadalajara, Mexico, all expenses paid, $239. How can you resist a vacation like that? You’re not about to share that you did work on your vacation, are you? No. Okay.
Okay. No, but I I did not go to sleep on my vacation either. Okay, we’re we’re riding in a bus from the airport, to the city of Guadalajara. I thought I was back in Pakistan. I saw all these adobe houses.
This is like Pakistan. Wow, these people maybe maybe they could work in Pakistan. So So the next morning we wake up, we’re walking the city and I’m reading all the street signs in Guadalajara. That’s Arabic in Spanish alphabet. That’s Arabic.
That’s Arabic. I didn’t realize so many loan words from Arabic came into Spanish. And on the last night there, we’re in a lovely restaurant and there on the shelf behind me is this Middle Eastern water jug. A glass globe, big neck, you grab it around the neck and a spout. And you hold it up like this and a clean spout of water goes into your mouth.
You never have to touch your lips to the vessel. I called the manager. I said, where did you get that Middle Eastern drinking vessels? He went like this, he put his hands on his hip and he said, senor, we have been making this for 100 of years, this is ours. And that’s when all the lights went on.
I said, good grief. Middle Eastern culture has made a profound impact on Latin culture. I came back to Fuller Seminary where I was teaching. I went through my roster of students and there she was. One student with a master’s degree in Spanish literature.
I called her into the office and I said, Sister, forget about your strategy paper on an unreached Muslim people group. Okay? I want you to research the number of Arabic loan words in the Spanish language. She found 6,000 of them. Wow.
Not all of them are very common. Some are technical, some are archaic, but she found them and I knew that I was onto something after that. When I finally started training Latinos, two things happened. In Latin America when I talked about folk Islam and the occultic things that people do because they can’t get in touch with God who is far away, so they get in touch with spiritists and other people who have strange power. They do that.
My students said, we have that here. We have that over there, yeah, we have that kind of shrine there, it’s just like the Muslim world. Wow, I woke up. The second thing that happened is when they got to the field, they made the muslims very angry and this is why they made the muslims angry. Speak Arabic to us.
You’re here in Morocco, you are a Moroccan. What are you trying to do pretending you don’t know our language? Speak Arabic. You look like one of us. You’ve got to be one of us.
Speak. And it took ages for the Moroccans to understand there’s another world called Latin America where people look like them. Oh, when I went to visit both my caucasian students and my latin students in Morocco, this is what the caucasian students said, Don we’ve been here 6 months and we haven’t been invited to a single wedding. This is what my Latino missionary friend said, Don, we’ve been invited to 6 weddings on the same weekend. What should we do?
Different problems. Is I’m assuming this is because of the Umayyads that came all the way up into Spain and Cordoba. A lot of people don’t know of the history, of Spain and its Islamic influences from the early Islamic dynasty. 7 11 to 1492, over 700 years. Mhmm.
A lot more going on in 1492 than Columbus sailing the ocean blue. He sailed the ocean blue because the Spaniards conquered the Muslims and gathered all their money so they could finance Columbus. We didn’t hear that part of the song though, Don, in school. So Unbeknownst to us. So have the they’ve been they’ve been effective in getting into communities with Muslims.
How about in sharing the gospel? They are slower, to go for closure. They’re more relational. I lost a board member over, who went with me to a Spanish board meeting of the Ibero American Institute that I was directing in Granada, Spain. And, this board member watched the chairman circle the question at tighter and tighter circles, beating around the bush, he thought, until they finally get to the point.
That’s their way, you know, edging your backside into the water hole until you reach a consensus, my board member lost it. He stood up with a red face and pounded the table and he said, let’s get to the point. The Latinos in that committee meeting totally ignored him. He realized he was finished. He resigned.
And they went around their normal way of decision making. And got to the point eventually. Yes. And maintained good relationships, probably. Yes.
A little touch of shame and honor there, not this brutal western confrontation stuff. Tell us a little bit about shame and honor in that context and how the gospel can best be presented in that context. Sensitivity, the Bible, the Bible teaches an awful lot about respect. The fact that we’re made in the image of God, GK Chesterton said, any sin against a fellow human being is treason because man is royal. We are the sons and daughters of God.
When you pick up on, stuff like that about respect for another human being, You learn gentleness, you learn, not to confront, you learn not to embarrass. I I was in a huge argument with the principal of my seminary, about a security measure, and, he was old time missionary and people were stealing stuff right left and center off the mission off the seminary compound, and we needed to take some security measures. And, all of the faculty except him were concerned about it. And when the principal realized, that he was gonna lose the argument in a vote, he lost his temper. And the Pakistani professor beside me said, Harigai, he lost.
You lose your temper in that society, you lose. You cannot afford to do that. So you learn a different style of sensitivity in a shame and honor society. And you’re very gentle, and non confrontational about how you reach consensus when you’re facing an issue. That’s totally different than the the blunt American way, let’s get to the point sort of a thing.
In the first story that you mentioned, you talked about how the man that saved your life, he stood in front of, the man that wanted to kill you. A a mob. Right. The mob. And, you said that the crowd started to leave.
Was that because of, him shaming them basically by, giving up his life in front of, the mob? I think so. He said you’ll have to kill me first, but they knew they couldn’t do that. In fact, the Quran says you must never kill another Muslim. Alright.
So this show wouldn’t be possible without sponsors. And at this point in the show is where if you wanna partner with us, we would put your ad. So if you wanna be a part of the show, you wanna partner with us, you like what we’re doing, you wanna be on our team, what have you, bringing this show to the world, then email us and let us know. Because that that that statement right there is confusing you because of everything that we’ve talked about already. Yeah.
How does that, pony up with what we see with the groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda and The case of ISIS and Al Qaeda and Taliban and Boko Haram and Jihadists, they are fed up with the supremacy of the West and they have memories of the glory of the Muslim past when they ruled the world. Both in Black Africa, the the the Don Photo, the the the Jihadist, back in those days, when they had fantastic empires etcetera etcetera, Baghdad and and all of that. And they falsely conclude that the reason we are not able to be on top and ruling the world is that we are not good Muslims. So they are now driven by a passion to emulate Mohammed, who is eminently successful as a warrior, as a builder of a community, of, giving the world a law that answered almost everything and and setting the example, by everything he said and did. So these, shall we say formerly defeated Muslims in their own eyes saying we are going to recover our lost glory, and we do it by emulating Mohammed in everything he did.
He is the example. He’s the perfect Muslim. He said, follow me. You have in me an excellent example. I’m the seal of the prophets.
I’m the last voice of God to the human race. Follow me. That’s what they’re doing. And so they’re not seeing others as true Muslims then? The the Muslims that they do kill, they’re not true Muslims in their eyes?
Or Exactly. Exactly. There’s a doctrine called Takfir. The Arabic root of that is the same root for kafir or blasphemer, meaning ungrateful. And, so is the doctrine whereby I have examined you and you do not measure up to the example of Mohammed.
Therefore, you are not really a Muslim. You either have to join me and, and fight with on my side, or you’re the enemy. This is how, Muslims are psyched into fighting one another. Doctor McCurry, there’s a group there in the beginnings of Islam, the the Kartagites that are the literalists and they, the ones that kill Ali for the Shiites, the the caliph Ali, and start a lot of this sort of dissension and fighting there right in the very beginnings. And they named them that as being the dissenters, the ones that are not within the folds of Islam.
Mhmm. Is that the way the current Muslim world, the majority, whether or not it’s moderate, or not, but the majority of Muslims, are they looking at these groups as being sort of neo Cartagites, the dissenters? They’re saying everybody else isn’t Muslim and they’re trying to fight against all of Islam. Does that have anything to do with what you see happening today in 21st century looking backwards? I’m not on their websites, so I’m not sure whether they’re using the word cottagites or not, but that is the way they’re looking at things.
They are trying to build now a war machine that will conquer the world because it’s it’s mandated in the Quran And, they therefore cannot tolerate dissent. They have to be totally united, in their effort and and they go forward therefore with a tremendous what you say in French esprit de corps with a tremendous spirit of victory in them, and with their peculiar concept of martyrdom, and the teaching in the hadith, that if you kill a a heretic, you’ll go to heaven, and if you die by being killed by the heretic, you go to heaven. It’s it’s a a no lose situation. It’s a win win thing for them. So, there’s a kind of intoxication that comes with releasing yourself to some kind of a cause like that.
You see it minimally in rock concerts and stuff like that where people surrender to the spirit that is there. They are surrendering to a spirit and there is a spirit there. This is not just human emotion and adrenaline. There is also something from the spirit world energizing them. Okay.
So this is one of those questions that we ask almost all of the people that we interview, particularly those that have studied in the academic field as well as been practitioners. And we get a wide variety Mhmm. Mhmm. Who has the right interpretation? Some have said, hey, it’s a it’s a diverse religion.
There’s a lot of interpretations. There’s no way to say who’s right, who’s wrong. It’s just to let the Muslim community sort that out. Some have said, well, you know, the the radicals seem to be more in line with what they think Islam teaches. You have any thoughts on this with what we see here in the 21st century?
My answer will probably be more shocking than any you’ve heard so far. Oh, I am so excited right now. I’m go for it. Every variety of Islam is powered by the enemy spirit, including orthodoxy. So it’s only a question of circumstances and personal persuasion as to what kind of Islam you belong to.
But if you understand Ephesians 612 and and everything behind it. The war in heaven, Jesus meeting of Satan, Jesus calling Satan the prince of this world, casting out demons, binding the strong man, setting people free. If you accept the biblical worldview, then you understand Ephesians 612. We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. We are in the business of setting people free from whatever and all those whatevers are under the enemy.
Bringing people essentially from darkness to light. And from the power of Satan to God. Acts 26 18. And I’m gonna go out on a limb here and assume that you would say the same thing of secular humanism, of materialism, of any other world system that is not Yeah. Faith in Christ.
Yeah. Vishal Mungawadi, a brilliant, Indian theologian philosopher has written a book called The Book That Major World. He’s analyzed every other ideology and religion. Bottom line, nihilism, they offer nothing and life comes through Jesus Christ alone. Yeah.
I don’t think it’s, I don’t think it’s that shocking. Maybe it’s because I had class with you. I don’t know. Well, you studied with me before. Okay?
That’s what Is there any last story you’d like to share from your book to give us one more glimpse into the, life stories that you’ve kind of gathered throughout your life thinking of, tell me the the title again, Howard. What is it? The, Tales That Teach. Tales That Teach. Could you give us one more tale to close with?
A tale that might teach listeners, something about what we’re seeing today in the Muslim world. Maybe a lot that has to do with fear, a lot that has to do with, just uncertainty, not people I I guess I get the feeling that people are having a hard time believing God’s working. Okay. This this, answer is gonna come in 2 or 3 stages, but I wanna use a domestic illustration from Pakistan. When we first went there without refrigerator, without washing machine, etcetera etcetera, if you did not hire a local person to help you, you spent all your time surviving.
So the the day comes when you have to find people who are gonna help you do the menial task. We had several disastrous experiences. Everybody we ever hired to help was a thief. They thought it was their right to help themselves to what they found. So my wife and I prayed, oh God, would you help us to find a Christian widow, maybe with a child or 2, who could kind of become part of our family and live with us, and God answered our prayer.
So in the beginning, I I didn’t get the game that this godly lady was playing. All I knew was that every once in a while, she’d come to me and she said, mister Don, I I need a bible. And, she said, I’ve been working with this person, and they’re ready to come to Jesus now, and I need a Bible for them. So I would go get a Bible. After this happened 3 or 4 years, I said, Birgit, baby, what is this that every once in a while you’re asking me for a bible?
Is there something behind this? She said, I guess I I never told you, but this is my prayer for each year of my life. God, let me lead one soul to Jesus this year. And that went on year after year, And she’s the auntie to my children. She’s the sister to my wife.
She is part of us. And and they’re in her private life, give me one soul. And God answered her desire every year. And that story entails a cheat. It’s called just one soul.
Okay. What about here in America? I’m gonna be home for 3 months which with no interruption. That’s unusual. God, let me be authentic where I live.
Let let me meet Muslims here in Colorado Springs. I go to church and I see that we are teaching verbal English to refugees. Sunday afternoon, I go join the group. They sit me beside 2 Iraq Sunni families that lost everything when the Shias took over their property and kicked them out and they became refugees in Jordan then Connecticut and finally Colorado. I’m sitting beside 2 highly educated couples that had an unbelievably good positions in Sunni controlled Iraq under Saddam Hussein who now are penniless.
What did I do? I prayed, let me be authentic here where I live. Let me meet Muslims here, Lord. It only took God 10 days to answer that prayer. I would urge every believer to ask God to open their eyes to the refugees, the immigrants, the indigents on their doorstep, and offer themselves as an agent of redemption, for these unfortunate people under our noses.
Even if it’s as simple as the prayer of Birkett Bibi, just let me lead one of them to Jesus each year. That simple. It can be better than that. Okay? Well, doctor McCurry, thank you so much for, your time.
The stories have been amazing. The book that, he, he wrote is called Tales That Teach. You can find it on Amazon. We’re also gonna put that link on our, website. Or mtm., books.
Mtm.books. What does MTM stand for again, doctor McCurry? Ministry to Muslims. Ministry to Muslims. So if you type in Ministry to Muslims in in Google, you’ll see it there.
Mtm.books. And he’s also got a book that I remember, from a while back, Healing the Broken Family of Abraham, which is also an excellent book. And that’s in 10 languages now. And I think people have been Muslims have actually been coming to Christ through reading that book, which is, got time for one more story? Yeah, it’s it’s because lazy Christians who are supposed to digest the book and learn everything in it hand it straight to a Muslim which they never should have done and I thought that might happen so I put a couple places in the book for my Muslim reader blah blah blah.
Oh, man. God is using a lot of things to draw people to himself. Amen. Amen. Thanks so much for being with us.
And, those of you that enjoy the podcast, be sure to go on iTunes, leave a review, continue to share the the podcast with people. I’ll close with a just a 2 second story. I was in Louisiana last week. Actually, I got in last night at midnight. And as I was, at my hotel, I got a phone call and they said, hey, there’s a person that would like to take you out to dinner.
They’re a fan of the podcast. And I was like, I’ve never met a listener of the podcast that I didn’t personally know. And so I go out to dinner and you’ll never believe it, I’m sitting at dinner in Louisiana and I say, so how did you hear about the podcast? He said, I had dinner with Don McCurry a few months ago at this very restaurant and now I’m sitting across from Don McCurry. Isn’t that amazing?
It was a wonderful wonderful evening and God is amazing. Hallelujah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, thanks for listening.