We arrived at the Malaysia airport on February 4th. There I met my contact for the month, Pastor Samuel Yap, a man passionate for God and excited to see Malaysia changed. We heard about his desire to bring youth into his small congregation church to promote long term growth and change in the community. Due to the lack of interested volunteers in the church he had been praying to God for help for a year and here we were, all the way from America, to serve alongside this man.
Eager to do the work, we set out doing ministry. For two weeks we walked around the community knocking on gates and praying the Holy Spirit would guide us to homes where people would give us just a moment of their time, a rare occurrence. Those that did welcome us were kind and listened to what we had to say. Pastor Yap’s agenda was to have us gather names of people with children so he could follow up and urge them to come to church where the children would inevitably learn English for free, haha clever. Along with his goal my team and I had one of our own, to change the community by loving them and pave the streets with prayer for future teams to come. It didn’t take long before people around the area knew us and welcomed us into their homes and even gave us free food.
One day we were meeting up with a bunch of our new Muslim friends in a park to teach them English. I was overwhelmed by how many people we had invited actually showed up. We began teaching them simple conversation there in the park and then the weather turned on us. Despite the black clouds and thunder our new friends were not ready to go home. They wanted to continue with the lesson so we invited them back to our home, the church. It wasn’t a secret, we pretty much waved bright yellow flags in their faces that screamed Christian Church but they were happy to come anyways. To help you understand how big of a deal this is let me just say that either party could have been seriously prosecuted. An entire Muslim family plus some, about a dozen people, occupied the church for the next 2 hours while we engaged in conversation and got to know each other a little bit more. I played with the little ones and helped a girl with English and math. It was incredible how the Spirit moved that day. MUSLIMS IN A CHRISTIAN CHURCH! It was risky business but God moved anyways. That’s just the way He is though, He doesn’t always ask us to be safe or do the socially acceptable thing. He wants us to take risks obeying Him and trusting him. If we had chosen to obey the rules that day a dozen people wouldn’t have experienced the love of Christ the way they did that day.
