Greetings Joey,
That's great work, it's truly wonderful to hear those developments as it was precisely this sort of achievement many visionaries of the 10/40 Window and the missions in Europe had envisioned. Some of us mission veterans are digging into some of our resources and texts going back into the 1990's but what you're seeing around Ksamil is indeed what was envisioned decades ago in those early planning tracts. It's a big part of why our own Sunbelt church network centered around our group of multi denominational churches in Texas, has re-directed virtually all our resources to the European missions, and shaped how those missions are conducted, which it appears you and your group ahve also adopted.
I remember as a young whipper-snapper then, our mission leader handing out photocopies of passages from one of the books talking about not only how to make the European missions more effective, but also to use them as springboards to reach into the MENA region that had been so tough for us to reach before. The plan being a form of "immersive missions" in Europe that would bring each of us permanently as a family unit from North America into Europe and make our families fully integrated into the region, generally through ancestral links and raising our children there as citizens of the nations we moved to (hence the "this is our new home" emphasis). And then, importantly, using our new ministry footholds in the EU to provide a base for newly converted circulating migrant workers (including some refugees) who were moving constantly back and forth and back again, from and back to the Balkans, Middle East and North Africa, to bring the Gospel themselves into those regions.
I also remember back in those early planning days, that observers outside the mission efforts and even outside our church network in general, being fascinated by the ingenuity, foresight and effectiveness of that system, how for the first time it's given us sustained reach into portions of the Window esp in the MENA countries. We were discussing recently what we could recall from those texts, and at least one of the authors who drafted the core ideas had been in the Foreign Service throughout the region also serving in Bosnia and Kosovo during the Balkans wars of the 1990's, used that knowledge to craft a plan that would make the missions more sustained and effective. His most important breakthrough was to realize that to bring the Gospel into MENA countries, the voices of Christ's Word had to be the sons and daughters of those countries themselves, not outsiders and certainly not Westerners identified with any kind of colonial history, as they would lack the kind of intimate cultural and community knowledge needed and spark reflexive resistance in MENA regions.
But a special opportunity came about thanks to the unique character of circular migration between EU countries and the Mediterranean, with the large majority of labor migrants returning back home to the Middle East or North Africa after building savings, and Balkans refugees staying longer but still traveling back to Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia and Kosovo and Albania often. By moving ourselves to European Union countries and attending and establishing churches in Europe, especially with ancestral links and our children being raised and fully identifying with the nations there--attending the local schools and speaking the language at home as much as possible--we would gain acceptance in the community and our churches would take hold. From there, we could build the local networks necessarily to bring the Gospel to the populations involved in the circular migration, and they would go back to the places in the countries of the Window and establish a church presence where we never could. This is part of why our own churches esp down in Texas have been so heavily emphasizing missions and a permanent relocation of our families in France and Germany to advance their missions there. And if anything, our task has become even easier in the last two decades, with free movement policies in the EU allowing our relocated families to freely move across European countries and plant the seeds of new churches much farther and wider than we could before.
We were going over some recollections recently of one of those mission planners from the 1990's drawing a map with curving arrows leading from the European base countries, where our families would move to and settle down in, into countries of the Window from Macedonia and Bosnia down into the mountainous mixed Berber and Arab regions of Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, on into Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran and especially Turkey. All places we could not effectively venture due to sensitivities about colonial histories, but where circulating migrant workers recently converted and fervent members of our churches in Europe, both established and revitalized and newly built, could go in the return migration portion of their journeys. Founding their own churches and bringing their family and friends, even village elders and leaders, into the warm embrace of our Lord and the Good Word of the Gospels.
I distinctly recall a grateful pastor from Algeria coming to speak to us and thank us for this two decades ago, who had been converted and founding his own church back in his family's home village this way. All thanks to the efforts, kindness and ministries of one of our members from South Carolina who had brought her family to France--where he had been born and worked for 15 years after schooling, but then after his conversion, feeling the calling to bring the Good Word of the Lord back to his family's rural Algerian community, that likely had not heard the Word of the Lord in at least 1,200 years, from when the Byzantine Empire had built the first churches there. And another pastor just 5 years ago from Syria doing the same--his church still growing and going strong despite the civil war there, grateful for one of our church members from the Texas German belt in the Panhandle through Oklahoma and Kansas, who'd brought his family back to settle in Germany and met him there. The Syrian pastor was a young man when he came as a refugee to Hamburg, lost and initially hostile to the Christian faith and people, until he heard our relocated church member singing Christmas carols with his family and other locals on a street corner, and finally opened his heart to the joy of the Bible and the hymns written to express the Good News of the New Testament. His conversion only fueled his love and drive to bring that same joy and faith back to his people and Syria, where he continues to minister today. This has been the joyful pattern across the region, repeated thousands of times, and in each case as the Church once again becomes a respected and cherished anchor of the MENA communities, it and its members are able to bring more of the neighboring communities into the flock.
And now decades later, we're seeing the beautiful flowers growing from those seeds planted in the 1990's. We of course do not know exact numbers with the de-localized and ground up nature of the missions, but they are significant and have had a great impact in resuscitating the Church in the Middle East and North Africa, likely for the first time and with the strongest presence in over a millennium. One of our recent speakers with a technical analysis background estimated that several million new ministers and family members from the US and Canada, Australia, NZ, Brazil, Argentina, South Africa, Chile and other nations, have been able to use their status as European diaspora to bring their families back into countries across the EU region and settle with full acceptance from the local populations, enough to revive once faltering churches and build new ones, and establish networks of Christian ministries stretching from one community to another. And then they in turn have reached millions among the circulating migrant population and provided them with the tools to bring the Gospel into the MENA region when they return home. This may well be what you were seeing in Ksamil, and the happy news is that the same phenomenon is taking hold in hundreds of other places as well. We are having a mission literature meeting again this weekend, including several who taught us the basics and developed the general system back in the 1990's, so we may be able to dig up some of those books and tracts that we ourselves used and learned from back then and still so relevant today. I will let you know any literature that we can resurface.
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