Central Asia: ‘The wilderness will rejoice and blossom’

In many ways, it was just like my church life group. A dozen or so men and women sat together of an evening in one of their homes.

Laughing. Eating. Pulling each other’s legs. The conversation flowing among the group as a whole and then ebbing into separate discussions in twos and threes. A few kids on screens somewhere else in the house, occasionally appearing… It all felt familiar somehow. At home.

In other ways, we were worlds away. Well, 3,000+ miles away and some 15 degrees hotter, the fan in the corner offering momentary blasts of relief as it turned from left to right. We sat on cushions on the floor around a low table artfully spread with a feast: bowls of nuts and hard-boiled sweets, cut-glass dishes piled with fresh fruit, cucumber and tomato salads with plenty of salt, and small fried snacks that seemed neither sweet nor savoury. There was bread – always lots of bread: big, round, flat and beautiful, stamped with distinctive floral designs. And no shortage of tea: poured liberally from pot to handleless cup as soon as it looked as though you might be anywhere near halfway finished. We sang (this being 2022, there’s an app for that – and Matt Redman in translation) before someone shared from the Scriptures. At this stage, the believers all pulled out their phones – no printed copies of the whole Bible exist in their language yet; owning a Bible in your native tongue is illegal here.

We’re not in Chessington anymore, Toto.

A team of us from my theological college were on a ‘Go, Look, See, Do’ trip organised by People International to Central Asia. It was a region of the world I expect few of us had given much thought to before – yet one that is home to half a billion people. Arabs, Mongols and Russians have all made their mark in the region’s rich and varied history, leading to a curious blend of cultures. There are fewer than 0.5% ethnic Bible believers in most of these countries. ‘I just want you to fall in love with one of the least reached areas of the world,’ People International’s mobiliser had told us at a training session. And on an evening like this, it wasn’t hard.

We’d been told that we were visiting a single church in a small-ish regional city about the size of Belfast. What we found was an informal network of a dozen or so churches, of which this little house church was one. As an unregistered church their gathering was technically unlawful; several of the pastors in the region have been called in for questioning and temporarily imprisoned in the past. But for the moment, they’re being largely left alone by the authorities.

So, they’re making hay while the sun is shining.

One day the pastor drove us to a first-century burial site. The new toilet block showed something of the government’s investment in tourism but, other than a few local lads hanging around at the entrance, we were alone: the desert scrub stretching as far as the eye could see. But something extraordinary was about to bloom: in the 40 minutes it took us Brits to climb the hill, take the obligatory photos, and troop back down again, the pastor had shared the gospel with one of the young men at the entrance. A few hours later, he got a text: the boy had gone home and told his mother, who had questions too, and the pastor arranged to visit them that Sunday. ‘What did you say?!’ we asked him, baffled. ‘Oh, I try to share the gospel with someone every day,’ he answered. ‘I just said: “Do you know about God?” and took it from there.’ People here are Muslims, but many of them only nominally so – there’s an awareness of God’s existence, but a sense of His distance, which put me in mind of Paul’s speech at the Areopagus in Acts 17.

That’s not to romanticise it. As in any culture, church unity must be striven for (Eph.4:3). You didn’t have to speak the language to pick up on something of the complicated dynamics around money, power and personality. And being a young church brings its particular challenges too. Back around the table in the house church, one father shared how, as a church comprised entirely of first-generation believers, they struggled to know how to raise their children in the faith.

But God is good. And the Spirit is at work. And the opportunities for the gospel are immense. ‘The desert and the parched land will be glad; the wilderness will rejoice and blossom. … They will see the glory of the LORD, the splendour of our God’ (Isa. 35:1-2). May God do it in central Asia in our day.