NORTH AFRICA – Midway through a sweltering Mediterranean summer, the mission is cloaked in secrecy. As usual, the outcome is in doubt.

Two Avant missionaries are quietly sweating out a long journey beneath the watchful gaze of Muslim minarets, posted like sentries overlooking the marketplaces, cedar groves and rolling backcountry that conceals the world’s largest export of hashish.

Carrying a contraband message of freedom, Boaz and Nabil are intersecting invisible smuggling routes patrolled by warring drug barons. The hillside marijuana crop is flowering. It’s harvest season, and these men have an urgent appointment.

As a broadcast signal, the gospel message is borderless. It’s not daunted by the eight-mile Strait of Gibraltar that divides continents, nor the much wider chasm of religious and socio-political ideologies. But the underground North African church, under constant police surveillance, still relies on personal visits by Arabic-speaking nationals to reinforce the TV and radio programs produced by an Avant Ministries media center in Europe.

High-powered technology increasingly impacts a closed Muslim world. But technology cannot shake your hand. It cannot reassure you with a warm smile, a knowing look. Especially when your life is undone by drugs, you are suddenly alone, and you find that Islam’s truth is not the answer …

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Boaz and Nabil are picking up where the airwaves leave off. After a long drive, they’re rendezvousing for the first time with Ahmed, a new believer and former Muslim drug dealer who’s been following Christian radio and Bible correspondence courses.

Or so he says, in his letters and phone calls. On a bright August morning, Boaz and Nabil finally meet the 45-year-old Ahmed. The bustling traffic in front of a big-city post office provides a safe cover of anonymity. But Ahmed’s stone-cold greeting, strange behavior and Muslim dress are a demoralizing first impression: “We’re not going to get far with this guy. We’ve seen this before,” Nabil thinks.

However, huddled in a sidewalk café minutes later, over cups of steaming mint tea, Ahmed pours out this story: his lucrative kif dealing had earned him the fear of drug lords and locals, but it couldn’t gratify the gnawing emptiness inside. He stumbled across an Avant radio program, and then an Arabic New Testament lying on a pile of books in a crowded souk, or flea market.

"I couldn’t believe it,” Ahmed exclaims. “I began to read it, and I knew right away it was the truth. Today my life is very hard, because I’ve left my old ways. But even if they hang me, I will never give up the Jesus I found in this book. I’m a new man.”

The gospel unplugged

In North America, you would simply plug a new believer like Ahmed into a church for discipleship and fellowship. Do that in North Africa and you’d risk undermining an underground church that’s often infiltrated by government informants.

Church leaders say they live under a constant cloud of “psychological persecution.” New believers suffer intense peer pressure to return to Islam, which bases salvation on loyalty and good works. Isolated already from other Christians, many new believers can’t bear the threat of being disowned by their Muslim family and employer. Some disappear. Others spill sensitive church information. It can take years for these outcasts to shed the culturally-pervasive fear, doubt and shame – enough for a church discipler to dare introducing them to the incognito congregation.
It’s not uncommon for authorities to follow North African believers, confiscate their passports, open their mail, intrude on home group gatherings, offer bribes for reporting fellow Christians, and even impersonate, interrogate or imprison them.

“It’s a really difficult persecution to deal with. You live with it all the time. It’s a tightrope. You never know what’s going to happen,” say Bob Ehmann, director of the Málaga Media Center. This Avant ministry was forced to relocate from Morocco to Spain in 1967; targeting foreign landowners and Christians, conservative Muslims convinced the monarchy to reclaim property and fortify a Moroccan identity after winning independence from France a decade earlier.

Today, religious “freedom” in Morocco still permits a handful of ethnically Christian churches. Officially, the law allows foreigners to uphold their own faith tradition – just not the Great Commission part. Converts can be punished for succumbing to Christian “coercion.” Last year alone, two foreigners accused of proselytizing were expelled, one for illegally distributing Bibles in a market and the other for inviting Muslim students to church. Newspapers decried the growing church presence, even picturing missionary literature as a public warning. Soon after, a Moroccan believer was jailed for four nights; his case was recently dismissed after being mired in court for months.

The tightrope is this: Moroccan officials can’t afford the Islamic extremism that would jeopardize international relations and call to mind the four-decade “reign of fear” by King Hassan II, who died in 1999. And yet, the national church can’t afford to shame a relatively moderate monarchy and parliament that’s facing pressure from a more fundamentalist and impoverished populace. Hassan’s son, King Mohammed VI, has made some democratic reforms, but the constitution still considers him a holy descendent of the Prophet Mohammed.

“No one wants to be accused of being soft on a Christian,” Ehmann says. “But everyone knows that Christians are good citizens. They are not corrupt, and they pray for the nation.”

Empowerment in persecution

National Christians estimate that 1,600 evangelicals comprise 45 congregations today in Morocco’s unrecognized church, an increase from 32 a couple of years ago. Most of these are home “cell groups” of up to 20 people. As a whole, Catholics and Protestants in Morocco make up only 0.1 percent of a population of 30 million (roughly the size of California). Elsewhere in North Africa, it’s estimated that evangelicals number 3,000 in Tunisia, 200 in Moratania, 20 in Libya and about 75,000 in Algeria.

In a region heavily populated by Christians before Muslim conquest in the seventh century, church growth can upset the delicate “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. “Every time we’ve become too visible we’ve gotten nailed,” Ehmann says, recalling the tens of thousands of Moroccans enrolled in Bible correspondence classes by the time Avant was uprooted in the 1960s.

But today’s North African church has the training, passion and maturity not only to withstand pressure, but to be energized by it – much like the persecuted early church in Rome, Ehmann believes. A low-key, decentralized church is hard to oppress, he says, and spared from “institutional and administrative” atrophy.

“We’re not planting an ‘Avant’ or a ‘Western’ church. I don’t know the order of their church services, or how they baptize people, and that’s not the point,” Ehmann says. “You have the Spirit working in hearts. It’s not an official religion. If all the missionaries got kicked out tomorrow, it wouldn’t change much. The national church is doing it, and we can help from the outside. That’s the beauty of media.”

The café visit with Ahmed represents a surge in new Muslim contacts generated by Christian radio, TV and Internet outlets beamed into North Africa. The media center estimates that 40 percent of the response comes from Algeria and 50 percent from Morocco, via phone, letter or email. Its Arabic Christian website called “Friends” is attracting a more global audience – daily hits on “Asdika.org” doubled last summer when it was advertised in an Arabic Christian chat room. Ehmann estimates that 40 to 60 percent of North Africans now have Internet access, a number that will only increase this year as “cybercafés” run by Arabic Christians create new safe havens for the underground church. Mailing an Arabic Bible might be complicated, but “Asdika” visitors can download one in 10 minutes, listen to Arabic Christian music and radio programs, and use a pseudonym in chat rooms to dodge government censors.

This momentum has flowed from music and drama seminars in North Africa, where Christian nationals gather for two weeks to write, produce and record original radio programs and worship songs. At the 10th annual music seminar last July – the first one led solely by nationals – 15 students composed songs for a third worship CD.
A native voice

Avant’s church planting is rooted in these strong national partnerships with North African Christians and staff. The rate of new contacts, believers and personal visits saw a sharp increase when the “follow-up” task was handed to North Africans three years ago: these “Muslim background believers” know first-hand how to be a companion on a journey mined with questions.

For Muslim viewers or listeners, this journey often begins with an anonymous phone number broadcast on media center programs – they are surprised that it’s a local number, and by the native voice on the end of the line. Five “call centers” – Arabic-speaking believers using anonymous cell phones – are now based in North Africa and Europe. In the past five years, average monthly calls have jumped from five to more than 1,500.

One woman waited two years to meet her first fellow North African believer. “Farah” had accepted Christ while secretly watching a Christian satellite TV program. But the nuns at a local Catholic Church refused to baptize her, citing the Muslim king’s ban.

“He is the king of my country – but not my heart!” Farah exclaimed. Last summer she immediately called a phone number that flashed on her TV screen during an Avant program; Nabil answered and, along with his wife, they visited Farah’s home to deliver a Bible and connect her with a home church.

The media center staff also fields and responds to hundreds of letters and emails a month. Along with the call centers, they build trusted friendships with Muslims: some want visas to a Western “Christian” lifestyle, while others angrily contest Christianity. But many are curious about Jesus and seeking biblical counsel for real-life hurts. They’re stunned that a stranger would care to listen – and even send them a birthday card.

If a relationship deepens through ongoing Bible correspondence courses, then a personal “follow-up” visit is arranged to better gauge a seeker’s spiritual understanding and sincerity. In 2004, Boaz targeted 160 Muslim correspondence students with invitations. This resulted in first-time visits with 50 new contacts during a three-week tour of North Africa last August. Boaz found more than half had already accepted Christ, and he connected them with local Christians for discipling. Even more significant: the first-ever “follow-up seminar” was held to train seven North Africans in Boaz’s role, which is critical to multiplying the network of nationals involved in discipleship.

A winding road

These disciplers are in short supply. After their café visit, Boaz saw that Ahmed was ready to pair with a local Christian. But Ahmed is anxious about former crime partners, friends and authorities who dismiss his new lifestyle. Will his faith solidify enough to risk his exposure to the church?

“I’m always an optimist,” smiles Boaz, after exiting North Africa. “I always think, ‘This is a believer who will be added to the church.’”

It’s not easy, Boaz knows. He’s walked the winding road Ahmed faces. Boaz’s faith once earned him a week in a solitary cement cell. His ingrained Muslim mindset gripped him years into his own Christian journey. Boaz accepted Christ in 1965 at age 17. His zeal for Christianity had first grown by attacking it – he was bent on proving to missionaries that Jesus wasn’t God’s son.

But Boaz eventually joined the very mission agency he had written an insulting letter to as a young Muslim. Avant had responded by mailing Boaz a Gospel of Luke and later sending a missionary to discuss the Bible and the Koran. Boaz became a leader in the national church and has been active in radio ministry for three decades.

Boaz is cautious in North Africa, but not apologetic. In one recent follow-up encounter, Boaz met a new contact who was accompanied by a government agent. “I preached to the agent from A to Z,” Boaz says, avoiding any critique of the Koran, Mohammed or the government.

“I was nice to him – but I gave him the truth.”