An abortionist changed in Kenya, pastors trained on the edge of Tibet, and why we are going back to the Nile and the Caspian Sea

Watching the gospel of life spread around the world is a great adventure. Some mornings, it comes to us all at once.

We wish everyone could sit in on one of our staff meetings every once in a while. If you are a Christian and you want to see God glorified throughout the whole world, the way that desire grows is by hearing stories and seeing how God is at work around the world. The morning we recorded this episode was that kind of morning.

It surprises people that PassionLife has no corporate headquarters. Our small team here in the United States lives all across the country, and we meet over a video link. That morning, our key leaders in Colombia, in Kenya and in India joined us too. We looked at pictures and stories and maps together, and it was a real encouragement.

Beyond Our Own Little World

All of us are called to care about evangelism and world missions. But if we are honest, it is hard to see past our own little world. We are concerned about our families and our jobs, our circle at church, maybe our community, a Bible study or a ministry we are part of. It is hard for most everyday people to cultivate a genuine passion for world missions.

Stories and updates of what God is doing around the world really help. So here are a few from that morning.

An Abortionist in the Audience

Our leader in Kenya told us about a training where he had been teaching our pro-life material, what we call the Four Questions. There was an abortionist in the audience.

When most people hear the word abortionist, they picture an abortion doctor. This was not that. She was a Christian woman, or at least someone inside the church, who had come to the training. On the side, she worked as an herbalist, using natural remedies and herbs to help women abort their children. She had done it for many years. Think of her as closer to a witch doctor than a medical doctor.

This herbalist had performed many, many abortions and was still performing them when she attended the meeting. And her heart was changed. It is a beautiful testimony.

It is not the first time we have seen abortionists show up at our trainings and be transformed by the truth of God’s Word. In Ethiopia, a Muslim abortionist came to a training, and the next week he was talking his own patients out of abortion in his abortion clinic.

They Have Never Been Taught

For a lot of people, this will be heartbreaking to hear. How could she be a Christian and use herbs to cause abortions?

The answer is that she had never been taught the Word of God. Churches have been far too silent, and pastors have not known what to say. People are growing up in cultures where abortion is just as normal as everything else. It is not a political issue. It is not anything. It just is.

If you grew up in China under the one-child policy, the church was generally not talking about abortion as a moral issue. The culture talked about abortion all the time, but as a patriotic duty: You have these abortions because it’s best for the country. Even Christians were not thinking much beyond what the culture was selling them. They were not thinking about the moral implications of abortion, because no one had taught them.

We Don’t Learn by Osmosis

That is why, in 1 Timothy, the apostle Paul tells Timothy to turn around and teach these things to the people in his care:

Command and teach these things. (1 Timothy 4:11)

We do not learn by osmosis. What we learn from the world by osmosis is how to do worldly things. We have to be trained in the Word of God to think biblically about the issues of our day.

In America, it is easy to take this for granted. Because of our Judeo-Christian heritage, people here tend to think through a biblical lens, and many at least know that abortion carries a moral weight, that it is against the will of God and against what the Scriptures teach. But if you grow up in a place where the church is young and theology is thin, and no one is talking about these things, you may never connect abortion with morality at all. That is how you end up with church attenders who are actually abortionists, who come to a church event and find out that what they have been doing is wrong.

And it is a transformational moment. These believers have within them, by their conversion, the power of the Holy Spirit and an ear for the truth. When they hear it, they recognize it and they are drawn to it. Through training like this, they are conformed to the image of Christ over time.

Where Four Countries Meet

We also heard from India, from way up near the border of Tibet.

You may not be able to find it on a map. Most of us know roughly where India is, and roughly where Tibet is. But this is a chance to think about where God is at work in specific places. Our leaders there were teaching pastors in the province with the second-highest abortion rate in India, and training them to reteach their own people: the sanctity of human life, the evil of abortion, the forgiveness that is ours through the blood of Christ and the new life he offers, and the call to rescue mothers and babies, the call to rescue the innocent.

Our India leader had just come back from Sikkim. It belongs to India, but it sits right beside Nepal, with China’s Tibetan region to the north, Bhutan to the east, and Bangladesh just below the city of Siliguri. It is a very dense abortion area, and a place where you can almost throw a rock in four different directions and hit four different countries.

Back to Egypt and Azerbaijan

The morning after we recorded, Mark Nicholson, our executive director, was leaving on his own adventure in the name of Jesus. He is retracing a trip he took a year ago, in November. His wife came along with him on that first trip, the first time PassionLife had ever gone to Egypt. From Egypt they went on to Azerbaijan, also a first for PassionLife.

Most people know where Egypt is on a world map. Azerbaijan is harder. Mark admits he might not know either if he didn’t travel as much as he does.

Azerbaijan sits on the Caspian Sea. It shares water with Iran, it has Georgia to the north, it touches Turkey, and it borders Armenia, and there has been fighting between Azerbaijan and Armenia over the years. Picture Africa bleeding into the Middle East and on toward India. North of all that, toward Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, where PassionLife has also worked, the world turns into Central Asia. Between eastern Europe and Central Asia, along the Caspian, is the region called the Caucasus. That is where Azerbaijan is.

On the map, it is not so far from Egypt after all. There are no direct flights, though, so Mark flies through Qatar and up to Azerbaijan from there.

Why Go Back?

That raises a fair question. If our goal is to teach in a way that reproduces on its own, why do the exact same trip this year that we did last year?

The brief answer is that last year, the leaders in Egypt and Azerbaijan were cautious, and rightly so. Imagine inviting a pastor you don’t know, from another country, to teach a controversial subject in your country. You gather a group of pastors in your area and put your neck out. And then you find out these visitors don’t have good theology, or they teach something in a way you can’t agree with. That is how our hosts may have seen us. They didn’t know who we were.

So last year’s turnouts were very small, and the trainings were shorter than what we normally do. But the people who came saw the value in them. They said, We need to do this again, and we need to do it right. We need longer trainings, and we need to invite more people in more places, and really get this off the ground.

That caution is commendable. It is good pastoral oversight. Leaders need to protect God’s people from false teaching and from the many strange things that go on in the name of Jesus. That first trip was really about getting to know the key leaders, showing them why this matters and how we teach the Word of God responsibly, carefully and logically, and letting them get to know us as people. It was building toward this trip.

Now they know the training. They know it is biblically based and taught with theological clarity and firmness. They are not worried that we will teach something wild. They trust us, they see the value in it, and they want to double down.

The Four Questions

What Mark is teaching is what we call the Four Questions, and it is worth spelling out. The training is designed to help people think in a very simple, logical way about what the Bible says. If you understand how to answer these four questions from the Bible, you have a good foundation for defending life and thinking about life from a scriptural standpoint.

1. What does God say through the Bible about human life, including life inside the womb? We might take an hour on this alone: the theology of human life.
2. What does the Bible say about the shedding of innocent blood, including abortion? How does God feel about the intentional taking of innocent human life?
3. How do we bring the grace of the gospel to the guilt and the grief of abortion? Many have been touched by abortion, whether by taking part in it or by doing nothing. This is where the gospel comes to bear on how people feel about their past.
4. How do we answer the biblical call to rescue the innocent in our communities? How was it done in the Bible, how has it been done in missions history, and how are people around the world answering that call where they live today?

Every time we share these four questions, someone in the audience asks, Well, can you answer them? Everyone should be able to, and we make the answers available. Go to our website, passionlife.org, and on the homepage you will see a blue ribbon with resources in 23 or 24 languages. Click on resources in English, and you will find the Four Questions in about ten pages, with the biblical answer to each one.

First Trust, Then a Wider Door

This is the strategy we use around the world. On the first trip into a country, we are vetted by key leaders. They get to know us, they come to trust us, and they see the content of our teaching. Then they start thinking, I wish so-and-so could hear this, and Let’s do this with that group of leaders. The second trip is where we reach a lot more people.

Sometimes the first training doesn’t have many people in it. But once they learn they can trust us, they want to do it again, and do it bigger. That is what we are praying for in Egypt and Azerbaijan.

Along the Nile

Our primary contact in Egypt is Tharwat Wahba, with the Synod of the Nile, the association of evangelical Presbyterian churches based in Cairo. He came to us through one of our board members who had been to Egypt, and he organized last year’s trainings. Some of the people who attended last year will travel with Mark this year. One of the women from last year’s training and her husband will take him around to the places where he will teach. Stan, who also serves on the PassionLife staff, is going with him.

The teaching will be in Arabic, and everything is ready. We have just finished translating much of our material, including the Four Questions training, into Arabic, along with some of our videos.

Last year, Mark flew into Cairo, the capital and the biggest city, the place most people picture when they think of Egypt. Flying in, you can look out the window of the plane and see the great pyramids. There are actually hundreds of pyramids all over Egypt, but the famous ones, along with the Sphinx, are not far from the city at all. You can go out from Cairo and see the pyramids and the Sphinx in a couple of hours.

When they were built, the Nile ran right in front of them, right at the feet of the Sphinx. Over the centuries the river has shifted, and today there is a whole city between the pyramids and the Nile.

Last year, Mark taught in Cairo and then went north along the Mediterranean to teach in Alexandria. This year will be different. He will teach for a day in Cairo at the main seminary, with some of the leaders there, and then head south, along the Nile, into southern Egypt, to cities he has never visited, including Minya. The Synod of the Nile has churches planted all along the river and down into the south. Small gatherings in settings like these are where we teach and train pastors there.

Baku

Azerbaijan’s capital, Baku, sits out on the Caspian coast. It is a beautiful modern city, where they hold Formula One races, with an old, old city inside it. Missionaries have planted several churches there. It has a Russian, Central Asian feel.

Last year, Mark and his wife were hosted by a young woman who was homeschooled alongside their own children and is now a long-term missionary in Baku with a missionary team.

Mark was able to train some pastors there, and one pastor and his wife reproduced the Four Questions this year, teaching it in their own church. Because most people there speak Azerbaijani, Russian, or a little of both, that teaching was given in English and translated into Azerbaijani. Mark and his wife even got to try on the local culture, in the form of the local hats.

The Endpoint

This time we are praying for a much larger crowd, mostly pastors and leaders. Mark will walk them through all that the Bible has to say about the sanctity of life, the shedding of innocent blood, the grace of the gospel for the guilt of abortion, and the call to rescue the innocent.

The endpoint is that people would take what the Bible says and be moved by it to start rescuing babies and women and families in their communities. We hope that means planting the equivalent of pregnancy help centers in some of these places, or at least some kind of ministry that protects and fosters life, rather than giving people away to the abortion monster.

There are surprises on every trip. When Mark gets back, we will follow up and tell you what went well and what didn’t. And in a year or two, we want to see whether pastors have taught other pastors, who have taught their people, who have begun organizing around the call to rescue: mothers and babies rescued, and many of those mothers, and their husbands, coming to know the Lord.

That is where the fruit of everyone’s prayer and giving comes in.

Join Us

If you want to be part of the great work of the gospel around the world, think about joining PassionLife as a partner. We would be glad to have you in this great work. You can join us at passionlife.org/give.

Come with us to Egypt and Azerbaijan, and watch what God is doing beyond our borders.

This article is adapted from the episode transcript.