For followers of Jesus from a Muslim background, isolation is a huge challenge, especially if their faith is secret. Basma longed for Christian community for many years, but recently met some CMS mission partners…

When she was a child, Basma (name changed) in North Africa was drawn to Jesus, even though she was born into a Muslim family. She had met Christians in her town and wanted to be like the Christian girls – though she wasn’t really sure why.

She learned the Lord’s Prayer and would say it sometimes. Like many other believers in Jesus from a Muslim background (MBBs), she had dreams about Jesus. And as she grew from childhood to adulthood, she gave her life to Christ.

Basma’s new faith was a secret, not shared even with those closest to her. She married a Muslim man, the marriage arranged by her family. Basma and her husband had two sons. Yet this marriage fell apart and the couple separated.

Craving community

The separation released Basma to explore and live out her faith in Jesus at home, though not in public. And that meant that while she could read the Bible and pray alone, she couldn’t meet with other Christians.

Basma has a good job to support herself and her sons, who now live with her, and the boys still see their father weekly. Basma is comfortable with continuing to wear a hijab and her family don’t know that she follows Jesus. She seeks to bring her sons up in the Christian faith, though she must be careful – their father could remove the children from her and bring them up himself.

Over the last 10 to 15 years, since first coming to faith in Jesus, the main place Basma has been able to grow in her faith has been through discipleship online. Yet Basma longs for community with other Christians and for the opportunity to discuss the Bible, and to connect with other MBBs like her to pray together.

CMS mission partners who know Basma comment, “She’s desperate… to talk about her faith and to be who she feels she is, rather than to hide.” But within that is a great tension – Basma needs to protect her children and is keen to keep relationships with her family.

Facing real risks

Secret believers like Basma risk losing their jobs, family life and connections with community, and in some places there are legal risks too. This makes MBBs whose faith is not publicly known reluctant to meet together.

The experiences of another MBB in Basma’s town, whose faith is not a secret, clearly illustrate those risks. This woman comes from another North African country, which she fled after she was beaten up and arrested for her faith, and her family disowned her. She had to begin life afresh with no connections in a new land, and still painfully misses the place and people she left behind.

Precious connection

Basma does know some Christians through her workplace, and they helped her to connect with someone who travels around her region meeting with MBBs and discipling them. Yet there was a challenge in finding a safe place for Basma to meet with this man, where she could go without suspicion and meet him with another woman present.

This is where the CMS mission partner couple stepped in – they offered their home as a safe place to meet. This couple speak Arabic fluently, and are able to welcome Basma and discuss the Bible and other issues with her, as well as hosting her discipleship meetings.

Basma and the man who disciples her arrive separately, and much of their time together is taken up with Basma’s questions about what she has read in the Bible. Recently she read through 1 Samuel, and had many questions about why God had done things and why people reacted in particular ways.

Inspiring hunger

One of the CMS mission partners observes, “Basma’s hunger for the Bible is inspiring. She absolutely devours Scripture and wants to discuss everything. She wants to understand everything in a way that lots of Christians don’t. That challenges me – when I’m following daily prayer and reading long chunks of the Old Testament, sometimes I just fly through it, I don’t think about it, but she is questioning everything she’s reading. She still really wants to learn and press in.”

Such is Basma’s desire to meet with other Christians to discuss the Bible that she will now come to see the mission partner couple even if the man leading discipleship cannot come too.

As their relationship with Basma has deepened, from time to time they have been able to take bread and wine together, at Basma’s request – hugely valuable to Basma, as she is unable to attend church.

While Basma’s friends and family don’t know about her faith, her mum does sense there is something about Basma and asks questions, such as “Where do you get your wisdom from?” Basma and her mission partner friends continue to pray for her mum, that doors will open up for Basma to speak about her faith.

Pray together

As we pray together, we can stand with Christians like Basma. Please pray for Basma to be encouraged in her faith, and that CMS partners will be able to show more people like her that Jesus never gives up on them.

Related posts

Get our email newsletter:

SIGN UP

The post A secret disciple appeared first on Church Mission Society (CMS).

Growing up, Misha hadn’t heard of Jesus – but now she has started a church in her village, thanks to the experience and confidence she gained through training with CMS local partners.

Misha (name changed) grew up in a Hindu family in rural Nepal. She hadn’t ever heard of Jesus. She lived in the hills with her husband, two sons and a daughter, but her husband left her and she cared for the children as a single parent. During Nepal’s civil war (1996 to 2006), Misha fled with her family – becoming one of hundreds of thousands of people who were displaced to other rural areas in Nepal.

As the years went by, Misha grew increasingly concerned about her daughter’s health. She was unwell for a long time, and Misha didn’t know what to do, especially as the cost and the difficulties of travelling made it impossible to access treatment.

Church: worth a try

One day, Misha’s cousin came to visit. This cousin shared her experience of meeting and following Jesus, including her own daughter being healed, and suggested Misha try going to a church.

Out of other options, Misha was sceptical, but decided to take her daughter to a church. The church she found was a long journey away, but when she got there Misha was amazed. People at the church prayed for her daughter, and the girl was healed! After this, Misha’s whole family came to faith in Jesus, and Misha continued to attend church.

After a few months, it became clear that the church was too far away to travel there every week, so Misha and her family sought other Christians closer to home. This isn’t a simple thing to do in rural Nepal. Travelling between villages can be challenging and sometimes there’s only one family or individual following Jesus in a given village.

Yet Misha met some local believers who gathered together for weekly worship, and she and her family joined a church much closer to their village.

Pillar of the church

As time went by, Misha became a key member of that church, and when problems came up and two leaders left, she stood firm, supporting the church and handling the issues that had arisen. Finding herself in a position of leadership, Misha realised that she needed some training to equip her in this role.

Misha wasn’t alone in feeling ill-equipped for leadership – most of the leaders of rural churches in Nepal are first generation believers in Jesus. Equipping leaders in remote and rural districts is a real challenge, leaving many churches without leaders. For new leaders, it is difficult to access long-term formal theological education – as that might mean relocating to study in Kathmandu.

In the face of this challenge, Misha heard about someone who could help. CMS local partners in Nepal run training for local church leaders through shorter courses in more accessible places. Misha heard that she could join a three-month course in a nearby town and signed up.

The courses these local partners run cover a range of different topics, including: discipleship, counselling, biblical preaching, leadership and Bible study methods.

Starting the training was a big step for Misha, and it wasn’t easy. Again like many leaders in rural and remote areas, Misha had not had the opportunity to access higher levels of education. In her case, she had only received primary school education, so study was difficult. Yet she tried her best and was able to complete the course, gaining valuable experience. She also found space to spend quiet time with God, and this time changed her and she left committed to God’s mission.

Shared learning

After the training, Misha returned to her village and shared what she had learned with others in her church. She commented, “I learned and developed myself to bring people to Christ and share the gospel confidently.” Misha felt far more able to care for the people in her church.

As a result of the training and the changes in her life, Misha has now started a church in her own village, with connections to the church she had been leading before. Misha leads this new church and even provided the land to build it.

Today there are 60 to 70 followers of Jesus attending this village church, as many Christians from a Hindu background have come to join them.

Recently one of the local partners was able to visit the church to see how God was using Misha. He shared, “I was very much encouraged by what she is doing and by the zeal and passion of the believers for Christ. I feel really God is using her to build his kingdom on this earth.”

Take part

Could you be part of the journey,
helping someone like Misha follow Jesus to the edges?

Explore mission opportunities

Related posts

Get our email newsletter:

SIGN UP

The post Nepal: remote possibilities appeared first on Church Mission Society (CMS).

We all see their work but not many of us see them. What they do is essential, but not considered valuable. This is the reality for many cleaners in the UK. Clean for Good wants to change that. Maritza’s story shows this is possible.

“Without a doubt, cleaning is one of the lowest valued kinds of work in the UK,” says Charlie Walker, managing director at Clean for Good in London.

Every day an invisible legion of women and men set off to make Britain’s office spaces usable. Yet, many cleaners are not given time off or sick days. Some suffer verbal and sexual abuse from their employers and almost none are paid a living wage.

The dirty reality

Maritza was one of these unseen people. Growing up in Colombia and Ecuador, her family was close-knit, but her father struggled with alcoholism, which took a toll on them all. Maritza got married at 16, thinking life would be better with her husband. But he became abusive towards her, just like her father had been towards her mother.

Her father-in-law told her if she went to church, she would find God and he would help her. She went, but nothing changed at home. She was lonely and unhappy.

Maritza, her husband and their three children landed in the UK in 1995, planning to get some documents in order and emigrate to the US. But it wasn’t long before Maritza’s husband abandoned them. She was stuck, alone with three children in a country where she didn’t speak the language. She eventually met someone who spoke Spanish, who helped her find a place to rent, and she got some cleaning work.

Working Monday to Sunday from seven in the morning to seven at night, she earned £90 a week, and £80 of that went on rent. “I had £10 left to buy food and pay for gas and electricity,” she remembers. Life was miserable. She couldn’t see a way forward, and considered doing something drastic.

But one day, as she was preparing lunch, somebody knocked on her door. Maritza tried to ignore them but they wouldn’t give up. On the other side of the door was a local pastor who invited the family to church.

Realising he’d interrupted their lunch, the pastor offered to take the family out to a restaurant. Later that day, he brought the family to his house to meet his wife.

“She just cuddled me. And that’s when I found Jesus,” Maritza says. The pastor’s wife cried with her. “In that cuddle… it was like I was telling her everything. She knew everything. After that, I felt peace and joy again. And I went back home and things were different.”

Maritza and her family got involved with this pastor’s church and accepted Jesus into their lives. But her job situation grew more untenable. Maritza was now working for a cleaning company who wanted her to work relentlessly and always be available.

Not surprisingly, her health suffered and she ended up in hospital, completely worn out. The doctor said she couldn’t go back to that job. But how would she provide for her family?

When she came home from hospital, she received a phone call from Clean for Good. She had never heard of them, but they had read her CV (which her daughter had sent out to help find an alternative role) and wanted to offer her a job under very different conditions.

A different cleaning company

Clean for Good, officially launched in 2017, is a commercial cleaning company that chooses to value people and aims to provide a higher standard of service than their competitors, while still turning a profit.

The Christian company was started in response to the problem of low pay, exploitation and oppression in the cleaning sector. A small church in the City of London, St Andrew’s by the Wardrobe (coincidentally where CMS was born), did a listening exercise with their parishioners in 2014 and discovered that many of those who worked as security guards or cleaners were exhausted and underpaid. They longed for respect, dignity and a fair wage.

Church member Miriam Goodacre took the idea for an ethical cleaning company to a Dragons’ Den-style competition at Greenbelt festival and won a grant and a place on CMS’s mission entrepreneurship course Make Good, where she developed the idea further. CMS became a founder-investor of Clean for Good alongside two other groups.

Clean for Good employs each of its cleaners with a fixed number of hours from day one (no zero-hour contracts) and pays the London living wage for every hour worked. Clean for Good also gives their cleaners 25 days of annual leave and bank holidays off and runs an occupational sick pay scheme.

Calling working at Clean for Good a “miracle”, Maritza says she’s gone from being treated like a machine to being seen for her worth as a person. She is now a manager at the company.

Clean for Good is not just paying a fair wage, but is also fighting for everyone who is trapped in a system dominated by low pay and oppression. The company’s vision is to set an example of providing an excellent service to its clients while valuing its cleaners as people made in the image of God.

“Jesus… wasn’t scared to confront injustices. And in a sense, that’s what Clean for Good is doing,” said Charlie Walker, managing director.

“One single mother who works for us had been doing 70 hours a week. Now she works 35 hours, and gets to see her children. In coming to work with us, another woman got a 350 per cent pay rise from where she’d been. Being part of this and being able to tell our clients and investors about this difference makes me really happy.”

Six years in, the way Clean for Good treats its employees is starting to influence other companies for good.

Take part

Do you have dreams of making a difference at the edges? Check out CMS Pioneer Mission Training:

Pioneer
Mission Training

Related posts

Get our email newsletter:

SIGN UP

The post Cleaning up the cleaning sector appeared first on Church Mission Society (CMS).

This term, 40 people joined in with Pioneering Parishes webinars, a new addition to CMS that provides tools to help parishes become more outward looking.

Founded on the belief that pioneering is integral to parish life, Pioneering Parishes webinar courses are designed for PCC members, parish clergy, people exploring a pioneer call, diocesan or parish support staff and anyone searching for tools to help them shift the energy of the church out into the parish.

Recently, three church leaders invited their leadership teams to join them on the First Steps course to develop a greater shared understanding of what it means for their church to become more outward focused, why focus needs to change and how they can do it – and sustain it.

One participant commented, “With the Holy Spirit we can re-imagine church ‘everywhere’ and not only within our church buildings… God can call us to minister organically in new ways and in new places, meeting people where they are.”

Take part

Could your church benefit from Pioneering Parishes? Find out more on the website:

Pioneering Parishes

Related posts

Get our email newsletter:

SIGN UP

The post Appetite for pioneering in the parish appeared first on Church Mission Society (CMS).

From physical food to spiritual nourishment: a market in north east Brazil changed Daniele’s life – and the CMS partners behind it long to see more lives transformed.

Daniele first heard about a new market in her community of Aguazinha (a poor neighbourhood in the city of Olinda) when two women came to her house. These women were members of Água Viva, an Anglican church in the area led by CMS local partner Bishop Flavio Adair. They came with news of a community market being launched by the church, where Daniele could come and buy food for her family for just five reais (about 80p).

Daniele, 38, grew up in a loving family home in Aguazinha, but her family had always had financial struggles. Now with two children of her own, she came along to the market. There she met Rosie and Stu Bayford, CMS mission partners who helped to start the market.

From delay to dreams

The idea for the project came about when Rosie and Stu were stuck in the UK waiting for a visa extension. Looking for ways to serve while they waited, they got involved in a project in Leeds redistributing surplus food. This brought to light for them just how much food is wasted (globally, around a third each year), so Rosie and Stu started dreaming about how this could work back in Olinda. They established that Água Viva church was interested in partnering with them and had space to host a market in Aguazinha.

On their return, they put together the details of a plan, brought together a team including fellow CMS mission partner Daniel Brito Medeiros and other members of Água Viva church and reached out to different supermarkets to see if they would be willing to donate food that would otherwise go to waste. The process took several months of ups and downs, but in April 2022 the market launched!

Rosie and Stu explain, “The community market exists to serve families most in need here in Aguazinha. Each week we pick up food that would otherwise be going to waste at bakeries and supermarkets in the area.…

“The idea is that this is like a little shop where families can come and choose the food they’d like. Many of these families have lots of children and are unable to work for a multitude of reasons.”

More than food

As Daniele came along to the market, she got to know people from the church. The market isn’t just about food – those who come along can have a drink and a snack, and spend time chatting with the team.

Rosie and Stu continue, “The idea of the market is not to just provide food for the families, but to walk alongside them as they do life…. It’s about meeting the needs of the people. And that’s not just physical food, but also emotional and spiritual.

“We have found that through conversations, through getting to know people, they’re interested and they want to know more about church.”

Bishop Flavio describes the market as “our work here to serve God together in the Aguazinha community”.

Daniele began to attend the church. For her, Christianity wasn’t a totally new concept, and she had been interested in faith throughout her life. Her grandpa and other members of her family were Christian and she had been to a church and a catechism class when she was growing up, but Daniele never got as far as taking her first communion.

She explains that as she started attending Água Viva, “I was not Christian but I was coming to church. Then I went to a course for people new to church and there I met Jesus. I gave my life to God.”

“Now I’ve met Jesus…”

Daniele was one of three women from the market to get baptised earlier this year. Jesus has made a big difference to her life: “Before I met Jesus, I drank a lot and I smoked, I went to parties and I was very angry. Anything upset me. But now I’ve met Jesus I don’t drink anymore. I don’t smoke anymore. I feel calmer and I’m much happier.”

Through the church Daniele has become part of a small group, with friends who have helped her to understand more about Jesus and encouraged her.

Daniele’s family have also been very supportive: “I gave my life to God. And then when I came back, I told my family, my friends, and everybody was supportive, was happy.”

Sharing the love of God

Daniele continues, “I would love to see my family get to know Jesus because it’s making a huge difference for me. I’m so happy and I would love them to taste and be happy like me. I can speak about Jesus and as well I think the food market should be speaking about Jesus and helping people to get to know the love of God.”

That is part of Rosie and Stu’s dream too: “We’re really excited to see more of these families come to know Jesus through the market and to bring the church to them in a different way. We’re really excited for what is to come. We pray that through the market, people can start asking questions and exploring what faith means to them and that we will see many more baptisms in the future.”

Give today

Your generosity makes stories like this possible. Thank you!

A gift today will help CMS partners to share the love of Jesus with people on the edges like Daniele. Jesus never gives up. Neither should we.

Donate

Related posts

Get our email updates:

SIGN UP

The post More than a market appeared first on Church Mission Society (CMS).

During a special gathering, leaders from Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and the UK connected across languages and cultures, working together to see lives transformed through the love of Jesus.

Related posts

Get our email newsletter:

SIGN UP

The post “There is life at the edges…” appeared first on Church Mission Society (CMS).