Contraband Hope January 5th, 2006
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 conceal 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.
Evangelism here is as illegal and clandestine as the cannabis fields. One is a multi-billion dollar industry feeding the European drug market. The other is bolstered by outside Christian media that feed a growing underground church – in a region where Muslim-backed governments banned missionaries half a century ago.
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 …
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.