Risking All for the Word

It took a long time for Steve, a born-again Christian, to work up the courage to tell his Muslim father that he was going to Croatia to try to convert Bosnian refugees.

His father’s reply still brings tears to Steve’s eyes four years later, as he embarks on a second missionary venture: “Good. You go and you pray to Jesus. And I’ll pray to Allah that you’ll be shot while you are there.”

It’s perilous being a Muslim-turned-evangelical Christian. It’s even riskier when you’re heading out to the Middle East to convert Muslims. This month, Steve arrived in Israel’s West Bank to start spreading the Gospel--an act that could cost him his life.

The danger can be traced to a verse in the Koran: “If they desert you, seize them and put them to death wherever you find them.”

Which is why “Steve” doesn’t want his real name--or even his occupation--used for this story. And he won’t be using his Muslim name during his yearlong trip, which is part of “Operation 500,” a program sponsored by the Embassy Christian Center, a charismatic church in Irvine.

Within the next five years, senior pastor Roberts Liardon plans to send 500 graduates of the center’s Spirit Life Bible College to areas of the world most hostile toward Christianity.

Liardon’s church has already raised $500,000 for the program, which pays for round-trip plane tickets and some living expenses for missionaries.

“All they have to do is be willing to go,” says Liardon, who sent out the center’s first 26 missionaries in February.

Steve, 35, has wanted to make this trip for two decades.

“I’ve always felt a call to be a missionary to Muslims,” Steve says. “Muslims are great, wonderful people--more pure than a lot of Christians. Muslims are willing to die for their religion, but Christians won’t sacrifice a TV show to go to church.”

Christian missionaries refer to the Middle East, North Africa and Southeast Asia as the “10-40 Window,” a wide strip of land between 10 and 40 degrees latitude that’s fertile, though dangerous, ground for spreading the Word.

“It holds 39% of the world’s population, and it holds 95% of all the people in the world who have no accessible church,” says Gary Edmonds, senior associate pastor at Mariners Church in Irvine and a Middle East expert. “It’s also the center of Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, mysticism . . . For Christians, there’s a real focus, a world-wide movement to try to reach this part of the world.”

Steve has some advantages. He knows both Arabic and the West Bank, having spent three years of his childhood there. After a bitter divorce, Steve’s father took his American children to a tiny village in his homeland. Steve, then 9, and his older sister lived in a one-room house with no water, electricity or toilet.

“It was like stepping back into biblical times,” Steve says.

He attended an Islamic school, where he developed a passion for religion. “I had a natural inclination to religious things,” Steve says. “One appealing thing about Muslims is that they are so passionate about their beliefs. Everyone’s very committed. I used to think of little sermons I’d bring back to the United States and use to convert my friends to Islam.”

Steve did come back to the United States and continued to practice his faith as best he could in a small Northern California town, which offered no mosque and few Muslims.

Everything changed on Easter eve in 1978. Steve was alone in his home, watching televangelist Oral Roberts on TV.

“I was watching because I was always interested in anything religious. And besides,” Steve adds with a laugh, “nothing else was on that late at night.”

Steve doesn’t know what exactly triggered it, but “Suddenly, the spirit of God just fell on me. It was as if he walked into the room and I recognized him. And I said, ‘Jesus!’

“It wasn’t that I was a Muslim and I became a Christian. I was dead and I came to life.”

Life as a new Christian wasn’t easy, though. His father found out and threatened to sue two churches in town if they kept letting Steve, then 15, attend their services.

“The churches asked me to stop coming,” Steve says.

So Steve rebelled by drinking and doing drugs.

“My dad thought, ‘So this is what happens when someone becomes a Christian.’ ”

Eventually, his dad kicked him out of the house, and Steve went to live with his mother in Reno.

“My mother is Catholic,” Steve says, “and it allowed me to grow in my relationship with God.”

Beginning this month, he’s fulfilling a calling he’s felt since he was 15. Steve’s not exactly sure how he’s going to reach out to the West Bank’s Muslims, but he’ll start by working with an established Christian organization before heading out to the villages.

If he’s discovered as a Christian missionary, Steve believes most Muslims--if they’re irritated at all--will simply shun him or ask him to leave. It’s the fanatics who pose the danger.

“But I’m not going to be afraid,” Steve says. “I believe that God wants me to do this and he will protect me.”

At a going-away party at Steve’s place of work, his colleagues gathered in the company conference room and listened to Steve play his guitar and sing “Harbinger,” a song he wrote. As the song ended, most of his co-workers--who knew only the barest details of his upcoming trip and, for the most part, weren’t particularly religious--were moved to tears.

I’m not the one you’ll find on an easy road,

But if I have to, I’ll walk this path alone

For now, at least, he’ll walk it without his father. Steve hasn’t talked to him in six months, and he didn’t call to tell his father where he’s headed.

“My dad, he’s a great man, and a wonderful father,” Steve says. “This is just something he doesn’t understand. This is something that he just can’t understand. He might be better off just not to know. Hopefully down the road, he’ll understand.”