She and her husband, Edward*, have spent the past decade focusing on an unreached people group in Central Asia—learning their language, living among them in the mountains, discipling the first known believers there and, now, mobilising a handful of ethnic believers living in a bigger city to go back and share the gospel with their remote towns.

When they moved to the mountains, Edward and Catherine didn’t know of any believers among the people group. Ten years later, they’ve heard of around 15 individuals who have come to faith.

The first man who came to faith left the area shortly after being baptised. Next, a pair of men found faith through a drug rehabilitation programme in the capital city. A couple women who grew up in a larger city, where they individually heard about Jesus, also moved back into the mountains.

“We really have not had a huge part in all those people coming to faith other than prayer. They came to faith through other ways,” Edward shared. But when he and Catherine encountered the new believers, their years of perseverance and language study paid off.

“I think one of the privileges of being there long enough to see some of the believers return was to just be there to encourage. They didn’t know any other Jesus followers in the area. They would be all by themselves if we hadn’t been there and met them. Even though we’re foreigners, God gave us the privilege of discipling them as they came back,” Catherine said.

Since some of the believers had come to faith through a Russian-speaking church in the capital, Edward and Catherine encouraged them to pray instead in their local language, their heart language.

“It’s fun to pray with a believer in the local language....To have a conversation about Jesus in the local language is so great. It was so encouraging when that started to happen with these believers,” Catherine affirmed.

Passing the baton

Recently, Edward and Catherine moved to a larger city in the country—intent on connecting with believers from the same people group and mobilising them to share the gospel with their family and friends. Another couple of long-term OMers, David* and Ellen*, took over team leadership, continuing the work in the mountains.

Encouraged by the handful of local believers they’d already connected with through Edward and Catherine, David and Ellen still long to see more. “The goal of our team is to see culturally relevant, locally led house groups among our people group,” Ellen shared.

Currently, only one of the believers has a believing spouse, the team reported. A few men meet with their sons to study the Bible and pray, but their wives are not believers. The women who do follow Jesus are married to Muslims, geographically isolated and struggle to grow spiritually.

Since the language spoken by the people group isn’t written, David and Ellen also continue to study spiritual vocabulary—by telling Bible stories to their language helpers and working out the best ways to explain gospel themes.

“The people are Muslim; they’re familiar with the prophets. They’ve heard about the creation story, and they know of Noah, but their knowledge of [the Bible] is pretty limited,” Ellen explained. “I’ve been going through these stories using pictures from a Bible story book, and my language helper is really excited about learning these stories. So after every story, whether it’s creation or the Tower of Babel or Noah, she says: ‘Is there more? Is there more?’”

When they reached Abraham, Ellen’s language helper knew of the famous prophet and the (almost) sacrifice of his son, “but she didn’t know how they’d waited many years to have a child or when, one day his wife said: ‘I think you should get a second wife,’” Ellen shared. “It’s cool to see how she’s hearing these stories for the first time — they’re familiar for many of us — and she always says: ‘Is there more?’”

Ellen gifted her language helper a Bible in the national language and, after each language lesson, marked the story they had read. Although the woman’s young daughter keeps her busy, “I’m praying that she reads it,” Ellen said.

Locals sharing the good news

Eliza*, one of the local believing women who moved back to the mountains, started practicing her professional trade in her new home. Then a church in the city gave her a grant to purchase more equipment and take on apprentices.

She hired two local girls, taught them her craft and slowly started telling them about Jesus. “Sometimes they would watch movies in the national language about Jesus, and she would share her testimony. They were just really amazed that she was from their ethnic group, but she was a believer in Jesus,” Ellen recounted.

As Eliza shared, she read the Bible with the girls and showed them from the Word who Jesus is.

“Why didn’t anyone tell us this before?” one of them wondered. “We’ve grown up our whole lives and not known about Jesus.” Eliza also gave both apprentices New Testaments in the national language, and one of the girls took it home to her father, read it with him and watched a couple of the DVDs about Jesus with him, too. From their conversations, Eliza said she believed both young women decided to follow Jesus.

“They’re some of the first people we know of that have become believers in our town, that haven’t gone somewhere else, but have actually heard from a local person and have come to faith,” Ellen stressed.

“These two girls were just ready,” Catherine said. And Eliza’s role was critical, she emphasised. “She shared so much sooner and so much deeper. She said to them: ‘God brought you because He knew you were ready to believe.’ We never saw that [openness] ourselves, but watching a local sister share the gospel, that was really exciting.”

Challenges to continue

“The Kingdom of God is like a seed that someone planted in a field, and I wonder, what is the process to get from zero to vibrant communities of Jesus followers, from no people and from a seed to a tree where birds come and nest in it?” Edward wondered.

It’s a long process, and for this Central Asian people group, “it’s kind of like the sprout is up out of the ground in terms of the Kingdom. Right now, it’s really brand new.”

Jesus’ ‘Parable of the Sower’ in Matthew 13 lists several challenges: birds that ate the seeds, shallow soil that prevented roots from growing deep, thorns that choked the young plants. Likewise, the new Central Asia believers have many obstacles that prevent their faith from growing.

For many of these believers, the biggest issue is extreme isolation. While Ellen, David and other OMers are able to meet with some of the believers in town, others live even more remotely—some hundreds of miles away from the nearest believer.

“These guys, they really have to trust Jesus. They’re the only ones there,” Edward emphasised. “They give me a different picture of what it looks like to trust God when it’s hard. We surround ourselves with a believing community; we gather for prayer; we do the stuff that draws us into God’s presence. [In the mountains] there aren’t other people around; there’s not a community they can go to; their wives don’t even believe.”

“As more local people share with others, or we’re sharing with them, our prayer is that family groups or natural communities of believers will gather together, will gather around the Word, so that would be their fellowship, their community, and it wouldn’t be one isolated believer who is all by themselves,” Catherine explained.

On a recent visit, one of the believers in the mountains asked Catherine to pray that she could remain steadfast. “She knows that Jesus is everything to her, and yet she says: ‘I’m not sure I can do it.’ She has encouragement. She meets with one of our teammates regularly,” Catherine shared. “I don’t know what it’s like to be so hard pressed that you’re almost crushed.”

Another woman, whose husband has recently become a religious leader, struggles to grow her faith in light of the challenges at home, Catherine described: “I asked her: ‘Do you feel alone?’ And she said: ‘No, I know God’s with me.’”

Nonetheless, she has to rely on God’s Word (in her second language, Russian) to feed herself. Without community to keep her accountable, she struggles to remain consistent. “When she doesn’t read the Word, she doesn’t pray, she doesn’t share,” Catherine explained. “When she’s not reading the Word, she’s discouraged.”

Pray that the believers in this people group would faithfully read God’s Word and find encouragement and strength in His promises. Pray the new believers would understand and embrace suffering as a context for spiritual growth. Pray that family groups would come to faith to provide community for isolated individuals.

*Name changed for security

Nicole is a world traveller and writer for OM International, based in the US. She’s passionate about partnering with believers to communicate the ways God is working across the globe. In her free time, you’ll find her biking, paddle boarding or curling up with coffee and a good book.

We were nearing the end of the beach, such as it was, and had just turned around, when a group of women sitting together called us over. They’d noticed we were foreigners, and, as we approached, they unscrewed a large glass jar of dried apricots tucked behind their spread of picnic foods. One of the women emptied a plastic grocery bag and poured half of the jar’s contents into it. Then she handed us the bag, along with a package of crisps, and smiled.

My husband and I put our hands over our hearts, smiled back and said, ‘Thank you.’ Then we walked back to the shady spot our own group had claimed for the afternoon. When we fished out one of the dried apricots to try, we realised they were stuffed with almonds. Wanting to show our appreciation for the gift, we grabbed half a package of candy-covered almonds we’d purchased earlier in the week and an unopened chocolate bar to take back to the women.

We didn’t speak a word of the local language or even the widely prevalent Russian, for that matter. When we got back to the ladies, we handed them our small offering and smiled again. Then, through a series of hand motions, they invited us to sit with them. We perched on the edge of the wooden platform and tried to communicate. We asked about the apricots, wondering who had made the stuffed delicacies. They laughed as they attempted to answer, mimicking the process of picking, pitting, drying and stuffing the fruit.

They called over their sons, towelling off after their own swim, who pulled out a smart phone translation app. Despite the technology, we couldn’t understand much, but we continued to express our appreciation for their country and their generosity.

Eventually, we stood up, ready to re-join the people we’d come with. Before we could walk away, though, the women picked up the jar of dried apricots again and unscrewed the lid. Then they tipped over the jar, dumping every last apricot into another plastic bag. We tried to protest, wanting them to keep some of their obviously labour-intensive treats for themselves, but they refused, sending us away with the second bag.

That act of generosity has stuck with me. We were strangers, and they called us over to bless us. They didn’t have to give us anything—let alone everything—but they did it with smiles on their faces. They didn’t know us; they didn’t expect anything in return; they just gave.

What a beautiful picture of generosity—the kind of overflowing, unasked for abundance God delights in bestowing on His children. And the kind of extravagant generosity we, in return, are asked to emulate.

“The point is this: whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows bountifully will also reap bountifully. Each one must give as he has decided in his heart, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver. And God is able to make all grace about to you, so that having all sufficiency in all things at all times, you may abound in every good work.” – 2 Corinthians 9:6-8 (ESV)

As a support-raising missionaries, my husband and I know all about asking others to be generous and rejoicing in the resulting gifts they choose to invest in God’s Kingdom through the ministry God has entrusted us to do. In turn, we try to steward that money well and use a portion of those funds to bless others.

But the ladies on the beach challenged me to more—not only giving with an eye to what’s budgeted or left-over, but turning the jar upside down and shaking it out for the benefit of others. 

This year, let’s go beyond giving to those we love and instead look for ways to bless strangers, to go out of our way to welcome people we don’t know, to give what we have without holding back—and to rejoice in God’s promise that as we give, cheerfully, He will continue to provide us with everything we need to do His good works.

Have you ever experienced extravagant generosity from a stranger? What ideas do you have to bless others this year?

Nicole is a world traveller and writer for OM International, based in the US. She’s passionate about partnering with believers to communicate the ways God is working across the globe. In her free time, you’ll find her biking, paddle boarding or curling up with coffee and a good book.

“At some of the weddings, I was only there for the ceremony. But with Maya*, I was there for everything.”

Ruthie met Maya, before she was married, in one of the few, small Christian fellowships in the 99 per cent Muslim country where they live. She and her husband, Karim*, had moved there to share God’s love with communities who had no access to the gospel, and they wanted to partner with national believers. Maya and, eventually, her husband, Jad*, were a natural fit.

“We were talking about health lessons and how we can grow in ministry,” Maya recalled about their initial contact. “Slowly we became closer and closer to this family, Karim and Ruthie. Now we are very close, like sisters.

“We meet with each other regularly; we pray for each other; we know what difficulties we have or they have; we help each other… So if in our family, my husband and myself, if we have any difficulties, any questions, we come to them.”

While answering emergency phone calls in the middle of the night, praying for and counselling each other might be part of any close friendship, Ruthie and Karim have another word for their relationship with Maya and Jad as well as three other couples in their community: discipleship.

Ruthie and Karim regularly meet with the four married couples—all from different fellowships—for prayer, reading Scripture, accountability, training and strategic planning. “We are sharing our daily life with them and asking them how they are doing,” Karim said.

They deepen the connection by “allowing them to speak in our lives and having permission from them to speak in their lives,” Ruthie added. “We make ourselves available to them, approachable.”

That availability is intended not only for the growth of the couples but also that of the emerging Church in Central Asia. “We try to model, ‘As we are with you, you need to be with people,’” Ruthie said.

“One of the couples, they had an issue together, and they called us at midnight, 12 o’clock,” Karim remembered. “We went there; they had a lot of issues; they said, ‘We don’t know what to do.’…We knelt down together …The Holy Spirit moved, and they both started to confess from both sides.”

Another pair, Ahmed* and Hannah*, recently gave birth to another daughter—a blow to Ahmed, who had fervently prayed for a first son. Despite Ahmed’s desire to follow Jesus, “it was a really hard time,” Ruthie said. “When I talked to his wife, she said, ‘Ahmed has totally changed now. He is fighting at home, in front of the girls, he was not like that.’”

“When I heard that my daughter was born… I just came [home]. It was night time, I was alone, and I started to cry, beating the floor,” Ahmed shared. He asked God, “Why are you not giving me a son? What do you want with me? Why you are quiet, since my wife was pregnant? Why are you not answering my questions?”

During that time, Karim took Ahmed aside, out of the city for a few days to pray and process his disappointment. After he’d returned home, Ruthie checked in with Hannah again. “He is a different person,” she confirmed.

When their baby daughter was a couple months old, with the other daughters in tow, Ahmed and Hannah accompanied Karim and Ruthie on an outing to a nearby lake. Ahmed hugged his daughters, splashed with them in the water and, in the evening, peeled bits of freshly fried fish away from the bones to feed them—paternal tasks that were neither modelled in his childhood (his father worked in another country and only spent two weeks at home each year) nor in his wider culture.

“Central Asian men are not hugging their children, but believing couples, we saw they take care of their children,” Karim explained. “Fathers, they know this is not just the woman’s responsibility.”

“Slowly, slowly, God gave me strength and has explained to me that each of your daughters is special; they were born for God, not for me. God created them for Himself, for His glory, for His work in this earth. I am just their father; I just need to raise them in a right way,” Ahmed shared.

Much of discipleship is doing life together, using challenges to point people to Jesus and encouraging them to share what they’ve learnt with others in the communities around them.

As foreigners, Ruthie and Karim recognise their influence only goes so far. “We are very good about sharing; what about the follow up? We are thinking, how do we follow up? We found we need locals around us,” Karim explained. “For developing vibrant communities of Jesus followers, we need to see the body of Christ in the bigger picture.”

That means national believers need to take the lead in ministry. At the weekly women’s group, the women Ruthie disciples teach lessons and facilitate discovery Bible studies. They learn how to include non-believers in the discussion and build friendships with those seeking truth.

With the men’s ministry and youth ministry, Karim also appoints national believers to give health talks, share devotions and follow up with interested persons. Through daily life and side-by-side ministry, Karim and Ruthie have seen growth in the couples they disciple.

Karim reported that they saw the couples overcome fear about how to talk to extended family about their faith and how to answer their questions from a biblical perspective. They have also been learning how to use tools, such as sports ministry and the women's gathering, to impact their community. They recognise how discipleship is important and how this fatherhood issue can bring change in their community.

"I believe this is the love of Christ pouring in their lives to spread the love of Christ in their community," Karim said. "We saw that this is not us; this is God. Jesus is giving them braveness. This is growth in their lives; trusting the Lord, their level of faith is increased.”

The Church in Central Asia is young, and believers—all in the first and second generation of faith—need discipleship. Pray they will grow in their understanding of God’s Word and that prayer and Bible studies will create momentum. Pray for maturity and boldness for national believers to share their faith with their communities. Pray for OM workers to continue sharing their journey with new believers and to add many more to God’s kingdom.

*Name changed for security

Nicole is a world traveller and writer for OM International, based in the US. She’s passionate about partnering with believers to communicate the ways God is working across the globe. In her free time, you’ll find her biking, paddle boarding or curling up with coffee and a good book.

Persecution for exploring other faiths—even for listening—exists and causes widespread fear in the community, but locals who are scared to listen to the Good News still have opportunity to experience Jesus by watching the lives of long-term workers invested in their country’s welfare. “In a sense we have daily opportunities to share, but that’s through our lives,” Magda said. “The goal of my team is that we would be salt and light incarnate in the place we’re living. The way we interact with [locals] and the conversations we have with [them] are the major way in which we are displaying and demonstrating the love of God.”

Recently, Magda needed to address a situation with one of her subordinates at work—a Central Asian man. When the investigation concluded, she didn’t need to fire him, but she had to introduce some disciplinary measures. During the process, the man came to her, tears streaming down his face, and asked, “How can I ever get you to respect me again? I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what actions I need to do. How can I earn back your respect?”

“I love you, and I respect you,” Magda responded. “I know who you are. The fact that you have done this wrong thing doesn’t mean I change the way I think about you.”

But for the man, immersed in the works-based mindset of Islam, “there was no way he could accept the fact that [his actions] weren’t changing our relationship,” Magda recounted. “I shared that I have a different understanding of God. God is a God who loves us and who has made a way for us to be reconciled and back in relationship with Him.”

Talking about the situation months later, Magda said, “I recognised that it wasn’t me he was seeking a release from... That’s not a normal reaction from a local man. God is doing something deeper, stirring up a desire for reconnection.”

Christmas message of hope

At Christmastime, after an especially trying year, Magda shared a message of hope with her colleagues. “We talked about last year being a hard year, but for many of them, that was a small thing in comparison to what they’d been through in the past,” she said.

Despite the challenges, she shared with the staff that “we still have hope. The reason we have hope is because we believe in God and we trust that God loves us and God cares for us.”

She read Isaiah 9:6 – “For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace” (NIV).

“Because it was Christmas, I had an opportunity to share that this is what we believe. [Isaiah] said the government was on His shoulders. God would be the one to oversee what was happening. It also said He was the Prince of Peace. Really the only place we’re going to find peace is when we trust God with our lives. The only place we’re going to find hope is when we trust God with our lives,” she said.

“As we look towards next year, we can have hope,” she told her co-workers. Not because their circumstances would change but because they trusted in God.

“We have opportunities like that because we are living in the country and building relationships, so we can share small seeds of truth,” Magda noted.

Another long-term worker, Anna*, agreed: “If you come straight out in saying, ‘You need Jesus,’ or whatever, there will be a huge reaction, but if you take small, incremental steps, they get interested and want to know… what’s different.”

Blessings both ways

Bob* and Anna, who lived in country for many years and now work with Central Asians living abroad, have seen many people come to faith outside the region in the last few years. But even inside the country, where there is not a single church building, “things are changing, and there are people coming to faith,” Bob said.

Local believers have to be careful who they talk to, but “they don’t hide their faith from those they know are Christians,” Magda explained.

“We have the opportunity to walk alongside those who are coming to faith in Central Asia. It’s a new and exciting thing for me this year that I’m getting to know local believers, and I’m able to just say to them, ‘How can we best serve you?’”

Expat workers cannot easily meet with Central Asian seekers in the country—“as foreigners, we just attract a lot of attention,” Magda noted—but they can pray for and provide resources to the local believers who are quietly, bravely telling others about Jesus.

“Our agency has always been good in literature,” she noted. “We make sure that we get various materials and make it available for people that are wanting to give the Word of God to those they have been sharing with.”

Some local believers also look for ways to bless those discipling them.

After a few months outside of the region last year, Magda needed to make security upgrades to her house. She asked a local believer she knew to oversee the process and hired him for a month as the building project manager. Later on, after the construction had been completed, she was having dinner with the man and his family.

In the middle of the meal, he turned to Magda and said, “You know, when you were moving into your new home, that first day that you asked me to come and have a look at it, I walked through every room and every floor, and I prayed for your home, and I prayed that God would protect you in this place.”

Being the recipient of that blessing blew Magda away. “That was something he thought of himself, and he wanted to bless us,” she said. “It’s good to know that it’s a partnership.”

Pray that more people would respond to the call to come and work in this hurting nation. The risk is great, but the opportunities are huge. Pray for long-term workers in the country to have courage to recognise and use every opening to share their faith and wisdom to know how far to speak and when to stop. Pray for local believers to grow in their faith and be able to impact their families and communities.

*Name changed for security

Nicole is a world traveller and writer for OM International, based in the US. She’s passionate about partnering with believers to communicate the ways God is working across the globe. In her free time, you’ll find her biking, paddle boarding or curling up with coffee and a good book.

For a number of years, the leadership team in one Central Asian country have been praying for a specific region—“a difficult place, spiritually, with a proud and aggressive tribe of Central Asians,” described Kevin*, the OM country leader. “Very few churches exist in the three major cities, and these churches face significant persecution from authorities and the community.”

OM in Central Asia is seeking to mobilise existing churches to reach beyond their walls and recognise their role in reaching people in their region who have never heard about Jesus. One of the most strategic tools for introducing Central Asians to missions is OM’s annual Central Asian outreach, where participants gather for centralised training before being sent out in small teams for short-term outreach trips.

When one local pastor was asked about participating in the Central Asian outreach this year, he said that God was leading his church to engage the same area of the country that OM had been praying about. In fact, the church already had some contacts in one of the cities and wanted to send a team there.

“Their vision was to open a church there although they hadn’t even visited the place yet,” Kevin said. “The team went [on outreach], shared the gospel and experienced God working in amazing ways, opening up situations for spiritual conversations and opening eyes to see Jesus.”

When they returned, the short-term team shared about their experiences, and “their enthusiasm was infectious,” Kevin explained. “As their pastor of 20 years listened, he was touched by their experience and said, ‘We should send more people, maybe everyone, to everywhere… to share the gospel!’”

OM’s Central Asian outreach aims to see the gospel going out to every village and city of Central Asia and to see the lives of those participating in the outreaches changed for His glory. This church team’s eager participation—and their pastor’s subsequent response—encouraged OM leadership to continue pressing forward in the ministry.

“Not only did we see God drawing people to Himself, not only [did we see] participants transformed as they experienced God work, but also the pastor and the sending church have been challenged to be declaring Jesus to the unreached parts of their country and beyond, and seeking to reproduce their vibrant community of Jesus followers across Central Asia,” Kevin said.

Praise God for the short-term team’s fruitful time in an unreached area! Pray that God would continue to open doors into this region for OM and local believers to share the gospel of Jesus with those who have never heard.

*Name changed for security

Nicole is a world traveller and writer for OM International, based in the US. She’s passionate about partnering with believers to communicate the ways God is working across the globe. In her free time, you’ll find her biking, paddle boarding or curling up with coffee and a good book.

The team hasn’t lived in this area of Central Asia for a long time, but they’ve made relationships with scores of people. “We cannot take all the invitations we get. We could accept many more invitations to eat with people and talk with people. It’s really an open door,” team member Iva* described.

Shopping at the bazaar is a chance to meet people. So is going anywhere, really. “Just walking on the street, you meet most of the people,” team leader David* said.

Developing relationships, however, requires intentionality – lingering over produce purchases and stopping to say hello whenever you see a familiar face – and flexibility.

“There is a butcher who works along the road home. I always try to stop and have a good word for him,” David shared. “One afternoon, he said, ‘Come with me, and we will have an evening meeting with other friends.’”

Five hours later, after driving out of town and meeting up with other men, David returned home.

Culturally, men in Central Asia can “stop by anywhere,” say hello and invite someone out for tea. David has even talked about Jesus while sitting in the public sauna, a central gathering area for men in the town.

Another team member, Missy*, said the team shares a lot, but she acknowledged they haven’t seen much evidence of truth penetrating people’s lives. “I think there’s a lot of people that have a spiritual blindness. They hear it, but they can’t accept the truth of who Jesus is. They hear it, but there’s still a barrier.”

The team doesn’t know any Central Asian believers in their town, but they have heard rumours of believers in one or two of the villages.

Embracing culture, sharing stories

Apart from encounters out and about, the team has also learnt to embrace the Central Asian in-house visiting culture as a way to share stories. There’s a special word in the local language for the act of visiting people in their homes, sitting on cushions, drinking tea and talking.

“It’s a very defined script. It’s always the same,” Iva explained. The two- to four-hour affair starts outside the door, when the host brings a jug of water for guests to wash their hands. Then everyone moves inside and sits around a tablecloth on the floor, artfully covered with small dishes full of nuts, raisins, biscuits, chocolate, savoury pastries and bread. Once the bread is broken, everything starts.

The host pours tea into a little round bowl–the tea cup–that gets passed around. “Tea drinking and bread are the most important,” Missy said. As a host, “you’re constantly pouring tea because that shows you’re serving a lot.”

On visits, a prescribed order determines the food and beverages served. Likewise, a defined hierarchy governs where to sit and who can speak.

“If you’re higher up (richer, older) you sit at the top of the room. If you’re lower, you sit at the door,” Missy shared.

As foreigners, the team members are often offered a special position. “Sometimes it’s an opportunity to speak, when age-wise and because we are unmarried, we would not have the opportunity to speak,” Iva said.

Still, it can be difficult to steer the conversation, David noted. Among men, subjects range from football to marriage to the price of a cow. “I cannot change the topic,” he explains. “I have to wait and maybe at one point I can jump in with [spiritual] things.”

“Often they are just curious who the foreigners are, what they do and stuff. Occasionally, they invite us to tell stories,” Iva added.

One woman in particular, who was instrumental in bringing the small team into the area, regularly creates opportunities for them to talk about Jesus.

“She really enjoys hearing stories, and various times when we’ve visited her and sat around with her relatives, she’s actually stopped the conversation and asked us to tell a story [about God],” Missy said.

The woman also remembers stories shared in the past. A couple years ago, Missy shared, “we were having a conversation about learning language and why it’s important and why we even have different languages. I just told [the Tower of Babel story] as a random, to-the-side comment. Later, she asked again, ‘Missy, tell the story about the tower.’ And she connected it to God.”

“When we share stories or even when we read, people are so excited about Jesus—they feel that the stories fit in their cultural background. They say, ‘That’s like Central Asia. That’s like our community. That’s like our religious leader,’” Iva said. “They very much can identify with the stories.”

Serving and pioneering

The team is trailblazing in Central Asia both geographically and professionally. David builds therapy devices and teaches language classes in the community. Iva and Missy serve as therapists.

“My heart was always for Muslims, and I wanted to use my professional skills [on the field],” Iva shared. “It’s exciting to be in a pioneering situation.”

The people living in the team’s host city are known throughout the country for their religious conservatism. “They are more strict than other places in the country, but I think it’s an opportunity because they really want to please God,” Iva explained. “Many of the ladies I am meeting want to please God by fasting or praying. I think the Lord sees their desire to please Him.”

Matthew 5:6 comes to mind, Missy added—“those who hunger and thirst for righteousness” (NIV). They want to be on the right path with God, that’s why they do the things they do religiously.”

As part of their professional work, Missy and Iva often meet with mothers of children with disabilities. “We give practical advice based on our professional backgrounds, but it’s also an opportunity to counsel the family about the disability,” Missy said. “Very often the conversation leads to sharing that your child isn’t cursed by God… . God doesn’t pick a bad mother and curse her with a disabled child. Actually, God picks a good mother, who will look after the child and care for him. Actually, God loves you.”

“This is a really key ground-breaking work,” Missy stressed. “Often women burst out crying because this is the first time they have heard [that message of love].”

Like others in the town, mothers of children with disabilities want to relate to God and want to love Him, but they believe they have been cursed by Him, the team explained. “We believe this first conversation will already plant seeds for them to see their child differently and see God differently,” Missy emphasised.

Of course, the team members pray their relationships will go deeper. “It’s our profession and our passion to help people with disabilities, but that’s not the main point,” Iva stated.

Pray that the Lord would reveal Himself to people in the town where the team serves. Pray that people will share what they learn about Jesus with family and friends. Pray for vibrant communities of Jesus followers to develop amongst these least-reached people.

*Names changed for security

Nicole James is a world traveller and writer for OM International. She’s passionate about partnering with fields to communicate the ways God is working across the globe.

OM workers share the message that Jesus changes everything. Many believers, however, struggle to experience total transformation in their lives, due to false beliefs they continue to hold onto. In Central Asia, one OM couple uses Transformation Prayer Ministry (TPM) to address painful parts of people’s pasts, identify lies they believe and provide freedom for their futures.

Simply put, TPM is “about finding hurting lies that we received in the past from a young age, and through prayer, we ask Jesus to tell the truth to the person,” explained Samal*, who leads the ministry with her husband, Miras*.

Samal, who first received TPM at a training in St. Petersburg, recalled the memory the ministry brought to mind: “I was in my home, maybe seven years old, and I was in the living room alone looking at the picture of my sister who passed away... I was crying and telling God that he made a mistake. He took the wrong person. I felt like I wasn’t supposed to live. I’m not worthy of living.”

That, Samal said, was the lie found in her memory. The next step in TPM is to pray for God to reveal His truth to the individual. “Then God talks to people,” Samal explained. “Sometimes people receive some verses from the Bible. Some people just hear His voice or feel His presence.”

Samal saw a vision.

“I saw the universe, like a cosmos, I saw the planet, the earth, all the planets and the sun, and I saw hands creating a baby in the mother’s womb,” she described. “Through that, I realised God was telling me that ‘I made you in your mother’s womb. I loved you in your mother’s womb. You were created. You were [worthy of] living.’”

After completing the TPM training in Russia, Samal and Miras, formed a little group in their country to study and practice the ministry. Then they presented the material to their Central Asian church leadership. The pastor’s wife received the ministry first. The pastor was interested, Samal noted, “but then when he saw the changes in his wife, he realised that this ministry really worked.”

At that point, he provided space for Miras and Samal to lead 13-week TPM courses in the church. From a woman left feeling helpless after her mother’s death to a youth leader hurt by his parents’ divorce to a woman struggling with a past abortion, Miras and Samal have facilitated a process of Spirit-led transformation for around 70 believers in their community.

According to the TPM website, “The purpose of TPM is that every believer become rightly positioned so they may intentionally and purposefully cooperate with what God is doing in refining their faith, renewing their minds and transforming their lives.”

TPM, which follows a seven-step process, begins by asking an individual to identity the emotion he or she is presently experiencing. However, in Central Asia, that request often presents a challenge.

“As [Central Asians], we never talk about our feelings,” Samal stated. “We grew up without hearing from our parents that they love us. They try to show with their actions, and they are caring, but sometimes you want to hear with words. When you have problems, you don’t talk about it. You don’t talk about your emotions.”

Therefore, people struggled to share what things they were feeling “because they couldn’t describe what that feeling is,” Samal said. When she and Miras started TPM courses in their church, they started giving participants a list of feelings in Russian and in their Central Asian language. “Some feelings we can say in Russian because we hear it on the movies and we hear it on TV, but in [our language], we don’t know it because we never talk about it.”

Miras tries to use TPM as part of mentoring younger men. He also sees value for Christian leaders who may be leading thriving communities of Jesus followers but struggling privately. One local leader told Miras about his relationship problems with his wife and his spiritual burn-out. “I preach, but I don’t believe for God to work,” the leader admitted. “If [TPM] is helpful for me, you can try it.”

Miras and Samal plan to meet with the couple individually and, hopefully, lead them through TPM. “This is a very good couple, their ministry is very good, but you aren’t thinking what happens inside,” Miras shared. “He’s a very good man, but has so much wrong thinking, so many bad feelings.”

Pray that believers in Central Asia would find freedom from the lies they have internalised. Pray that Miras, Samal and others would be able to effectively use TPM to help Central Asians become thriving followers of Jesus.

*Name changed for security

Nicole James is a world traveller and writer for OM International. She’s passionate about partnering with believers to communicate the ways God is working across the globe.

Society scorns the individual women in the trade, regardless of whether they’ve entered by choice or coercion, but is immune to prostitution overall. Children scamper around the same streets where women stand, jingling a handful of keys, alerting passers-by to their availability. Families shop at bazaars bordering brothels. Sometimes, at dusk, cars full of men will pull up together—fathers or uncles bringing younger male relatives as a rite of passage, Amelia described. “If you see that growing up, how normal does it feel to you?” she stressed. “I pray that men will realise this isn’t what sex is. Sex should be about love, it should be about your family, with your wife.”

For the majority of women in the trade, however, sex is about survival.

They cross city limits and country borders, motivated to earn money that will help them achieve a better life or support their children. But once they enter the trade, they rarely make it out. “Before the girls will come with us, they have to believe something else. They have to believe that they have other options. They have to believe they’re worth something,” Amelia stressed.

Katya*, a Central Asian believer who helps with administrative tasks and accompanies the small outreach team on occasion, said, “God gave us freedom, so I want also to share with them that they can be free. And help them to get out. Some of them think that they have no choice, and they don’t have any way to start a new life, but we want to help in that.”

Breaking the ice

A handful of OMers, including Amelia and Katya, seek to make relationships with women already involved in prostitution as well as those most vulnerable to it. They don’t have a specific programme but have adopted practises that put them in proximity to the women they want to reach.

Sometimes a pair of OMers walk down a street where girls are known to stand, praying for and interacting with those they meet. Other times, they visit a nearby brothel and sit in a break area, praying and waiting for the women to approach them.

“There’s a lot of suspicion if you just go and start talking to someone,” Amelia explained. “When we’re walking on the streets and meeting girls, we found that just starting to talk to them wasn’t working, so we would ask for help.”

Questions like, “Do you know where a good place to eat around here is?” or “Do you know how much I should pay for a taxi to get to this place?” broke the ice. “We found out the girls really wanted to be helpful,” Amelia said. “Even though they’ve been through difficult situations, their hearts aren’t completely closed up yet. They’re still willing to help a stranger.” By asking for help, the OMers also start relationships they can build on later.

Of course, resulting conversations often stall on the surface level topics of hair styles and children. “You can have these conversations for a year or two years before you get to something significant or before they trust you enough to say, ‘I want to leave,’” Amelia noted.

One of the brothels the team visits has a café where the women take breaks between clients. For a long time, whenever Amelia went there, she would sit in the café and pray that God would provide a way to talk to the women. “For ages that wasn’t happening,” she recalled. “We were just praying for the girls but not engaging them.”

Finally, on an afternoon visit, Amelia and another OMer, both new to the local language, arrived at the brothel and found the café empty, except for the girl who served coffee and tea.

“Do you want to sit with us and help us practice our language?” they asked her.

She agreed and sat down next to them. “When the girls came in, instead of going over to the counter to buy their food, they came to where she was, which was at our table, and then they started talking to us, too!” Amelia recalled. “From that day forward, we had relationships.”

In the end, the solution again proved so simple: “It’s just us going in and asking for help,” Amelia described. “If we humble ourselves, we can connect with people a lot more easily.”

When the church cares—and when it doesn’t

Rosanna*, a girl Amelia encountered in her city, was alternating between Russian and English when they met. “Usually, the girls have quite similar back stories. Maybe they’re from another village. Maybe they have children or relatives they’re supporting. They came in to the city looking for a better life, but they didn’t find it,” Amelia said.

Expecting Rosanna to echo this narrative, Amelia was surprised—and saddened—to hear her account. She had studied English and German, earning a university degree, and was living and working in another big city—doing Bible translation.

“A lot of the girls won’t be 100 per cent honest with us, especially in the first few meetings,” Amelia noted, “but this makes me so sad if this is true. If she was working with the church, and then she moved cities, ...who was not looking out for her that she ended up in this business?”

Despite discouragement at some of the stories and the scope of the situation, Amelia has also seen God work through dismal situations. At one point, after establishing multiple relationships in a particular brothel, a new pimp forbade the OM workers from visiting girls there. “Stay away, stay away, stay away!” she hissed whenever they showed up.

“We were really worried,” Amelia shared. “These are the girls we’ve spent so much time with. The whole ministry is threatened.”

The team took time out to pray for the situation, asking friends and co-workers to join them. Eventually, they returned to the brothel and discovered that the problematic pimp had been overpowered. During their absence, however, one of the girls had left the trade. She was at a partner organisation’s shelter, and a small local church had taken responsibility for her rehabilitation—offering to help her find work and accommodation. “The timing for that and our faith was crazy, the fact that God’s doing that for this lady is crazy, and the fact that a local church wanted to get involved and help—that’s huge!” Amelia enthused.

“If someone’s been known to be a prostitute, it’s hard for them to find another job afterwards,” she explained. For their career prospects to change, it’s imperative that believers start businesses that will employ these girls. “At the moment, our partners have a shelter, so if girls come out, they can go there, and they can get rehabilitation, but we don’t have any business we can put the girls into.”

Meanwhile, the OM team hopes to advocate for the women in area churches, “so that the believers will step in: that when they’re going through the streets that they will be different than other people, that they won’t just walk past the girls, but they will see them as people God loves,” Amelia explained.

From project groups to DBS

Prostitutes are not the only women who operate on the fringes of Central Asian society. Amelia has also partnered with another organisation to empower the poorest women in the country where she serves.

Through the project, which involves business skill development, God has provided Amelia and her partner opportunities to connect with individual women. “We’re sitting in parks, knocking on doors, going to schools and asking the teachers to point out the poorest women in the community,” Amelia described. “For a lot of them, they’ve never met a believer before, so it’s God allowing us to enter into these women’s lives and giving us a way to do it, even if the project objectives are turning out really hard to meet.”

Through the project, Amelia’s partner—a Central Asian believer who was divorced—discovered that she could reach out to women in similar situations. After a month of working with other divorcees, “we still don’t have a [project] group, but two of them have come to know the Lord, and one of them is interested in going along to house churches,” Amelia shared. “I taught her [Discovery Bible Study] because she wants to start doing her own groups with these women, and they’re looking to her for guidance. This is so cool!”

“When I joined OM, the most important thing for me was that in a lot of places in the world, and definitely in the prostitution sector, there are women that have been told by their societies, by people they’re meeting, ‘You’re no good. You’re not good enough. You’re lesser,’” Amelia summarised. “It’s so hard for me to see people who don’t realise actually they are so important and so special. ...I want women, who don’t believe that God could possibly love them, to know that He does.”

*Name changed for security

Nicole James is a world traveller and writer for OM International. She’s passionate about partnering with believers to communicate the ways God is working across the globe.

First, they spent two years at seminary in the USA, preparing for the next step. Then came a vision trip to Turkey, and, as an afterthought, a short visit to a long-time friend leading an OM team in Central Asia.

Those four days in Central Asia changed their lives. “God really started growing our heart for Central Asia and for the Central Asian people,” Christy said. “We’re not go-it-alone pioneers, and the team in Central Asia was strong, and our friend was leading it, and it really seemed like a place we could work.”

Several years after settling into their host country with their children, the couple continues to see God’s confirmation. “Every time you get another visa that seemed impossible to get. Every time it seems absolutely impossible that we would have enough money... this is confirmation,” Christy explained.

As a whole, Central Asia is predominantly Muslim. However, many people practice Islam nominally, if at all, simply equating their religion with their nationality as a result of Soviet-era policies. Thus, “To be Kyrgyz is to be Muslim. To be Tajik is to be Muslim,” explained Dr. John Heathershaw of Exeter University, England, in a roundtable discussion hosted by RadioFreeEurope/Radio Liberty.** The same is true across the region, OM workers acknowledged.

“It’s an unreached people, but there is an established local church, and it’s quite strategic for reaching the rest of the area,” Eric explained. “We’re living there among the unreached.”

Professional opportunities

Professionally, the couple has found places to plug in and use their skills. “God keeps surprising me with the opportunities He gives,” Christy said. “I didn’t expect to use occupational therapy in Central Asia.”

Christy stopped formal work when her daughter was born, but in Central Asia, “the opportunity to be engaged with OT again has been incredible,” she said. “We don’t go out looking for people with disabilities, but God brings people—someone who heard about this foreigner.”

The line of her work opens doors into homes, for her and other believers. “What’s been so neat is that every now and again, I am the excuse for my local friend to be able to go and visit his neighbour, someone he’s been trying to build a relationship with,” she shared. “Sometimes I’m not the one sharing the gospel, but ...I’m the reason that a friend or a colleague or someone that knows me can go and share. One family came to Christ through that.”

The father of that family had been part of a building project Christy and Eric’s expat friends had commissioned. Another Central Asian family, who were believers, was connected to both. When the local believers found out the other family had a child with cerebral palsy, they asked Christy to come visit.

Christy accompanied her friend to the family’s one-room house. While she worked with the child, the friend chatted with the parents. “I can’t pay you,” the mother told Christy, “but every time you come, I’d like to make you a meal.”

From Christy’s perspective as an occupational therapist, “that was brilliant.” Eating together allowed her to monitor the child’s posture and technique. Meanwhile, her other friend was sharing the gospel with the family.

“First the father came to Christ, and then the whole family,” Christy shared. She celebrated the family’s newfound faith and continued to champion their child, who eventually enrolled in a mainstream school, “which is amazing,” she added.

Dana*, another believing friend from the host country, occasionally accompanies Christy to therapy sessions to translate. “Sometimes they’re asking me why Christy is doing it, why she’s helping. We can’t [say] openly ‘because we’re believers and we love Jesus.’ ... I’m saying, ‘Oh because she has such a big heart and she wants to help,’” Dana explained.

Even in a short time, Dana has seen the impact of Christy’s service. “God can use this. Stories from Christy’s family and the stories from her life, they can help the parents,” she emphasised.

“Most of the time I want to tell them that they don’t have to feel sad about [their child’s disability]; they don’t have to blame themselves,” Dana added. “In our culture, if something happens to your child, this is the mom’s fault.”

Christy uses visits to actively refute that mind-set, “just encouraging the mum that this child is loved and it’s not a mistake.”

‘Shalom’ statements

“We don’t get an opportunity to sit down and tell the whole gospel all at once,” Christy said. Rather, the couple practice wide sowing, making little ‘Shalom’ statements that bring God into conversations. Sometimes the statements lead to friendships; sometimes they spark deeper conversations about God.

Through such introductions, Eric has been able to share with a taxi driver about who God is and His love for people. “If God has a son, and He walked through the earth, He really knows what we’re going through, and He really loves us,” he told the man.

Another time he caught a ride with a young Muslim man who, like Eric, enjoyed playing football. They became friends and, eventually, Christy met the man’s girlfriend, an atheist. One day, the four of them were driving somewhere together. Christy noticed a little bucket hanging from the bottom of the car in front of them—a superstition locals practised to carry their luck with them. “It’s the first time we’ve seen the bucket,” Christy told the other couple.

“Are you superstitious?” the girlfriend asked.

“No, we’re not. We believe in a God who cares for us and loves us, and we believe nothing can happen to us that He doesn’t allow.”

The conversation didn’t continue then, but another evening, the young man visited Christy and Eric’s home. Knowing his interest in graphic design, Eric showed the young man a high-quality comic book about the story of Jesus that had been translated into the local language. “It was the first comic book he’d ever seen in [his language]. The pictures were so well done, he was really able to appreciate it as an artist,” Eric noted. “We were able to explain the gospel.”

“It’s those kind of relationships and opportunities that are so exciting, and it’s nothing we could have planned,” Christy said.

“There’s nothing we do that God couldn’t do another way,” Eric continued. “Our impact is as broken sinners... God is already there. God is already working in people’s lives.”

“It’s actually such a privilege to see what He’s doing in Central Asia and maybe to be part of it,” Christy concluded.

Praise God for the work He is doing among unreached people in Central Asia. Pray that workers would boldly take opportunities to speak about God and trust in His faithfulness and perfect timing.

*Name changed for security

Nicole James is a world traveller and writer for OM International. She’s passionate about partnering with believers to communicate the ways God is working across the globe.

** https://www.rferl.org/a/central-asia-islam/26707668.html

Those 300,000 people, living in rural villages with little to no gospel engagement, are whom OM workers Abbas* and Maryam* want to reach through community development projects.

From sports ministry to nursing clinics to peace-making iniatives, the couple neither limit the project topics nor the age of participants. However, they do seek to offer holistic development: physical, social, emotional and spiritual.

In many cases, the projects create opportunities for Abbas, Meryam and other believers to introduce Muslims to Jesus.

Sports programme provides access to people with diasabilities

When Abbas and Maryam started a sports programme for youth with disabilities in one village, they met a family with five daughters, two of them with disabilities. According to Abbas, in Central Asian society, boys are often considered more valuable than girls, and disabilities are seen as curses.

“People think we are cursed. People think we sinned,” the family told Abbas and Maryam.

As the couple continued to visit the community, however, they brought different people to share testimonies as part of the sports programme. After listening to the various speakers, Ara*, one of the daughters with a disability, said she was interested in reading the Bible.

“Now she’s reading the Bible and learning. Praise God!” Abbas said.

Although Ara has not made a commitment to following Christ, “she is searching,” he added. “Everyone has a process [in coming to the point in the relationship] that you say, ‘Yes, Lord, you are my saviour.’”

The sports ministry provided access to several families, with whom Abbas and Meryam have developed ongoing relationships. “There’s a lot of brokenness,” Abbas explained. “We speak about inner healing, peace-making sessions and ethics that take them toward the cross. It’s a process that needs time.”

Health classes pave way to talk about forgiveness

Abbas and Meryam visit villages where there are not good medical clinics or hospitals and offer health classes to women. “In our lessons, we were sharing stories from the Bible according to topics,” Meryam said.

One Muslim woman, Marjan*, had gone on a pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi Arabia, in hopes of receiving forgiveness for sins according to Islamic teaching. She approached Meryam after one of the health classes.

“These are interesting stories. Where did you get them from?” Marjan asked.

“They are from the Holy Book,” Meryam responded.

“Can I have the stories?”

Wanting to mentor a pair of Central Asian believers serving with her, Meryam told Marjan to ask them for a Bible. When she did, they gave her one.

“She started reading and she’s still reading,” Meryam confirmed. “We are praying for God to open her heart and that she will understand [that] to get forgiveness and salvation, she doesn’t need to go far from her country.”

Football club introduces sportsman to Jesus

A few Central Asian believers Abbas mentors recently started a football club. Most of the men who signed up to play were Muslims. In order to be a good witness on the football field, the believers established rules for their team: no cursing, no fighting, no cheating.

During the fourth week of games, Kia*, one of the Muslim players asked one of the believers what was different about their group.

“Nothing,” the believer responded. “We are trying to do what we are reading.”

“What are you reading?” Kia asked.

“We’re reading from the Bible.”

“You’re Christian!”

“We’re believers, but if you’re interested, you can also read.”

At the next football gathering, Kia told the believers, “I will try praying. If I score a goal, I will believe in Jesus.”

That day, Kia scored a goal and announced, “I believe Jesus exists and listens to prayer.”

Since then, he has been reading the Bible with the group of believers. “That [story] was very encouraging to us,” Abbas shared.

In terms of transforming society, it’s imperative for men, like Kia, to accept Christ, Abbas noted. Although he said women in Central Asia seem to be more open to accepting Jesus, they have greater restrictions than men and can be more easily persecuted for their faith.

“If women come to faith, praise God they are coming to faith, but then they have more difficulties [in their families]. If men come to faith first, they can lead whole families [to Christ],” Abbas explained.

“One friend accepted Christ through our project five years ago. Now his wife is a believer, his children are believers and he is sharing with his sisters, mother and neighbours,” he said. “That’s why we are praying, ‘God provide us men of peace.’”

Praise God for the work He is doing in Central Asia. Pray for more workers to join Abbas and Meryam’s team. Pray that God will provide finances and visas for workers in their host country.

*Name changed

Nicole James is a world traveller and writer for OM International. She’s passionate about partnering with fields to communicate the ways God is working across the globe.

This easy friendship through football is part of what makes sports ministry so effective in Central Asia. Local men, especially, flock to group sport opportunities and often spend time together afterwards—at a sauna or in a nearby tea shop.

The other reason sports ministry works well, long-term OM worker Michael* noted, is because , unlike participating in something overtly Christian, there’s no barrier for Central Asians to participate in football, volleyball, track competitions or adventure sports. “[Central Asians] can’t separate being Muslim as part of their identity,” he said. “Even just to walk into a church building is really daunting for them, and counter-cultural and maybe offensive to their family.”

Sports ministry, however, is “being Jesus on the sports field and in the community,” he said. As Central Asians interact with Christians—locals and foreigners alike—on the playing field, “we’re able to break down some of the stereotypes of who Christians are and through that start some discipleship as well.”  

“Why do you like playing with the foreigners?” Levi asked his friend Erkin* upon his return to Central Asia.

“It’s fun playing with foreigners because they’re different. You’re honest. You don’t lie,” Erkin replied.

“And you don’t lie when you play with us?” Levi countered.

“We learn not to,” Erkin said.

Levi provided some background on Erkin: “He’s a bit of a trouble maker on the field, but he’s very faithful in coming. He’s significantly noticed how we play and who we are. ...There’s something that connects him. The prostitutes and the tax collectors hung around Jesus; there was some attraction. I’m hoping he’s experiencing some of that attraction to Jesus.”

‘A different football’

Artyom*, one of a dozen OMers serving in their home country in Central Asia, has loved sports since he was a child. He graduated university with a professional coaching and teaching degree. Since it was illegal to share his faith with students while working at a government school, Artyom quit his 15-year career to pursue sports ministry full-time and formed his own football team.

“With one ball, you can gather lots of people,” he explained. “I was working for many years in a school, and I had a lot of contacts with teenagers. I can easily ...get them together to play football. Even those who already graduated, they mostly can come.”

When setting up his new football team, Artyom invited another believer to join the coaching staff. He also approached Dima*, a former student from a Muslim family, who was interested in sports. “I invited him to have a coffee in the city, and I asked him, ‘Do you want to work together with me to train this football team?’” Artyom recalled.

“I explained to him that we will play a different football—not the one that people usually play. We will try to play fair.”

Dima quickly connected with Vanya*, Artyom’s assistant coach. One day, the three men went to the sauna together, and Vanya shared his testimony. “After that, Dima started to become closer to us. Our relationship grew,” Artyom shared.

Artyom and Vanya invited Dima to other meetings and gatherings of believers involved with sports. “In the last months, he’s become very close to us, with our family, too. He comes and visits us often.” Artyom said. “He didn’t make the step to receive Jesus yet, but we are waiting for that day. We are praying.”

Many OMers involved in sports ministry have similar stories. The playing field provides a connection point; the journey of discipleship continues around the game.

Michael, for example, met his friend Alexy* five years ago. Michael was invited to play football with some guys, and, through that invitation, he connected to another group of football players. “Alexy introduced himself, and there was something there—we immediately clicked,” Michael shared. “It probably helped that he could practice English with me. I was very new to [the Central Asian] language at the time. We found we had a lot of similarities as well ... This started a deeper friendship.”

Besides playing sports together, the two men’s families also began connecting. Meanwhile, Michael was upfront about his motives. “The first meeting I shared with him what we were doing through sports, looking for opportunity to connect and change behaviour through sport,” he said. “Our friendship blossomed through that.”

As the men grew closer, Alexy shared more of his story. He had a “very typical” Central Asian upbringing, Michael described. His mother moved cities (with her children) twice before Alexy turned 10, the second time to escape his abusive step-father. At nine years old, Alexy pumped gas to make ends meet for his family, sometimes standing outside in -40°C (-40°F). “If the family made 2 or 3 USD per day, that was enough to sustain them,” Michael said.

Since his childhood, Alexy has had many different jobs, Michael reported. Currently, he has a good IT position and comes to the sports programme regularly. “From that point, I noticed that his lifestyle has changed: He stopped smoking, he stopped drinking, his behaviour started to change, his attitude started to change,” Michael said.

“As we’ve been journeying, I’ve been sharing bits of the gospel with him. He’s open to God and believes there must be a God. But he doesn’t understand Jesus.”

A major road rage incident a couple years ago landed Alexy in jail.

“As I was sitting in the jail cell, I started to think, ‘What am I doing with my life?’” he told Michael. “At that moment of desperation, I realised I couldn’t get myself out of this situation, and I called out to God.”

God heard that cry. Alexy was released from jail, and the person involved in the road rage incident did not press charges. “At that point, I was able to share the Good News story with him. He hasn’t made a decision for Christ, but he has said as a result of meeting our [sports] team, his life has changed.”

For Christmas, Michael gave Alexy a Bible. Soon afterwards, the men met together and talked about what it meant to be a father in a family. Michael shared the story of the prodigal son. “That story’s from the Bible,” Michael said. “This is how I see God as my father.”

“I think I need to start reading this Bible,” Alexy replied.

 Time for the women

Although sports are more popular among men, two OMers also started an inter-organisational, cross-cultural women’s sports team in 2017. Two Central Asian girls and two foreigners invited young women from the area to join them for a volleyball club. The first week, 15 women came; other weeks only seven showed up. “Every week is different,” explained Kellie*, one of the OMers involved. “We don’t talk a lot while we’re playing, but afterward we go out for tea and the girls ask, ‘What are you doing here?’ And that’s an opportunity to share.”

Kellie noted that mentoring Maria*, a Central Asian believer who assists with the women’s team, is paramount. Because Maria’s position in the country is more permanent than foreign workers’, “we’re helping her to be the leader,” Kellie said.

Sports ministry is a good fit for Maria, who recently graduated university with a degree in physical education. Not only does she have a passion for sports, but she also has first-hand experience being eternally impacted on the playing field—she first heard about Jesus from a short-term sports mission team visiting the orphanage where she grew up.

The new women’s sports team is a good opportunity for girls who have limited access to sports clubs. Its purpose, she said, “is to build relationships with girls... and then do other important stuff.”

“If you build a really good relationship, you’re able to share with them,” she added.

Pray that more local leaders would be raised up to lead flourishing sports ministries across Central Asia. Pray that there would be more opportunities for believers to share the gospel with Muslims through connections on the playing field.

*Name changed for security

Nicole James is a world traveller and writer for OM International. She’s passionate about partnering with believers to communicate the ways God is working across the globe.

She welcomed Irini, a long-term OM worker in Central Asia, with a hug, scanning the area around her to see if she’d brought her young daughter along. It was too hot for the two-year-old to be out, Irini explained, as she and the other visitors stepped into the courtyard, scattered with a few empty day beds and decorative plants.

Inside the building, low-lying beds framed almost every wall of three simple rooms, broken up only by the kitchen’s row of cabinets, refrigerator and stove as well as a tiny desk stacked with books and craft materials. Though basic, the accommodation was clean—and cooler than the outside temperature, 39°C (102°F) in the shade.

For Aziza*, one of seven women living in the shelter, it was home. When Irini and the others entered the women’s shelter, she immediately busied herself preparing tea and serving a handful of the sweets Irini had purchased on the way as a gift.

“When we came here, our lives got changed,” Aziza stated. She pointed out a bookmark-filled Bible lying on the desk and then pulled out a bag of craft materials.

“This is what we are doing every day,” she said, fishing out a handful of tiny felt ornaments—angels with curly hair and an assortment of coloured hearts. Though her accommodation costs, as well as the other women’s, were covered by churches and other ministries, Aziza used income from her handicrafts to supplement her personal expenses.

“I cannot work outside and carry heavy things, but I can do this,” she said, smiling. “Praise God that He gives us the ability to do and not just sit.”

Manal*, sitting on her bed in the next room, had welcomed an extra special guest that day: her daughter. “They haven’t seen each other for two years,” Irini explained.

A year and a half prior, Irini and her team had found Manal in the streets while distributing weekly food packets to homeless people they knew. “She was drunk and half-dead,” Irini recalled.

On the streets, Manal had lost contact with her husband and children. After moving into the shelter, Manal first reconciled with her heavenly Father and then reconnected with her children. “In the past, I didn’t pay attention to what God is doing, how He is working,” she said. “But now I see miracles every day.

“I’m reading from the Bible. In the past, I didn’t read books. I didn’t understand the Bible. …But now I understand each word has so much meaning.”

Manal also used her time in the shelter to re-apply for official identification, which she had lost on the streets. When she received her new documents, she applied for—and received—pension payments.

“She was so proud [of] her ID card,” Irini recalled. “She said, ‘Thank you for supporting me. Now I have a pension, and you can pay for someone else.’”

*Name changed for security

Nicole James is a world traveller and writer for OM International. She’s passionate about partnering with fields to communicate the ways God is working across the globe.

Through his time interacting with and serving people on the streets, Akin slowly understood that homeless ministry was “God’s ministry.”

Years later, he also realised his initial experience with homeless ministry in his home country had been preparation.

Twelve years ago, Akin and his wife moved to a remote city in Central Asia as long-term workers with OM. They have dabbled in different ministries, including serving at an orphanage and teaching sports. Five years ago, Akin began reaching out to the homeless people he saw on the street.

It started with a project, he explained. A few homeless people he had met told him they wanted to change their lifestyle, so Akin took them to a rehab centre. In the end, “they didn’t change their lifestyle, but we had a good relationship through our project,” he said.

That relationship was important. Because of harassment from police and discrimination—taxi drivers often refuse rides to homeless people; hospitals, too, turn them away—“they’re scared to meet other people,” Akin explained.

“In Central Asia, homeless people are often trafficked,” another OM worker involved in homeless ministry said.

But showing up week after week, learning their names, praying for them and sharing the gospel have broken down barriers, workers have experienced. Today, Akin, along with volunteers from a local church, provide a meal every Saturday for homeless people in the city. They serve bread, tea and a traditional Russian dish to around 15 homeless people (not always the same people show up).

“When I read from the Gospel, they like to listen,” Akin said. “Some people wanted to go to church.” When the first homeless people showed up to a summer service, though, the regular congregants were offended by their smell. That group of homeless people didn’t return to church, Akin noted.

Last year, however, one homeless man repeatedly told Akin he wanted to change his lifestyle. Akin sent him to a local church that facilitated a rehab centre. After three months, the man left the centre and enrolled in a Bible course. “He wants to do ministry for homeless [people],” Akin said.

Since the church joined the feeding programme, “they also know this is God’s ministry,” Akin said. “Every month we get together for a prayer time.”

The next step, he indicated, was starting a centre for the homeless people. “My plan, maybe this year, [is to] buy a little place,” he said. When homeless people want to change their lifestyle, the process takes time. Akin hopes to offer those people a place to stay, counselling and, especially during winter, shelter from the elements.

*Name changed for security

Nicole James is a world traveller and writer for OM International. She’s passionate about partnering with fields to communicate the ways God is working across the globe.

Already, in Kyrgystan and Kazakhstan, people can hail taxis on their smartphones, using apps, such as Uber, Yandex and Namba Taxi. Governments across the region have unveiled multiple-year plans for digital development, hoping to gain economic and social benefits available through increased technology and widespread internet access**.

“Everyone has smartphones,” OM worker Craig* observed. “Moving forward, that’s how everyone’s going to be reading things and getting access to information.”

Selfies and social media have transformed popular culture, but the Central Asian church hasn’t caught on to the technology craze. “We need to fill that space with resources for local churches in local languages,” Craig asserted.

He formed a group of cross-organisational workers interested in developing digital discipleship tools. Their top three projects include making Scripture available on smartphones across all platforms, developing a devotional app in a Central Asian language and adapting a worship songs app for use by home churches.

“We also see there’s room for a lot more to happen in that space—many more apps and other digital resources as well,” Craig said. “We’re trying to draw from the ones that are really good in English and either try to find a Russian version that already exists and promote it here, or if there’s nothing, create something in the local language.”

In addition to making Scripture available on smartphones, Craig said adding an audio Bible is strategic. People travelling by bus often listen to music or other entertainment during long commutes, and, in the evenings, nearly all walkers and joggers exercise with earbuds attached to their phones.

This technology is not only for the young, though. “The older generation … like to listen to things more, so they’re really happy when they can have the audio version of the Bible on their phones,” Craig said. “When I put it on some people’s phones and they start to listen, they get very excited about being able to hear.”

Online apologetics

Like smartphones, social media also provides a huge platform for sharing Scripture. Craig and the team created a Facebook page for The Prophets’ Story, an evangelistic video outlining the lives of several biblical prophets—culminating with Jesus—and illustrating the message of redemption through sacrifice.

The team has used Facebook advertising to push the video out to more people and create discussion. “There’s a lot of negative response because it’s a Muslim country, but … you find these random comments: ‘Yeah, this is what I believe’; ‘I agree with that,’” Craig said.

Part of promoting information online is training locals to follow up with interested individuals. Craig helped facilitate an apologetics training, led by a Central Asian who teaches in a Bible school, that included a section on online apologetics.

“We invited local believers, mostly young people who are engaged with social media and the digital side of things,” Craig shared. Twelve people attended the four two-hour sessions.

The training focused on apologetics theory and methods, and incorporated a practical application. Attendees learned common questions that Muslims have about Christianity and how to answer them without creating barriers.

For example, when responding to comments about The Prophets’ Story, “How do you engage as an apologist?” Craig asked. “Rather than laying down an argument, it’s sharing faith and doing that in a grace-filled way.”

In Central Asia, “any type of proselytising or evangelising is illegal,” Craig stated. However, digital content doesn’t have the same restrictions as printed media. Information can spread more quickly and widely via technology.

“I think The Prophets’ Story might have had 300,000 views in a month or so because people share it and people comment on it. If they comment on it, other people will see it. Even if it’s a negative comment, it will appear on their feeds, and it will spread like that. And it will go further than we physically can,” Craig said.

Worship via WhatsApp

Gary*, a worker who’s lived in Central Asia for nearly 30 years, started collecting worship songs in one local language when he noticed his home church always sang the same songs. “I knew there was more material out there,” he recalled.

To make the songs accessible to more churches and individuals, Gary decided to upload the songs onto a smartphone app. Instead of developing new technology, he got in touch with the creator of an existing application.

The app initially contained songs from only a few languages, including Turkish and Mongolian. Gary partnered with the developer to add the songs he’d already collected as well as those in other Central Asian languages. “I’m a regional guy,” he explained.

Gary hired Taras*, a worship leader in a local church, to upload more songs to the app. “He’s a musician. He knows how to put chords into the songs,” Gary noted. In one year, Gary and Taras were responsible for uploading over 5,000 songs in 10 Central Asian languages—about 1,000 individual uploads and the rest via electronic songbooks they sent to the app developer.

“You can choose which languages you can load on your phone. … You can get the words of the songs; if we have the chords and have entered them, you can get that; if we have an MP3, we put that on the app. You can listen to it streaming or download it,” Gary explained.

Downloading songs is important as the internet doesn’t always work well, and, in some places, streaming Christian music might be a security risk. “If you download it in a safe place, you can listen to it whenever you want,” Gary said.

He can’t track how many times people listen to individual songs—once files are downloaded, they’re invisible, so to speak—but during one recent monitoring period, he noticed that over 100 users had clicked on songs in two Central Asian languages from his area.

One of the most helpful features was the app’s ability to create song lists, Gary said: “You can use WhatsApp to send a link to all the people [in a house church, for example], and everybody has the words.”

The app’s popularity is still growing, but “everybody uses WhatsApp, so we’re passing songs around on WhatsApp all the time.”

Gary’s home group has used the app to share songs for their meetings. Another church he attends has connected the app to a projection programme, a feat Gary also helped engineer.

“Other people … have said, ‘I never knew there were so many [Central Asian] songs,’” Gary said. “Some people who worked with me are happy to have an expanded song book.”

Apart from increasing awareness about available songs, “we’ve also been effective in networking and bringing groups together,” Gary said.

“There was one group that fell apart; the people weren’t even in church. But they heard I was collecting songs, and they came and showed me their songs, and through that, they got reconnected to the [indigenous] church scene.”

Pray for Central Asian churches to take hold of the digital resources being created. Pray that they would invest in creating tools that will benefit emerging communities of Jesus followers among the least reached.

*Name changed for security

Nicole James is a world traveller and writer for OM International. She’s passionate about partnering with fields to communicate the ways God is working across the globe. 

A handful of Jesus-followers, both OM workers and local church partners, have committed to caring for the men and women they’ve found on the streets in one Central Asian city. Each week, they prepare simple food packets early in the morning and then spend two to three hours walking around the area, scouring the out-of-the-way places often occupied by homeless people and handing out sustenance and encouragement to those who need it most.

‘How many people should die before someone starts a ministry?’

Clara*, a long-term OM worker, had already been living in Central Asia for four years when she noticed a man begging in front of her building. She approached him and offered help, but he didn’t want to go to rehab and continued spending the little money he gathered on alcohol. Eventually, the man died. “I couldn’t help him,” Clara recalled.

The incident shook her. “How many people should die in this city before someone starts a ministry for homeless people?” she wondered.

Clara started to pray for the homeless people in her city. Soon another worker joined, the beginning of a small group. “Every time we met, we prayed for different things. I always asked that God would open the church’s eyes for the homeless,” Clara said.

After a while, another friend introduced Clara to Sezim* (now her husband). Together, they connected with a church group already involved in providing food to homeless people. “I started cooking at home, all kinds of food,” Clara said. From there, the ministry turned into a movement.

Some of her local friends joined the weekly outreach, along with people she knew from different churches. For Clara’s birthday that year, she invited friends over but told them not to bring the traditional chocolate or flowers as gifts. Instead, she asked her friends to bless the homeless. From 12:00 to midnight, her friends dropped by, bringing donated clothes and shoes. “My balcony was full,” Clara remembered.

During that first winter, Clara realised that providing food and clothing wasn’t enough. Homeless people needed shelter out of the bitter cold. “In the winter, [many homeless people] get drunk. They sleep on heating pipes and don’t feel that they get burned,” Clara explained. “Many of them die because of cold or alcohol problems.”

In January 2014, the informal homeless ministry rented a house for people to stay. “We didn’t have anything in the beginning; we didn’t have enough money; we didn’t know what’s the plan—but God blessed us,” she said. Churches donated used furniture and OM contributed towards the needs. “That was the beginning,” Clara affirmed.

Since then, Clara and the team have turned over physical shelters to churches. “Now there is a house in a village for older people and two houses in the city; one is for women and one for men,” she noted. “We are not directly in charge, but when we find someone in the street, we ask [the shelter] to take them.” Then, she continued, the ministry pays for monthly room and board.

There have been positive and negative outcomes, Clara shared. “We’ve seen people coming with joy to be in our shelter, but they left. They didn’t want to be in the house; they wanted to be in the streets. But we also have the testimonies [of formerly homeless people]. God changed them, and now they are a blessing for others.”

Everything is possible with God

Taras* knew how to pray before he knew how to read. Growing up, he was the youngest and “the most loved” in his family, he described. But, when he was 15-years-old, his mom suddenly got sick and died.

At first, Taras looked for freedom, turning to alcohol and drugs. Then, at 18, he moved to another city with his brother. “I started working in a marketplace and making some good money. Because I had money, I started using more drugs,” he said.

By age 20, Taras was addicted to both alcohol and drugs. He tried to stop but lacked the willpower to change his life. “When I was 29 years old, I lost everything. I didn’t have any documents. I lost my relationship with my family. I was in the streets living as a homeless person for three years,” he said.

During that time, Taras found ways to earn money for alcohol and little else. After one night partying with friends in a village about 10km (6.2 miles) from where he stayed, Taras and his companions got lost. They argued about the way back and split up. “That night, it was very cold,” he remembered. “On the road, there was ice about 15cm (5in.) thick.” Eventually, Taras found his way back but realised in the morning, one of his shoes was missing.

A man who had hired Taras for work drove him to a hospital. Because Taras didn’t have identification documents, the hospital couldn’t provide necessary treatments. After two days, Taras was back on the streets. For one week, he went from hospital to hospital in the city, looking for a place to help him. “Because I was not sleeping for all of this week, I had some hallucinations. And in that moment, I remembered about God,” he said.

Taras prayed again, asking God to help him die with dignity. Then, Sezim and a friend found him. “They really wanted to help me,” he remembered. They took him off the streets, gave him a shower and new clothes and listened to his story.

“God loves you,” they told him.

“How can God love me if I’m still in this condition and need help?” Taras remembered thinking.

Clara and Sezim located Taras’s brother. Then, with his help, they checked Taras into a hospital. “The doctor said I wouldn’t survive the surgery,” Taras noted.

In fact, he survived not one but three surgeries—in which doctors amputated nine of his fingers and both legs. When Taras woke up from the procedure, “I wanted to end my life, to kill myself,” he recalled. “But even at that moment, I couldn’t do it.”

Taras stayed in the hospital for some time, recovering and reading various books, including a Christian title, “Come back home.”

“I was reading about the prodigal son when he turned back to his father, and I was feeling the same—that I wanted to turn back to the Father,” Taras said. “That night, I knew that everything would be different.

“When I went out from the hospital, I was free of cigarettes, of alcohol and drugs. And I started to read the Bible.”

Change didn’t happen overnight, but with the support of Clara, Sezim and other believers, Taras made peace with God and his family. He learnt how to write with the single finger on his left hand and attended Bible school. Slowly, he re-learnt daily activities, including driving. Today, he volunteers at youth camps and shares his testimony with others. “I am different than many people, but I can say that my life has purpose,” he stated.

“If someone told me three-and-a-half years ago that I would live, I would say, ‘You lie. That’s not possible.’ But I know that with God, everything is possible.”

*Name changed for security

Nicole James is a world traveller and writer for OM International. She’s passionate about partnering with fields to communicate the ways God is working across the globe.

Five months after he started building the basement recording studio, nestled on the outskirts of a bustling city, Jacob could finally see the finish line. Sitting in the studio, he looked through the glass windows at the still-in-process lounge. “The acoustics are finished in here, but it’s not pretty yet,” he said. “That room’s acoustics should be done in the next month, and it should be a lot prettier.”

Functionality and beauty were both important aspects of his design. After all, Jacob imagined the studio as “a place that…will inspire both creativity and worship. This is a place where you can meet God.”

Centring the experience around music was simply a reflection of Jacob’s own passion. “Music’s always been a big part of who [I am],” he stated. “It’s how I met my wife. I worked in live sound to go through college.”

Music is also “a growing felt need here in the church,” he added. “There’s no effective outlet for creative people of faith.”

The best scenario believing artists can hope for is secular spotlight, where they can’t mention Christ, he explained. “If you’re a creative [musician], and you’re a believer, you either have to never mention that you’re a believer or just sing at your church. But your church is 12 other people in someone’s living room.”

While there are talented individual musicians leading worship for home groups or small churches, “there’s no sense of collaboration, community or anyone to bring you along and help you grow. There’s no iron sharpening iron,” Jacob noted.

Indigenous churches struggle with unity and rarely share worship resources, he sad: “If you ask one church, ‘What about this song?’ they’ll say, ‘That’s not our song. That belongs to this other church…We don’t sing each other’s songs unless they’re both a translation of Hillsong.’”

Therefore, instead of widespread worship expressions that resonate with believers across Central Asian congregations, “translated western songs—badly played and badly recorded—have become the standard for worship in the church here,” Jacob stated.

Another worker once played him a song and asked whether it was translated or local. The song’s genre was rock, tinged with metal, but the quality was high, Jacob described. It turned out that a group of Central Asian believers had formed a band in the ’90s, played together for one year and then broke up.

“They haven’t spoken to each other in 20 years,” Jacob said. “I want to see the opposite of that. I want to see long-term collaboration and discipling each other.”

That’s where the new studio comes in. “The idea was if I made a place where these people could gather and do concerts, do recordings and do music together…a place where musicians could collaborate and see that they’re not alone,” Jacob said.

Anna*, a veteran worship leader at an indigenous church, shared Jacob’s dream. Before the studio was completed, she spent three days recording worship songs and strategised for hours in the under-construction space about ways to bring together a music ensemble from different churches.

“The thing that excites me the most is what I fear won’t happen. My fear is that they won’t collaborate, and it will just be a place we can go and record something on our own for selfish purposes,” Jacob admitted. “Conversely…the thing that will give me the greatest joy is to see people who won’t work together [naturally] create something together and see something that will last.”

There were probably 25 other musicians who would want to know about the studio, Jacob estimated. But when he finished construction, he wanted to walk them slowly through the recording process. “There’s a lack of understanding of what the recording process looks like regarding the instrumentation, the rehearsals that go into a song and then the recording,” he explained.

In the future, Jacob hoped to host music nights where different believing song writers could share their work and get input from other talented musicians.

“There’s a two-fold outlet [to the studio project]: Creative people can create art that’s long-lasting and influences the next generation of the church. And, secondly, if the musicians are working together, then I believe that will foster greater church unity—churches will start to work together as well and love one another.”

Pray that the studio would be used to foster unity and creativity among Central Asian believers. Pray for God-ordained musicians to use the space. Pray for talented, high level musicians outside the country to come alongside the studio and collaborate with Central Asian musicians for the glory of God.

*Name changed for security

Nicole James is a world traveller and writer for OM International. She’s passionate about partnering with fields to communicate the ways God is working across the globe.

Tony* is a Canadian cross-country skier studying indigenous studies and dabbling in philosophy. He was excited over one breakfast to talk to Mark*, who works in Central Asia as a sports coach and with a company involved in humanitarian work—two of Tony’s passions. 

It was an opportunity to go a bit deeper—talking about local culture, community development and the privileged role a coach has, being able not only to assist his team with their sports but also to play a key part in their lives.

“Coaching is really important to me. I have a book about it I can send you if you’d like?” Tony offered his new friend.

“Great, thanks!” replied Mark, eager to see what the content was. Tony sent it as soon as he got back to his room.

They bumped into each other again at lunch that same day.

Mark thanked Tony for the resource, and the conversation began to go deeper. “So,” said Tony, “why do you do what you do?”

Mark paused and caught his breath; here was the opening: “To be honest, it’s because of God, it’s a calling to follow Jesus.”

From there the words flowed, covering topics from the creation of the world to the afterlife and encompassing the entire gospel. It was the sort of conversation Mark would never usually have with someone who he had just met, and definitely not the sort of conversation he’d be able to have in his own strength.

The enthusiastic exchange had taken an hour and a half, but to Mark it felt like just minutes.

Pray for Tony, that the message of salvation would grow in his heart and he would turn to the one true God.

*Name changed for security

Aslan’s* mother was no exception. An older woman looking for spiritual peace, she had started attending a mosque and reciting Islamic prayers. But she wanted a translation of the Arabic prayers. “I am [Central Asian], and I want to know what I am saying to God,” she told a Muslim religious leader.

During that time, some relatives living in a nearby city approached Aslan’s mother. “We found a group of people who are reading, worshipping and praying in our language. Can we go and see these people?”

The discovery of that Central Asian church transformed Aslan’s family. His mother, touched by prayer and teaching she could understand, became a believer. Over the next seven years, the rest of the family followed.

Eventually, Aslan’s parents started a home church. “Every week somebody was visiting us. We invited our relatives and our neighbours. It’s good news, so we were sharing!” Aslan remembered.

Several Christian workers also visited Aslan’s family, bringing a copy of the Jesus film and some books. Aslan read a children’s Bible in Russian—a common language across Central Asia—and started to understand “what it meant to accept Jesus, to understand that Jesus is Lord.” Later, He read an adult Bible and commentary, deepening his knowledge and confirming his conviction.

Through the late ’90s, different pastors continued to bring box after box of Bibles and Christian literature to Aslan’s family. They, in turn, gave the books away.

“This time was very free,” Aslan described. After 2000, though, the rules started to change.

Today, Aslan heads up a literature printing and distribution project, sponsored, in part, by OM. “Maybe because of my [early] experience with books, I work with the literature project,” he suggested.

The first full Bible in Aslan’s mother tongue was printed in 2010. Aslan remembered pastors excited about the option to finally preach from the Old Testament to Central Asian congregations. Prior to the translation, the Old Testament had only been available in Russian.

Aslan joined the publication efforts in 2011, when preparations were being made to print the second edition of the Bible. He agreed to help with the logistics of transporting the Bibles in the country and distributing them to churches.

“Our goal is to provide Scriptures to local churches. We’re covering two [Central Asian] languages now,” Aslan said.

In some ways, his role isn’t so different than the early days of handing out the boxes of books his parents received. Aslan goes to churches and presents the various resources to pastors: Scriptures in the local language, Christian children’s books and evangelism guides. “We bring several boxes of books and find people from the church … who are responsible for sharing and distributing the books,” he explained.

That process works, but in the future, he’d like to see churches asking for the literature. Aslan has given Bibles as presents to pastors, especially those partnering with literature projects. Generally, though, people are asked to make a donation if they want a book.

Some pastors have caught the vision for literature distribution. One pastor, whose church displayed a book table in the back of the room, told his congregation at Christmas, “I’d like you to buy two books—one for you and the second for your neighbour. Give it to them for New Years.”

In 2015, Aslan’s team printed 22,000 Bibles in the local language. They also printed 14,000 evangelical books. Now, those resources are almost gone. A handful of other organizations help with printing costs and distribution. If fundraising goes well, Aslan expects to print 20,000 Bibles again next year.

Over the years, the team has experimented with different sizes and bindings. A small, easily transportable Bible proved suitable for outreach but less ideal for elderly people straining to read the tiny script. Pastors especially appreciated the large, zip-up Bible, convenient for storing pens and sermon notes.

The most important aspect of the Bibles—the text—has remained constant throughout the editions. “The translation is not word-by-word,” Aslan explained. Rather, it’s an adaptation of the Scripture, with some passages, including the Zaboor (Psalms), written as a poem.

“We’re reading this, and it’s like a real Central Asian book,” people have enthused.

While Russian translations of the Bible remain widely available, the spread of the Central Asian Scripture is closely monitored by the government. “We have so many rules … [about] how we can share these books. Every year, it’s becoming harder and more uncomfortable,” Aslan said.

Pray for wisdom and protection as Aslan and his team seek to distribute the Central Asian Bibles throughout the region. Pray for good relationships with pastors and for churches to accept their responsibility to share God’s Word.

*Name changed for security

Nicole James is a world traveller and writer for OM International. She’s passionate about partnering with fields to communicate the ways God is working across the globe.

Nastya*, who participated in the Central Asian outreach six times, said one particular trip stood out. In a small village, she and her team had ordered food and then started talking to the owner of the building. Initially, she wanted to know more about Nastya’s home country and the team members, and “it ended up by [us] telling her about God.”

The team prayed for the woman. Afterwards, she started crying. “Can you come to my home? My brother is sick, and he can’t even move.”

“Yes, we will pray for him,” the team agreed.

As they followed the woman to her house, though, they were worried. “What if we pray and nothing happens?” they wondered.

Upon arrival, they prayed as a team, “God, it’s not us who will do a miracle. We don’t want to promise to these people that something will happen.”

Inside the building all of the relatives stood around the sick brother’s bedside. The young team introduced themselves to the oldest relatives first, then they addressed the woman’s brother. “We can’t do anything for you; we can’t promise anything will happen, but we do believe we have an almighty God, and, if He wills, you will be [healed]. If you want, we can pray for you.”

The man and his family agreed to prayer, so the team sat down, grabbed each other’s hands and prayed in the name of Jesus. Half an hour later, the man in the bed sat up. A couple hours later, he asked for food.

“God you did it!” the team exclaimed.

Just before the team left the house, the man who was sick came out to their car. “I praise God to whom you prayed,” he told them.

Growing in faith

Dana*, who participated in the Central Asian outreach twice, remembered her first outreach as challenging and inspiring. She had travelled with her team to an especially conservative area where they knew of one family who were believers. Because of their isolation, “this family was struggling, and it was so difficult with their faith,” Dana recalled.

The team visited the family in the middle of the night, sitting together for five hours, encouraging the believers but “afraid the police would come,” Dana said. “It was very difficult for them, but they were trying to do so many things for the Lord.

“It was such an encouragement to me because here [in my country] we live in freedom, and sometimes we don’t appreciate that,” Dana stated. “I’m a believer, and some of my relatives are Muslim, but it’s OK; nobody is against us.”

One year later, Dana signed up for a second outreach. “I grew and I learned a lot from the first [experience], so I decided it’s a really good thing and I needed to go back.”

She had struggled with her team the first year, but Dana instantly connected with the other young people in her group on the second outreach. “In the evening time, we could go to a park and worship in our native languages. And people were coming and asking, ‘What are you doing?’ And we had the opportunity to share the gospel.”

Participating in the Central Asian outreach doesn’t have to be a one-time experience, Dana explained. “It’s always something new, and this year it won’t be like last year or next year…. You are meeting with different people. You’ll be able to serve other countries.”

“Just come and do whatever God wants you to do,” she encouraged. “It’s also about obeying, it’s also about patience. You can learn how to serve God, how to build teams and how to communicate with other people.

“I am smiling every time I think about it. It helps you to grow.”

Amazing challenge

When Baha* wanted to join the OM Ships Ministry, his last requirement was participating in the Central Asian outreach. At the beginning of the outreach, Baha’s four-person team went to a nearby bus station, where they booked an eight-hour taxi ride to their destination.

In the middle of the night, Baha woke up in the back of the taxi and heard his team leader praying out loud in the front. Alarmed, Baha then realised the taxi driver was repeating the words. “It was the prayer of salvation. This driver got saved!” he remembered.

At that time, Baha was still exploring Christianity. “I just believed in God. I didn’t know Jesus,” Baha shared. “I never read the Bible at home…. On Fridays, I went to the mosque; on Sunday, I went to church; at night, I was out on the streets.”

Therefore, he said the concept of evangelism terrified him. “I have to talk about God, but I don’t even know Him,” he thought.

Still, the outreach challenged Baha to grow closer to God. In one village, a family of six hosted the team in a small, sparsely furnished house. At night, the family gave up their beds to the team, while they slept on the floor.

“If they did this for us, what did Jesus do for us?” Baha wondered.

During the outreach, Baha also prayed for the first time in his life. “The preparation is good,” he said. “This challenge—going into other countries for 12 days—is amazing.”

*Name changed

Nicole James is a writer for OM International, passionate about publishing stories of God’s work among the nations and telling people about the wonderful things He is doing around the world.

“They were different than my friends. I found it weird and strange, but I really liked how they interacted with each other,” Aida remembered. At an evening fellowship meeting, which lasted until 3:00 in the morning, the youth shared with Aida that everything in their life was because of Christ.

A couple of hours later, around 5:00 in the morning, Aida decided to follow Jesus. “The reason is because I saw the difference in these young people, and I wanted to be like them,” she explained.

By then, Aida’s older brother had also became a believer. Slowly, one-by-one the rest of her family also accepted Jesus. “It’s unusual,” Aida shared. “Even though we are a family-oriented culture, most believers, when you see them, it’s just one person from the family. Sometimes it’s just the mother.”

Several years later, Aida joined the OM Ships Ministry for two years. “Being on the ship made me realise that God has a heart for missions. It’s not just about Central Asians; it’s not just about one particular country—God cares about all the nations,” Aida said.

Still, when her commitment ended—despite a rousing speech from OM Founder George Verwer challenging crewmembers into missions—Aida prepared to go home.

“OK, God, my two years are over, and I’m going back home. I’m not going anywhere, but I promise I will tell my people to go,” she prayed.

Back in Central Asia, Aida tried to go back to her normal life. “I wanted to be a normal person who goes to church on Sunday like all of my Christian friends,” she explained. Two jobs (and cities) later, however, she questioned whether having a “normal life” was what she really desired.

Around that time, she received an email from the OM country leader inviting her to planning meetings for the annual Central Asian outreach. Aida had participated in the two-week outreaches before and after her time on the ship, but she hadn’t maintained contact with OM since her return two years’ earlier.

After talking more with the country leader, Aida discovered he wanted to offer her a part-time job: coordinating the Central Asian outreach each summer.

“I remembered that when I was on the ship, I thought I would tell people that missions is important,” Aida stated. “I knew in my heart I would like to see Central Asians going out…. I would like to see the Central Asian church be involved in the world.”

She accepted the job. Seven years later, Aida is still involved with OM. “The company has projects that match my passion: mobilising locals into missions,” she said. “I guess it’s the right place for me.”

Mobilising Central Asians into missions

OM’s annual Central Asian outreach seeks to reach every city in the region with the gospel. It follows the same format as many of OM’s short-term programmes around the world: centralised training followed by outreach to surrounding countries. Currently, the three-day trainings are offered in two countries. Teams of two to four participants then travel to do outreach throughout the region for 10 days.

Structurally, the programme remains the same, but according to Aida, “Every year it’s exciting because every year it’s different people, and God is working differently.”

Aida and other organisers hope to mobilise Central Asians into long-term missions through the outreach programme. Increasingly, though, they’re focusing on churches instead of individuals.

In the past, Aida said pastors would accuse her of stealing their church members for missions. Now, a handful of pastors have organised entire outreach teams from their congregations. “God is doing something among Central Asian churches,” Aida shared.

Churches (or groups of believers) are also essential on the receiving side of outreaches. “It’s important that there are some locals that can do follow up” once short-termers leave, Aida explained.

Sisters sharing God’s love

Nastya*, who helps Aida organise the Central Asian outreach, grew up in a broken family. Her parents abused alcohol and argued constantly. Eventually, her father left.

During that time, Nastya asked, “God, where are you? Why is this happening to my family? What is my purpose in life?”

Somehow she heard about Jesus and wanted to go to the single church in her village. Afraid of her mother’s reaction, Nastya first prayed to Jesus that she would be allowed to attend. Her mother said, yes, and Nastya went to the church.

After the first service, Nastya wanted to accept Jesus. She prayed again: “Jesus, if you want me to became a Christian and believe in you, then change [my mother’s] heart so she will allow me go to church every Sunday.”

Again, her mother allowed Nastya to attend church regularly. From that point on, “God started working in our family,” Nastya remembered. Her mother became a Christian after one year, followed by her siblings. Seven years later, her father returned to the family, asked for forgiveness and accepted Jesus.

In 2005, Nastya participated in the Central Asia outreach for the first time. “I found out that I love [sharing] God’s love with people and talking to people,” she said. “I was a really shy person, but I found out that it’s not difficult for me to share God’s love with people. After that, I decided if we will have that kind of ministry in my country, I will make sure that I will be participating.”

Nastya said it has been exciting to see other Central Asians volunteering their time to share God’s love in the region. During training, participants learn about sharing their faith with Muslims, dealing with security, using their personal testimonies and telling Bible stories in a sensitive way. These lessons are new information for most participants. “At my church, we were never taught how to evangelise to Muslims,” Nastya noted.

Esther*, Nastya’s sister, joined the Central Asia outreach two years after Nastya. She participated five times because she wanted to communicate with new people, grow spiritually and “get encouragement to encourage others,” she said.

*Name changed

Nicole James is a writer for OM International, passionate about publishing stories of God’s work among the nations and telling people about the wonderful things He is doing around the world.

John* was a substitute goal keeper for one of the ice hockey teams – a staunch atheist, but religion must have held some interest because he was strolling along the hall to take a video of the different religion’s prayer rooms all there together.

Ben ventured into the hallway to start a conversation with him. It was easy to get into a long discussion about John’s life and their different views on faith.

“It’s great to see prayer rooms from so many different religions,” said John.

Ben paused, “But you said that you’re not religious.”

“No – I’m an atheist,” replied John.

A lack of belief in a God who hears didn’t prevent John from sharing his prayer requests and Ben happily prayed for his health, a good competition and a chance to play in the games.

We believe in a God who hears the prayers offered on behalf of those who are currently following Him and those who are not. Please continue to pray for John, that some of the seeds planted in his heart during this conversation would grow in the coming weeks sprouting genuine faith.

*Name changed

Dorcas Kitchen provides training in a safe workplace to provide a marketable skill and self-respect. Women learn cooking, food handling and budgeting. Dorcas Sewing gathers women twice a week to learn embroidery, fabric painting, and Kyrgyz felt-carpet technique. Bags, dresses, slippers and rugs are made for income. Dorcas Repeat Boutique distributes clothes and household items for children and women collected from the expat community.

Not too long before joining Dorcas Kitchen, a doctor told Sabina* that she had six years to live. Sabina is Uzbek, from South Kyrgyzstan. Her partner had a criminal past and spent a number of years in and out of jail. After becoming a Christian, said Sabina, she wanted to separate from him. However, whenever he would get released, she would allow him back into her home. She worked hard to provide for her family, but her partner demanded that she give him the money she earned.

The last time he went to jail, he fell sick and died a year later. Sabina took her two daughters to Russia to earn money. A couple of years later, she found out she was HIV positive. After hearing she just had six years to live, Sabina was devastated and lost her desire to live. She became preoccupied with trying to get her eldest daughter married and worried about her younger daughter. 

Many people urged Sabina to seek medical care, but because of shame, stigma and discrimination, she refused to see a doctor, even though her health continued to deteriorate.

Sabina, being a very good cook, went to Dorcas Kitchen. When the staff heard her story, they connected Sabina with Channels of Hope, a group that trains and assists people who are HIV positive. Sabina returned from her training with a new perspective and hope for the future. The first words she said were, “I am not going to die with this infection. If I take good care of myself and get the medical care I need, I can live a long life.”

A couple of weeks later, she went to see the doctor for the first time in two years and is now waiting for her results.

*Name changed

In a busy Central Asian bazaar, behind a rusted gate is a run-down brothel posing as a guest house. My colleagues and I had been visiting there for over a year, so these days we had no qualms about walking straight through the front door to spend time with our friends inside. It was something we’d done several times before, but today, the brothel owner was not pleased.

“All extra people get out,” she called less than a minute into our visit.

We headed to a nearby café with a couple of the workers, feeling dejected. We had put a lot of time and energy into building those relationships, with the owners as well as the workers, and this felt like a huge step backwards.

Presently, the same woman who had dismissed us entered the café. She came and sat down at our table.

“I’m sorry I had to send you away,” she started, “We’re trying to keep a low profile right now.”

She went on to explain the trouble they’d been having with the police and their struggles in attracting enough clients to turn a profit at this time of year. I was amazed by the trust she showed in sharing with us the intricacies of an industry so often covered up.

By the time she left, the conversation had turned to nail care. She enjoyed getting manicures but felt like her nails weren’t strong enough; maybe she was lacking something in her diet. It was a strange normalcy, as if we were a group of friends catching up after a while apart, not opposing parties, each fundamentally against the work of the other.

The more we can grow healthy relationships with the owners of the brothel, the more we will be able to have contact with the women who work there, and the more opportunities we will have to share with them about hope for a new life--free from both physical and spiritual chains.

Please pray the Lord would give us more opportunities like this one.

When the team first came across her on their weekly feeding day, a day set aside to take food to the homeless people of their city and offer shelter to those willing to accept it, Anna was a shivering wet heap in a pile of snow. The harsh conditions had taken a toll on her health and she was close to death.

It was only with the help of their local church fellowship that the team was able to get Anna warm, dry and into a women’s shelter. It was only by God’s grace that her heart was changed. Her health was restored and she began her journey towards knowing Him.

Nearly a year later, she spends her days knitting and sewing small toys to contribute to the income of the shelter. She hands one to our worker with a smile, “a gift for your daughter.” Even now, she remembers that if God hadn’t brought them together that winter’s day, she could have died.

God is the only one who can change people. Praise the Lord for the changes in Anna’s life.

*Name changed

“It is,” replied Rob*, who was serving in the prayer room at an international sporting event.

“Oh,” she smiled sheepishly. “But we are Muslims.”

With a deep breath and a prayer to the Lord, Rob decided to engage, “Well did you know that the Koran mentions Jesus?”

“Does it?” She’d actually never read the Koran, neither had her friend. But they were local volunteers and they were Muslim no matter what they had read, knew or believed.

“Yes it’s true,” Rob started explaining about Jesus, and using what he knew was in the Koran as a base, the girls became more curious and engaged in the conversation with interest.

Rob handed them both copies of the Injil or New Testament - known by Muslims to be a Holy book, so that they could continue to learn about Jesus – which they gladly accepted and promised to read. However this wasn’t enough to end their curiosity so before they left, over the course of an hour Rob was able to share the whole gospel story with them as best as he could in their heart language. 

Pray to the Lord that He will give the girls continued curiosity and understanding of what His word means.

*Name changed

Throughout Central Asia large churches are uncommon. Believers instead gather in small groups in people’s houses or small congregations in shared locations. These groups are pursuing and loving Christ together and growing in the knowledge of God. However, with a smaller pool there is not always someone with the time and passion to perform the role of a music pastor. The churches are often unaware of each other, so if one congregation has a couple of original or translated songs, the others have very few means of accessing them.

OM workers in Central Asia are expanding the worship app to solve this problem. They are gathering Russian, Kazakh, Uzbek and Uighur praise and worship songs. The files are then loaded including lyrics, chords, MP3 files – even the ability to project from a computer. The team include links between the songs in different languages so that they can be shared between community groups as well as churches.

The app has been a huge hit. One house church leader stated “I love the worship app you have been working on. I am using it all the time for our small meetings.” As more and more believers become aware of the app OM hopes to see it utilised across Central Asia.

*Name changed

When we first went to visit the homeless on the outskirts of a Central Asian city; it was freezing cold, we were chased by dogs and the people were vicious and hostile towards us. This is how our ministry began.

As we persisted in bringing noodles, hot tea and words of hope to these people throughout the winter they slowly began to accept and trust us. People have started coming along to local fellowships. People have started asking us for help escaping homelessness and finding new lives.

One such man is Azamat. We were able to bring him into a rehabilitation house and he began to learn about God and to get his life back on track. His passion for God grew and he is now studying at seminary.

One of our greatest encouragements has been the involvement of the local church. This is a ministry that must always be motivated by love and the local churches are showing love and sharing faith with the homeless of the city. Praise God that He sees each suffering person. He will not forget, or allow us to forget them.

Please pray that God will send more workers to this ministry and that He will provide finances to allow us to open our own rehabilitation centre.

The workers walk the streets to observe and pray.  Each week that they go to the same area, they see new brothels, new police booths and new workers that they haven’t seen before.

The challenge to be seen

It is very difficult to meet the girls who have been trafficked. These girls are almost always locked up and the OM workers only catch glimpses of them through brothel windows and when doors are opened and shut. The girls’ freedom is completely taken away. They are being controlled by their oppressors and are owned like inanimate objects.

Rarely, even if they are known by our workers, they will stand in the door way and shake their heads when our workers come near, indicating subtly that they are being watched and cannot have any contact with them.

For our workers this can be frustrating, there is a very real sense of hopelessness. How do they reach out to these girls when it’s impossible to meet them or even speak to them? And yet our workers faithfully walk the streets each week, observing and praying.

Breaking through hopelessness

Earlier this year on Women’s Day, our workers did an outreach carrying flowers and cards with their contact details on them. Miraculously, they were able to enter a very secure brothel where trafficked teenagers are kept as sex-slaves. They delivered their presents to the girls working there and they were able to tell them that they are not forgotten, they are seen by Someone who deeply loves them.

A few months later they were contacted by a girl caught in human trafficking. She was pregnant and needed help to get out of her position. One of the ladies who had received the gift on women’s day had passed the workers’ information on to the girl.

The workers know that they need to continue to be faithful in their outreaches even when it feels hopeless. They will continue to be faithful and open and let God work.

God hears the cry of the vulnerable and powerless and as Isaiah says “Surely the arm of the LORD is not too short to save, nor his ear too dull to hear.” Isaiah 59:1

After turning down a job in translation to serve with OM overseas, John* thought it might be the end of using his languages degree and the interpreting skills he’d learnt back home. But God had other plans.

Knowing Russian, the lingua franca of Central Asia, he found himself able to translate for and communicate with many believers with whom other workers - who knew only the local languages - couldn’t.

“It’s so amazing and encouraging to see God’s sovereign hand over decisions about my academic life I made years ago – even before I was a believer – with the opportunity to work for His kingdom many years later more effectively,” John shared. “It’s opened up doors to encourage and train local believers as I use my degree skills of interpreting for translating training sessions, sermons and chatting with locals."

John has also had the opportunity to offer two key skills every developing nation needs - English and computer skills. Being a native English speaker in a place where many want to learn English and want to go abroad opens up many opportunities for meeting people. Many don’t have the money to go travelling and are prepared to go to any length to get a job – and money in their pocket.

Teaching trust in God

People have been coming to John for English practice, but doors often open for talking about ethical choices in difficult situations – and how beliefs shape those. Miles* and Ben* profess to be Muslims but John challenges them about using deceit to get a job. 

“It’s a sin – you shouldn’t do it,” he explained.

"But what if you can’t get a job without the required experience?" they question.

“God is Judge. You might get your job – but God knows our hearts. It’s wrong.”

Corruption is another topic that often comes up in conversations in this part of the world. “You can’t open a business without paying a bribe” John is told. But where John works with other workers, they’ve never paid a bribe.

“I love God more than I love money. It might mean my life is less comfortable and less easy, but I don’t want to dishonour my God,” he told Miles and Ben.

“You’re right” replied Ben. “You’re my teacher”.

Please pray that John and other workers in countries where corruption is commonplace would be distinctively set-apart to cause others to question their own values and seek the true answers found only in Christ.

In 2006 for the first time, a young lady from Central Asia boarded the OM ship Doulos to serve on board for two years.

Cari* remembers prayer times by country on the ship, when all the people from the same country had the privilege to pray together for their own country. Because she was the only one from her country she always had to join up with people from another country to pray. She remembers hoping and praying for a time when there would be groups of people from her country praying together on the ship.

This year, for the very first time, three people from her country boarded the OM ship Logos Hope together to serve. God heard Cari’s prayer aboard the ship many years ago to send more workers from Central Asia.

God is doing amazing things in Central Asia. He is calling the lost to Himself and then sending them out into His harvest field around the world. He includes people from every tribe and tongue and nation in His great commission to reach those from every tribe and tongue and nation.

*name changed

Malcolm* is always keen to improve his English and learn new words as he waits to go to the Middle East for a job. OM worker Alex* has met him many times to chat in the park where Malcolm was working, and more recently as Malcolm came around to Alex’s house in the evenings. “Savob” is an Arabic word roughly meaning “merit” which devout Muslims seek to accumulate to cover their sins on judgment day.

“It’s hard to translate that word into English,” Alex* explained. The conversation continued as Alex* conveyed that no amount of ‘savob’ can appease a holy God who must punish sin. So what then is our hope for judgment day?

Alex* got out his New Testament that he had ‘happened’ to put in his bag earlier that day. Malcolm read “By grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no-one may boast” (Ephesians 2:8-9).

Please pray that Alex can continue to have deep chats about faith and regularly read God’s word together in the evenings, and that Malcolm would trust Jesus for his savob as his Lord and Saviour.

Desiring devoutness, Firuza quit high school at age 15 to study in an Islamic boarding school about an hour away from her house. Ten days into her stay, however, she returned home.

“The head of the [school] was a very rude, yelling woman, all covered in black, and I was scared. I didn’t see any godliness,” she explained.

The chase

Firuza re-enrolled in high school, learnt reading and Arabic script, and continued following standard Islamic practices: attending the mosque, praying and fasting during Ramadan. After finishing high school, she decided to study in her country’s capital city.

“There, I heard about Jesus for the first time,” she remembered.

A group of Westerners invited Firuza, along with other students, to watch the Jesus film at their apartment. While the cinematography impressed her, the video’s message fell flat.

“The first impression I had was, “Oh, they make good movies about their prophets. We must make good movies about Mohammed as well,” she remembered thinking. “I didn’t know it was all taken from the Bible. I didn’t believe the Bible was real.”

That mind set, in fact, was the first barrier to her believing in Jesus. Shortly after viewing the film, Firuza started avoiding the people who had extended the invitation. However, God pursued her.

“I heard about Jesus from my roommate in the dormitory. My teacher at the university, she gave me the Bible in three languages… In my working place, I heard about Jesus. They were inviting me home, having coffee, talking about Jesus,” she said. “Of course, I always avoided those people. I didn’t want to talk to them.”

And although she kept the Bibles, she put them away, afraid she would be a sinner if she even touched the books.

While taking a tram to work one day, an old woman approached Firuza, who was standing in the middle of the overfilled car. “No person died for people’s sins, only Jesus Christ did,” the lady told her. Um-hmm, Firuza thought, plastering a polite smile on her face as she turned away. She’s one of them.

“God was kind of chasing me,” Firuza concluded. “He was sending all kinds of people: friends, people that I knew, people that I didn’t know, strangers.”

The dream

Another day, on her way to work, Firuza said, a prayer came to her. She began crying as she prayed, “God, I only want you. I want to go to paradise. What if…when I go to you, my sins would be heavier than my good deeds?”

“This is what Muslims believe,” she explained. Cupping her hands, she listed the ways to earn points: going to the mosque, fasting, doing good deeds. But suddenly blowing her imagined collection away, she continued her charade—if the points fail to add up, they disappear, “and I will have to go to hell.”

Not long after that experience, Firuza had a dream. “I was on the very top of a mountain or hill, a high place, and the sun started rising,” she described. “I was watching it. It came right above me. Then I reached my hands, and it came, it landed in my hands. And I lowered my hands, and I looked, and the sun became a baby. The sun became a baby.”

Burned into her mind, the dream occupied her thoughts. “This is something,” she pondered.

The church

Sometime later, a lady brought painted Easter eggs to Firuza’s work. “Why did you paint these?” Firuza asked.

“It’s a holiday,” she responded, continuing with an invitation to celebrate Easter together at church.

“What do you do there?” Firuza wanted to know.

“We sing songs, we pray, we praise God, we worship."

“Maybe for a concert I could go, because I like music,” Firuza decided. So on Sunday, she went to church. “But the concert was awful.” Looking around the church, Firuza was confused by what she saw. She saw rows of Central Asians—her people—listening to the message.

Bored and uninterested in the preaching, Firuza didn’t concentrate on the message. Afterwards, though, people from the congregation went forward to share their testimonies.

“This really touched me, the testimonies,” she said. Previously, she had thought God gave rules and had nothing to do with individuals personally. At the church, she heard people describe the ways God was intimately involved in their lives.

Firuza agreed to attend church a second week. Again, she ignored the preaching but listened intently to the testimonies. And when the pastor asked to pray for newcomers, to bless them, Firuza walked to the front of the church.

Besides a blessing, there was also a prayer. Unable to return to her seat, Firuza answered the set of questions being asked.

“Do you think you are a sinner?”

“Yes.”

“Do you want forgiveness for your sins?”

“Yes.”

“God sent 2,000 years ago a Saviour to sacrifice for your sins. If you accept that sacrifice your sins will be forgiven… If you want to be forgiven, you can pray this prayer with me.”

And they prayed. “I accepted Jesus, not really deciding I want Jesus, I just thought they were asking questions,” Firuza said.

Immediately after praying, she was filled with fear. “I thought I betrayed my family, my religion, my ‘god’… I thought, ‘What have I done? Is this right or wrong? How can I know?’”

The truth

When Firuza got home, she locked herself in her room. Weeping, she began to pray. “I didn’t say Allah, I didn’t say Jesus, I didn’t say Mohammed. I said, ‘My Creator, I known You exist. Only You can show me the truth. You know my heart. I want to go to You.’”

After praying, Firuza found the Bible she’d been given, a New Testament in her language, and began to read the Book of Matthew.

“I couldn’t stop until I finished this book,” she said. “Then God in His power showed me the whole picture. He took away this thought I always had that the Bible was changed… God spoke this, and I…believed the Bible was true.”

As Firuza continued to read the Bible, she discovered more evidence of God’s love and truth. She began studying the Bible with the woman who had invited her to church, and she also started praying for her family.

“It took me seven years to receive Jesus. For my youngest sister, it took less than seven minutes,” she said. Later, another sister also believed.

“I see God’s power in my life,” Firuza said. “There are so many hundreds, if not thousands, of miracles… God knows my heart, and He gives the answer that I need.”

*Name changed

Nicole James is a journalist, ESL teacher and adventurer. As a writer for OM Middle East North Africa, she’s passionate about publishing the stories of God’s works among the nations, telling people about the wonderful things He is doing in the world.

Bahar, though, is unique because she was able to bravely turn away from her past with the help of Lisa*, an OM worker there. One day, Lisa was sharing the passage from Matthew 11 with Bahar: “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest” (v. 28; NIV). 

After many years of being controlled and owned, the young lady was moved by these verses. She hungered for the rest and freedom that God offers when we give our burdens to him.

"I want to experience God's freedom" she said.

Lisa encouraged her to draw a picture of what she was feeling. Bahar drew a person with her arms outstretched and hands reaching out to heaven.

Lisa shared more with her and gave her a Bible in her own language and in a translation she would understand and appreciate. 

Even though Bahar is now living in a safe place where she isn't abused daily, it is only through God that she finds true rest and freedom from bondage.

Please pray that other women in Kazakhstan like Bahar find rest in Christ and freedom from bondage.  

*Name changed

“I recently visited my neighbor, who is like an aunt to me and is the same age as my mother. I had not seen her since I came back to the country, though I have spoken to her on the phone. Bibi, of course, asked me, ‘Did you get married while you were away?’  Ginny, trying to illustrate her reply, told her friend the story of the woman in Luke 11 who said to Jesus, ‘Blessed is the woman who bore you and nursed you,” and Jesus replied ”even more blessed is he who hears the word of God and lives according to it”.

After lunch together, Bibi asked Ginny to show her a movie about the prophets, which Ginny did on her phone. “She was really receptive and kept saying, ‘true’ as we watched.” Ginny also read John 1 and she listened attentively. “She told me that she can understand the Injil (New Testament) but she doesn't understand the Koran. She is an Arabic teacher and has a local language Koran as well as one in Arabic. But, she said that the Injil is what she had been searching for all her life.”

Ginny asked her neighbor to get her Holy Book, which was found in the back of a cupboard. “We talked a bit more, and then I asked if I could show her more about what is in God’s Holy Word.” Ginny got it down and they read several stories together: the beginning of Genesis (which Bibi had heard about in the prophet’s story,) Noah, Babel, and God's promise to Abraham, Joseph and Moses, Psalm 23 and Isaiah 53. “She wanted to know where the Injil was, and I showed her, and we just happened to open at Matthew 5, so she read Matthew 5, 6 and 7 and some of Matthew 8 which refers to Isaiah 43,” Ginny said. “Then she said her eyes were sore!  It was amazing to me, and I was almost in tears.”

The two ladies talked a little more and then prayed together. “She said, ‘You are the guest—you pray,’ so I prayed the Lord's Prayer. She cried and then she prayed for me as well—including, of course, that I would get a husband!”

But Lucy had local friends who knew the mother and father of Alex, a little guy with cerebral palsy. When the family learned of Lucy's skills, they begged for her help. Alex's mother had been trying to get help for her son, but the medical system required her and Alex to spend a month in the hospital if they were going to appeal for government help.

So, Lucy agreed to help and has been so blessed to visit the family in their home - without any running water on the property – and see Alex's perseverance and joy as she stretches his abilities.

On one recent visit, Alex's father asked Lucy when they could attend church together because he had been having dreams and he thinks he should go to church with Lucy and her family! “This family is going to have a real struggle as they care for their child in a culture which traditionally sees disability as shameful,”  Lucy acknowledged. “What a privilege to be able to offer them a small amount of hope through helping to improve Alex's physical disabilities, but more than that, to help point them to the ultimate hope in the One who created Alex special!”

*Name changed

Life as a marginalised minority was not easy. Gulchara worked long hours in often extreme conditions to earn meager wages.  Five years later, she was relieved to marry an Uzbek man and looked forward to giving more time to her family.

Happiness turned to fear when Gulchara's new Uzbek husband, suspecting unfaithfulness, took a knife and stabbed her several times in the stomach. Gulchara was able to get a hospital where a kind Russian nurse prayed for her and gave her a Bible.  Gulchara, being a devout Muslim, was afraid of both Christianity and of touching the Bible so she disposed of it in the waste bin in the hospital toilet.  

However, during the operation to repair her liver, she ‘saw’ herself leave her body and enter a garden in the sky, filled with peace and joy.  She heard a voice say, ‘I love you; you are my child.’  When she was discharged, Gulchara met a believing Uzbek family who took her in and read the Bible with her.  She heard how to become a child of God and remembered her hospital experience.

Gulchara became a Christian and on visits back to Uzbekistan has now led three family members to faith in Christ.

Pray for many Central Asians who seek work in Russia to find faith.

While it’s difficult to come by hard numbers for how many girls are involved in the sex industry in that part of the world, because of shadow economy and cultural norms of the region, some people feel there are unmistakable trends. How is it, for example, that thousands of Kazakh women turned up in the South Korean sex industry, and that thousands of Uzbek and Kyrgyz women provide sex services to Kazakh men?

Regularly spending time on the streets and talking to the women, Amy learnt about the "second wave”—a trend, in addition to migration and criminal business, in the region. Since highly traditional values are the norm in the culture, if a trafficked woman is somehow able to return home, she is often stigmatised and unable to pursue a normal life. Often, her only recourse is to become a recruiter for the sex trade herself.

Many times, the victims-turned-traffickers no longer recognise the devastation they inflict on others. With a moral rationale that comes only from a cycle of abuse and violence, these women reason that, since they treat their fresh recruits with less cruelty than they themselves incurred, they are actually doing the girls a favour. In fact, many in this criminal industry justify the exploitation of these girls: Traffickers—recruiters, transporters, buyers and clients—imagine that they are helping these girls, rather than oppressing them.

Please pray for God's intervention to stop this disturbing "second wave" trend in this beautiful region of Central Asia. Pray that the Lord will raise up godly men and women like Amy to fight against human trafficking and prostitution. Pray for partnership between OM and local ministries, and a holistic approach to this issue.

*Name changed

Burjoo is one of those women, believing radiantly in Jesus and yet grieving at the lack of response to God in her own family.

Over the years, Burjoo's mother has heard the good news many times, and she has even actively participated in fellowship groups at Burjoo's house. She has accepted that her daughter is a follower of Jesus.

However, when Burjoo moved into her mother's house, she established clear boundaries that Burjoo must not talk to her friends about the Lord, and that she must not leave her Holy Book around for people to see. 

Burjoo felt discouraged and cried out to God, asking how she could share His love with such restrictions. She decided to start by showing the film Magdalena: Released From Shame one evening. 

At first, most people continued their conversations and didn’t pay attention to the film. Slowly, one after another was drawn into the story, so that eventually everyone’s focus was on the screen.

Before the movie ended, however, the electricity cut out for the night. Her family was disappointed and wanted to see the end.

Burjoo said, “Don’t worry! I know the ending. I can tell you the rest of the story.” 

And so it began. The family sat late into the night while Burjoo told the story of Jesus and how He interacts with women, bringing hope, healing and salvation.

Now this has become a regular evening event in Burjoo’s family. After the lights go out and candles are lit, Burjoo begins another story. 

Please pray that God will draw Burjoo’s family into a relationship with Himself. Pray for wisdom and discernment for Burjoo as she shares, and that she will boldly use the gifts God has given her.

In their small community, Bernd and Birgit’s need for a new accountant was soon known, and so the bookkeeper for the bazaar stepped in to help. This well-respected older Kyrgyz lady knew Bernd and Birgit wanted things done right, but old habits die hard. Despite the couple’s instructions, hints and pleas, for five years the woman managed the books her own way.

They began to pray for a good and honourable way to fire this influential woman and find someone who would be more transparent, available and teachable. Offending this woman, who had so many contacts and connections in the community, could mean trouble for the couple, so Bernd and Birgit brought this issue before the Lord and asked for a solution.

One day Bernd entered the bookkeeper's office to delicately broach the subject. Even before he said anything, she started apologising. Working for the business had become too much for her and, unfortunately, she had to leave. She then introduced Bernd and Birgit to a young, motivated and teachable bookkeeper to replace her and promised she’d still be available to help should any problem arise.

God turned this critical situation around in a way Bernd and Birgit couldn’t have imagined.

*Last name omitted for security reasons

A long-term worker, Sherry, was at home with her husband, Mark, on Women's Day when there was a loud thumping on the door. Mark answered, expecting it to be the man with the electric bill. Instead, it was two little boys holding a soggy, dilapidated mountain iris in their hands.

They congratulated the household on Women's Day and wanted some candy. Mark is always happy to give kids candy, so he went and got a big handful, poured it into the kids’ hands, took the iris and began to shut the door.

But, the boys looked alarmed. Mark clarified that the iris was indeed for Sherry for Women's Day, but they vehemently shook their heads. "No, you need to shake it and give it back," they insisted.

Despite living many years in Tajikistan, Mark was unsure why he should shake a little mountain flower and give it back – as well as pay candy for the favour! The boys finally explained that he needed to shake the flower and make a wish. 

"Soof-poof" is the Tajik expression for magic and superstition. Mark, Sherry and the workers in Tajikistan long for the precious people of the country to neither wish upon a star nor a mountain iris, but to put their trust in their Saviour, Jesus Christ.

I was told by a friend of mine that about 20 years ago there was no word for “sorry” in Kazakh. She corrected herself and said that, actually, one of the country’s poets had used a word, but that no one actually said it.

Then, apparently, foreigners came to the country. They wanted to know how to speak Kazakh, and they needed the word for “sorry”. They wanted to know what to say when they made blunders in the language, bumped into people by accident or offended the culture in some way.

Struggling to meet the new foreigners’ request, the language helpers dug out the old word meaning “to forgive”. They worked out what “forgive me” would be, and the foreigners started using it – all the time.

Eventually, the locals who were working with them had to respond to this strange phenomenon when they realised that the Bible supported all this “sorry-ing”! My friend said that the first time she had to say it she hesitated, experiencing an internal battle: “Say it.” “No, I can’t.” “You have to.” “Ok ... s... s... sorry!”

Eventually usage of the word spread from the foreigners to the believers and from the believers to the rest of society. Now the word is part of the language.

Most believers in Kazakhstan are first generation believers – people who’ve been brought up without using the word for “sorry”, without knowledge of how refreshing forgiveness can be.

We’re here to model a humble attitude, a readiness to apologise – even in an honour-shame culture, where you aren’t supposed to admit to being wrong – and the joy of complete forgiveness.

Tanya’s* voice was insistent: “We need to talk to you!”

A bright, intelligent 12-year-old, Tanya was the most faithful attender of our conversational English clubs in Kazakhstan. While we teachers are restricted from sharing much during teaching times, we are always thrilled when our students want to spend time with us outside of class.

I explained that I had answered her call during a meeting, and that I would call when the meeting was finished. Tanya called again before the meeting was over. 

"My mother and I want to take you to see a movie," she said.

At the cinema, Olga* strode ahead to buy us tickets to an early showing of “Les Misérables”, the film they had invited us to see. For the next two and a half hours we were immersed in the story, the music and the power of the cinematic experience. The songs and some spoken parts were in English, while others were in Russian.

As soon as the credits began, the lights came on, and our hosts hurried us from the cinema. Over lunch we learnt that Tanya and her mother had seen the movie the day before and decided to invite us to see it with them. They filled us in on some things we missed, and we began to discuss the film’s message. They felt that the character Javert’s approach to life was right, with his insistence on obeying the law.

We talked about how forgiveness had turned another character Jean Valjean’s life around, and how God’s love and forgiveness are available to us. In response, Olga stated that we are each entitled to our own choice of religion, but as we parted, I praised God for the opportunity, which they initiated, to spend time with them and discuss matters of faith.  

I pray that they will reflect further on the message of forgiveness reflected in this powerful story, and that we will have further opportunities to discuss this with them.

Please pray for Olga and for Tanya, who is studying a Christian, American home-schooling course in addition to her normal schooling here in Kazakhstan.

*Name changed

“Will there be guards to protect us?” added Sasha.

Workers responsible for sports ministry in Central Asia never thought it would be possible to organise a football game against inmates from the nearby prison. But a friend, who works with local prisons and inmates when they leave, had told them that a few of the men were allowed out of the prison occasionally and suggested the idea.   

A week later, four believing expats, two believing nationals and five non-believing friends formed a team to play their hearts out under the blazing sun.

The team from the prison entered the field as if the sports ministry team would be no match for them, but by the end, after being defeated 8-5, the captain of the prison team admitted they were actually good. “We’ll have to play harder next time,” he grunted, as the two teams shook hands.

After the match finished, the referee, a believer from Ukraine, shared his testimony. Several of the players were intrigued by what he said and talked with him afterwards.

Maksat and Sasha expressed their changed opinions after the game: “They play just like we do!” one of them uttered. “I guess we all play by the same rules,” responded the other.

This friendly match, with its fierce competition and mutual respect, gave the two teams a chance to share their lives with each other. It has now become a monthly event.

“I am excited with the opportunities we have to openly share the reason for the hope we have within us, to non-believers on both sides of the prison walls,” responded one member of the sport ministry team.

She was all smiles as a staff member adjusted the chair, which wound up fitting her perfectly. As she went through user training, it was obvious she was comfortable and learning quickly to move and spin around, to the extent that after her parents had finished filling out all the necessary paperwork, everyone suddenly realised she was gone.

She had wheeled out of her family's gate and over to her teacher's home nearby to share her news.

Her teacher no longer needs to come over to Mijgona's house—she can finally go to school on her own.

There are still countless numbers of children in Central Asia who, like Mijgona, cannot attend school because of a lack of assistive devices and support infrastructures. One of our partner organisations is working to meet these needs by setting up a wheelchair workshop where local workers can build, maintain and adjust assistive devices to meet the needs of those children and their families

My Kazakh friend Fiona recently found out she’s pregnant again. She had a tough time getting used to being a mother the first time, so she and her husband had decided to wait a while before having another baby. But recently a scan revealed a six-week-old baby!

Still, the couple are believers and are rejoicing in the gift God has given them—even though they were hoping to wait another couple of years before receiving this particular gift.  

When Fiona found out she was pregnant, she was asked by the first three people who knew her news if she and her husband were going to keep the baby. The doctor performing the scan told her the baby didn’t yet have a heartbeat—as though this meant they could do whatever they wanted to “it” without a problem.

Her mother-in-law also asked this question. As believers, they witnessed to her and said that, of course, they would be keeping God's gift to them; what other option could there possibly be with something so precious? Fiona is now overjoyed at her news and celebrated with me, despite remembering the difficulties she had the first time around.  

I casually asked her whether she was hoping for a boy or a girl and was surprised when I didn’t get the answer that either would be good, as long as the baby was healthy. She wants a boy, as then her family will be deemed honourable by others. 

Her first child is a girl, which is OK in this culture, as they can help bring up the much-esteemed boy—but to have only girls? Then you must keep having children until the boy comes along. 

As a result of this attitude, many Kazakhs live with the knowledge that their parents didn’t want them—or wanted them to be something they’re not. I once befriended a woman whose name was Ulbolsin, which roughly translates as, "may there be a boy". 

My husband and I have chosen to have two children, unless God gives us more unexpectedly. I appreciate the freedom to make that choice, unhindered by a doctor’s medical mistakes or my relatives’ expectations.

Meanwhile, I’ll do my best to help Fiona with the new baby and encourage her to continue being a witness to her non-believing friends and family in the way she brings her children up, with love and respect for life, treating everyone the way God would treat them—whether they were planned or an unexpected gift.

These words reveal the concept of marriage in Uzbek culture. A man builds his house and family when he gets married: starting a family and having children is the purpose of marriage. A woman, however, becomes “a full person” in a way when she gets married.

Unmarried women are often referred to as girls, no matter how old they are, and are accountable to their fathers, under his protection. Once a woman is married, Uzbeks believe she then knows what life is really about, as she has then experienced “life in its full form”.

Staying single is not an option in Uzbek culture. There is a lot of pressure, especially on women, to get married. Even girls in their early twenties become anxious if they don't yet have a husband. The neighbours begin to refer to them as otirib qolgan, or “someone who was left sitting”, which means basically that on one wanted them.  

OM works with Uzbeks in both Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, two independent republics that were formerly part of the Soviet Union. During the Soviet years, expression of Uzbek culture was restricted. Since the separation of the Soviet Union, Uzbeks have had the freedom to return to their cultural roots, but they have also experienced great economic upheaval that has caused significant problems in many families.

OMers in the country know many families where the husband has either deserted his family and/or turned to alcohol, and the wife is left to bear the responsibility of raising the children alone.

Please pray that Uzbek men (and other Central Asian men) will uphold their cultural mandate to “build their house”, with Jesus as the foundation. Pray also that Uzbek woman (and other Central Asian women) will truly “enter life in its full form” with Jesus, their ultimate Groom. 

Despite the deportation of most Christian workers in 2006, OM works quietly behind the scenes in different ways to equip the national church. A key need is the provision of jobs so that local believers can earn a living and remain a light in this place. Joshua*, a resident believer, is one of these. Here he shares his story:  

"In my capacity as a manager in a factory, I used to host many parties with lots of alcohol, and, along with my supervisor, I used to cheat the company to make extra money. Even when I would tell my supervisor that I didn’t want to do it, he would insist that I continue and that he would take the responsibility, even it if meant going to hell.

“At home, a local Korean lady would come regularly and try to share the good news with us. We didn’t like it, but we put up with her visits for over a year because we didn’t want to offend her. When we decided to move to a bigger flat, the owner of the flat we liked was an Uzbek believer, and she also tried to share the good news with us. We didn’t like what she said, but we wanted the flat, so we bought it. The owner lived in the same building and she hosted many worship meetings. She invited us time and time again, and eventually my wife went and became a believer. After that she would question me constantly about where our money came from and would refuse to use money that I had earned dishonestly.

“I did not object to my wife becoming a believer, and I even agreed that they could have their meetings in our flat sometimes, but I told her that she should not preach to me and expect me to be like her. I refused to join their meetings. I had decided that no matter what, I would not believe.

“One day, however, as I was preparing to leave my flat, I heard them singing. It made me feel really good and I tried to get closer to listen to the words. I ended up staying. I continued to attend for some time, even feeling like God was speaking to me when a Russian pastor was preaching, but I was reluctant to accept Christ because I knew it would mean an end to my drinking and extra income.

“Finally though, I decided I would rather have eternal life than all the things in this world, and I accepted Christ as my Saviour. My supervisor was really angry with my changed behaviour and tried to get rid of me. Eventually I resigned and my wife and I travelled from town to town for three years to share the good news.

“We have led many to Christ and now are leading a house group in our home town. Our oldest daughter is also leading the youth group. We are also involved in media translation work, translating many Christian movies into Uzbek. My wife sells vegetables in the morning and I am currently attending Bible training in the evenings. Although we do not have many things, our family is content and glad that we can serve Him and have the hope of eternal life."

Joshua and his family have spent almost all of their savings, and they struggle to keep their three children in school. His wife is now thinking about going to Russia to find a job. Please pray as the OM team works with them to find ways that the family can stay together and continue to lead the group and do His work. 

OM is trying to help many people like Joshua who are providing spiritual bread for their people also provide physical bread for their families. Pray that God will send people to help set up businesses and create jobs for them. Please pray for protection for Joshua and his wife.

Are you interested in investing your business skills in Uzbekistan to help Joshua’s family and other Uzbek believers? For more information, contact silkroad@om.org.  

* Name changed

A long-term worker in Kazakhstan shares about her passion for creative arts to invest in relationships and learn about culture at a prestigious university.

When you visit our house you'll notice that I love doing crafts. One of my best Kazakh friends noticed this and she invited me to go to sewing class with her. What better way to invest in relationships, grow in language and learn about the culture? From the first moment I joined her, I have loved it.

At her teacher's house I learnt how to sew korpes (floor cushions), found out which bazaar sells what, heard about their birth place, Ural, and many more things. The first lesson took three hours, but of course, we couldn't leave before we had tea!

After a few times of traveling by bus for half an hour to our teacher's house, she asked if it was easier for us to come to her work place. We thought it would be interesting as well, as it would give us the opportunity to see the work of other students.

"But we don't have a pass to get in, what do we say when we enter through security?" my friend asked. "Just say you're my sisters," our teacher responded. My friend looked at me and started laughing. "For me it would work, but what about her? She doesn't look Kazakh!"

The teacher looked at me and agreed to call me a friend of her sister. For me it was a big compliment that she saw me as one of them! So, off we went to the Kazakh National University of Arts—a funny blue building that looks like a bucket, and the place to be for all future professional dombra players, dancers and other artists.

I love to be there, surrounded by all the creative students. Some are practising their dances; from another room you can hear a beautiful concert being rehearsed; our department is full of inspirational works—paintings, weavings, leather applications and stitched art.

At first I was a bit afraid I would be sent away, as I'm obviously not a Kazakh student, but now the teacher even lets us study together with her official students. They wonder what we are doing there, but they are encouraged that I'm speaking their language and desiring to learn their forms of art.

I spend a lot of time with my friend, our teacher, and now also the other students. I'm praying for them as our relationships develop. Even though I feel really small on my own in this huge building, I hope God will work through it and let His light shine to these people in this university.

To address this need, the Pamir radio ministry staff send Bible verses by SMS, or text, to listeners and viewers. These SMS texts become their daily bread. One man said, "The verses you send me have completely changed my life." Another called to ask for more. Others say they share them with their friends. Please pray for the encouragement of lone believers and for spiritual growth through radio and TV ministry.

Seeing their open hearts, the team shared about Jesus and the life He brings. The father had watched a film about Jesus and admitted, “I want to go to heaven, but I think I’ll go to hell because I am a bad person.” He wanted to believe, so the team continued sharing. The father accepted Jesus! A believer who lives in the village and knows the family will help them as they embark on their new life with Christ. Please pray for the discipleship of those who have come to faith through the Silk Road Challenge outreach.