Have you heard the expression “Boots on the Ground?” Well our Live Dead Missionaries are the boots on the Silk Road. Here we’d like to take a moment and allow one of them to share a snapshot of their life with you. Some names and details have been changed, but this is a true story from this colorful, vibrant, and sometimes surprising region.

At the end of the first year working at our language center in our country of ministry, the students there began to open up in new ways. They wanted to spend time with us, talk with us, and get to know us. This is a major deal here. The culture is very much an insider/outsider culture where the only ones on the inside are your family; all others are outsiders not to be trusted. However as the school year ended this all changed with our students. Our team started to become insiders.

We hosted a Chi Alpha team from the US. Our students loved them and opened up to them in unprecedented ways. Just before the team arrived, one of our students, Ramazan, told us that he had begun to follow the Muslim faith. He had started reading his Koran and saying his prayers. He was seeking God and seeking truth.

When the Chi Alpha team arrived in our village, we arranged for our two most advanced groups of English students to lead them on a tour of the town. Ramazan was one of those advanced students. We split into two groups and I had Ramazan, the leader of the Chi Alpha team, Josh, and a newer believer from the team, Tim, along with several others.

We went to the Russian Orthodox Church in the village and as we walked into the gates, Ramazan came to me and whispered, “This is my first time to come here.” He was obviously very nervous.

We went in and the students were amazed. They had never seen anything like it before. There were paintings all over the church, depicting biblical scenes and the major characters of the New Testament. Tim asked me to explain the significance of a couple of items and that led to me sharing the bulk of the Gospel with the female students and team members, all based on the images in the Church. This is what those images were originally intended for, telling the Gospel! As I did this, I heard Josh doing much of the same thing with the male students! As we left, Josh and I were talking and we overheard Tim, a believer of maybe one year, telling the Gospel to Ramazan, who had certainly never heard it before.

Tim answered all his questions as best he could and in culturally appropriate ways. He was definitely being Spirit-led. As the day concluded, we asked Ramazan if he would like to come play soccer with us but he was very unsure. He eventually told us that when he runs, he gets sick. He said that he has some type of deformity of the ribs but the doctors would not do anything to help treat him. So he simply cannot run. Pretty tough for a 17-year-old kid.

I asked him if he would allow us to pray for him, in the name of Jesus. I explained to him how the Koran and the Injil (Islamic name for the New Testament) speak of Jesus as the healer, how Jesus healed me, and Josh and Tim shared experiences of Jesus healing. Though he was unsure at first, he agreed to let me pray for him right there in the central square in our Muslim village with his friends standing around.

After a simple prayer, I saw him wiping his eyes discreetly. I wish I could say that he was healed instantly or that he bowed his head and accepted Christ, but that didn’t happen. However seeds were planted in this young man’s life. The Gospel was shared with a student seeking after God, who also seemed to be the most resistant to the good news.

Our vision isn’t to reach one, or plant one church, but to see a church planting movement throughout this most difficult and hard of places. But it still begins with one.