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Missionary Lives

Engaging Iraq: mobilizing the unexpected to the unengaged

My wife and I were bored in the church, and I was the pastor! We decided to resign because we were stirred by the Great Commission—bringing the hope of Jesus Christ to people among whom the work had yet to begin. It didn’t matter who that was, so long as it was pioneer church planting work. That was Paul’s passion, as he described it in Romans 15: 20-21: “I make it my ambition to preach the gospel, not where Christ has already been named, lest I build on someone else’s foundation, but as it is written, ‘Those who have never been told of him will see, and those who have never heard will understand.’

“From the pamphlet to the plane.”

First we found two more like-minded, restless church members, who wanted to get up and get started. That was in 1987. We found an agency to help us get to the field. Little did we know that it would take us three years to get “from the pamphlet to the plane,” to use the clever phrase the agency used. God used the three year “delay” to connect us with Muslims in our city, and we made our friends among Kurdish people. That was pretty great, actually; camping, picnicking, politicking, and hearing what it sounded like to tell the stories of Jesus to our friends. When my wife and I sold everything in 1990 to move to the Middle East, our Kurdish friends took us to the airport. We have never forgotten their friendship.

An unexpected opening

We started Arabic language school in Jordan. But months into our studies Saddam Hussein invaded the neighboring country, Kuwait. Everywhere there was confusion and fear and rumor. After the Persian Gulf War forced Saddam Hussein to sign a humiliating peace treaty, the Kurds of northern Iraq rose up in a vain attempt to bring down his regime. The Iraqi army moved north and began dynamiting the cities, block by block. On Good Friday 1991, the Kurds fled to the mountains—into the mud and the snow. A thousand people a day began to die. To stop a catastrophe, and to return these refugees to their homes, the United Nations created a “safety zone” in the north of Iraq. Suddenly the Kurds were on the front page of Time magazine.

“Should we go to Iraq?”

We sat in my living room in Jordan, blinking like deer caught in the headlights of fast moving events. I wrote on a piece of paper, “Should we go to Iraq?” and placed the paper on the coffee table. The team went to prayer; we prayed in silence, hoping God would speak. We waited—20 minutes, 40 minutes. (We wished we were Quakers, with a better habit of quieting our hearts and listening for God). Then I said, “I think God has spoken, and told us to go to Iraq.” The team agreed. We bought tickets to fly to Turkey later that week; we flew from Ankara to Iraq in a U.S. military helicopter. A military bus drove us to a refugee camp, with row upon row of blue tents. They were empty, as the Kurds had not yet walked down from the snow-capped mountains behind us.

Meals Ready-to-Eat

As we stepped off the bus, the soldier who was driving said, “Come back in one hour and I’ll return you to the helicopter.” I stepped off the bus and thought to myself, “God, did you bring us here for one short hour, to look at empty tents, and then get back on the bus and go home?”

We walked through Tent City. A U.S. State Department man asked us if we wanted to spend the night. We said, “Yes.” He gave us each a sleeping bag and an MRE (Meals Ready to Eat. The soldiers called them “Meals Rejected by Everyone” but for us they were a feast.)

The glory of the impossible

The next morning we woke up, and the first Kurds were coming down the mountain! The U.S. army found out I could speak some Arabic, so they sat me down in a registration tent, lined up the Kurdish families and had me ask them a set of questions from morning till evening: “What is your name?” “How many wives do you have?” “How many children do you have?” “Walk over there and get your blankets”. Same thing next day, until we registered 25,000 Kurdish refugees. When Tent City filled up, the U.S. army built a second one for 25,000 more Kurds.. As summer turned to autumn, and peace was restored, the Kurds moved back into their neighborhoods, and we moved in with them. And we never got back on the bus!

Other Related Posts

• Mobilizing African-Americans
• The Four Barriers

© 2007 Momentum Magazine.
Related: The Mission Manual · Justin Long's Annotated Links and Notes