Middle East (MNN) — For Christians who grew up as Muslims, church and discipleship are often a challenge to find.
Michelle Sessoms serves with Freedom to Lead International, a ministry that comes alongside believers in North Africa and the Middle East.
One Christian from a Muslim background told Sessoms, “Persecution is not the greatest difficulty that we face. The greatest need for Muslim background believers is identity.”
Sessoms explains that this need for identity comes because on one hand, these new Christians are persecuted by radical Muslims. On the other hand, they are shunned by the traditional church, which doesn’t know what to do with them.
Photo courtesy of Gabriel Almanzar via Pexels
“Part of our heart is that we want to cultivate these faithful, effective leaders so that they can guide this unique global family, because they don’t know how to fit into that traditional church,” she says.
“We have a four year program where we walk them through leadership development from a ministry development standpoint and character formation focusing on the stories of Jesus.”
This equipping is for real-life, practical questions facing these Christians today.
“It changes our perspective of, ‘How do you lead a healthy church when there’s no structure of a church? How do you be a peacemaking leader when all these forces around you are happening? How do you mentor the next generation when it’s such a young church?’” Sessoms says.
Ask God to build communities and leaders who can pioneer hard questions that Muslim background believers are going through today.
“We learned a lot from them (Muslim background believers),” Sessoms says. “[We realized] ‘You know, there’s bigger questions here that we don’t have answers to.’ Really [it’s] dependence on the Holy Spirit to guide in these ways.”
Learn more about Freedom to Lead here.
Header photo is a representative stock photo courtesy of Amir Hosseini via Unsplash.
