Missions Insider
Exclusive Stories from the Mission Field
November 18, 2021
The pope’s historic visit to Iraq in March presented massive security challenges, with all military and civil security forces taking stringent measures. Soldiers at checkpoints were instructed to seize the cargo of any transport vehicle, and before one major papal event they confiscated local missionaries’ carload of 1,000 Bibles. “The strange thing is that we met several people while walking in the streets carrying the same Bibles that we distribute, and when we asked them, they said that they got them from the checkpoint,” a ministry leader said.
November 4, 2021
Invited to a local missionary’s house for dinner with other Christians in Vietnam, Thuan was surprised when they were somehow warm, fun and friendly without the drinking or opium-smoking common in his village. “He had heard the gospel from the local missionary many times, but he didn’t like hearing it,” the leader of a native ministry said. Thuan could not know that accepting the dinner invitation would set him on a journey to prison.
October 28, 2021
Taiba and her two young children arrived at the office of a Middle East-based ministry exhausted, hungry and destitute after fleeing a Taliban raid on their home in Afghanistan. They have lived the nightmare that tens of thousands of other Afghan refugees are trying to avoid. Witnessing the execution of her father and the abduction of her husband, she and her children had to leave home, town and country with only the clothes on their backs.
October 21, 2021
Armed men in a European capital tied up a Druze refugee from Saudi Arabia last year and were torturing him as they recorded videos demanding his family pay 25,000 euros (US$28,900) for his release. When Khaled cried out to God, his Muslim captors told him that if he was going to pray, he should pray like a Muslim to Allah. In the midst of his ordeal, Khaled found himself in an unexpected spiritual battle.
September 16, 2021
A ministry leader in Burma (Myanmar) said he has lost 134 pastors and other workers, including his younger brother, to the pandemic or to violence from a military coup in February.
September 9, 2021
Members of a tribe in the Philippines lived in tense isolation from each other due to decades of conflict that at times flared into war. Then native missionaries arrived suggesting the unthinkable – rival factions working together in community farming. For the tribal villagers, it would be a necessary evil that brought unthinkable good.
Exclusive stories from the mission field