Pastor Joseph is visiting leaders in each of the big cities in the country; our denomination has churches in about six different cities. Except for ICS, all are churches for locals, with services conducted in the local language. ICS is the only international church in the group.

Pastor Joseph’s church in the capital city has seen some significant success. “The Holy Spirit moves faster than us!” he says. People are coming to Christ because of the miracles and because of special communications from God. Handicapped people have been healed. Jesus has visited people in dreams. Three religious leaders have converted! There has been tremendous growth, because of what God is doing.

One of the mosques in the city has been converted to a church. A visiting pastor from Minnesota was given an opportunity to preach there! (There are now 8 evangelical churches in the city.)

God is redeeming the crimes of ISIS; 38% of Muslim youth have turned away and become atheist. This decision frees their minds and they are now open to hearing about the true God. To reach them, the church has set up coffee shops and provided teaching in the New Testament. They don’t teach from the Old Testament to these young ex-Muslims because so much of it is in the Quran already.

Photographs from Facebook

The government has been surprisingly supportive, even to the point of providing security for the church. The church is holding Bible studies each week – one for regular people and one for government leaders. God is working hard among those leaders.

“They respect us,” says Pastor Joseph. “They respect us for three reasons. First, we are open. We tell them exactly what we believe and what we are doing. Our faith and our work are not secret. Second, we are not political. We do not align with any political candidate or party. We refuse political invitations.” He got distracted and did not tell us the third reason, but our guess is that it has something to do with the 150 orphans that the church has been caring for, and the help that they’ve been providing to people whose homes and livelihoods have been destroyed by war.

We asked Pastor Joseph how we could pray for him and the work, and he had several requests:

1. Pray for security for the believers, for safety from families and the tribes.
2. Pray for wisdom for the church in dealing with new believers and their secret faith.
3. Pray for the Holy Spirit to lead us, it’s His work, and it’s easy for us to get too much confidence in ourselves.
4. Pray that God will send us a worker who has theological training and is able to talk to atheists. “Someone like Ravi Zacharias,” he said.
5. Pray for the meeting, planned for August in one of the northern cities, when all of the pastors from our denomination in this country will get together for a short conference to plan for the future.

We closed with a prayer time, mentioning all of these things. We were all greatly encouraged by Pastor Joseph’s visit, and the workers here would love to visit his city and church.