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God at work - in the UK

Teaching English

Teaching English is a good opportunity to make contact with those women who wouldn’t normally attend groups or, for some, even come out of the house. The UK government now includes a knowledge of English as essential for granting visas and stays so even the most conservative of families send their women to English classes.

Alongside covering subjects such as visiting the doctor and shopping we include scripture stories.  Creation introduces some basic vocab and simple sentences for the very beginners and we progress on to stories of the prophets known both to our Christian and Muslim learners. Following on from understanding the story, discussions have been had on sacrifice, forgiveness, trust etc at a level the class can understand and identify with.

From there we turn to stories of Jesus, pointing out that the Christmas and Easter story are important for them to know for the ‘life in the UK test’. The stories of Jesus’ interaction with women are always well accepted and leads to many discussions.

Whilst we need to still be wise about the stories we tell, and the way they are told, we have never had any objections or withdrawals from class due to the Christian aspect of the course, in fact the ladies love to hear that Jesus cared for women.

September 2022

Reading the Bible at English class

Lockdown has brought many challenges but also opportunities.  In our English classes we have always told a bible story as part of the session and we have continued this as we have taken classes on line. 

We told the story of Moses and the 10 commandments (not my favourite story to tell as I feel we are setting down law rather than grace) but we explained the commandments as well as we could using simple pictures on a powerpoint.  We than asked the ladies to go away and try to write down what they remember and send it back on WhatsApp, which they do sporadically. 

But that week I received a very long message from a Bengali lady which had almost been copied out of the bible-‘ thou shalt....’, ‘thou shalt not....’ and ‘it will go well with you in the land’. 

Obviously copied BUT someone (and I suspect not the learner) had taken the time to google/search for the wording.  The story had led someone in that family to read scripture for themselves!  We praise God for this and pray them, and others like them, will hear the Living Word spoken in to their lives as they ‘research’ the homework.  May the Spirit move! 

Next we start the Christmas story- let’s see what that produces.........

November 2020

Three examples of the network networking!

There’s a facebook page for Syrians in the UK. Fatima posted on it that she and her daughter had been moved to a country town where they didn’t know anyone and were really lonely. A Syrian in another town saw it and told her friend Janet, a Christian from the local Mahabba group who had befriended her.  Janet contacted Mahabba and asked if anyone knew of any Christians in the country town. Yes, there’s a Mahabba group there! Within two days of an email to the local coordinator, ladies were visiting Fatima and now she is no longer alone. What a lovely picture of the Mahabba network working together.

Iranians arriving at a resettlement centre are being introduced to Jesus, either by Christian Iranian migrants or by local Christian volunteers. One of these volunteers contacted Mahabba to see if local groups could carry on the befriending when these migrants are moved to other towns, often alone and desperate for friendship. The response from people has been wonderful. One man, Farid, had found Jesus and been baptised at the resettlement centre. Within a few days of being moved, thanks to the local Mahabba group he has been taken along to church, been introduced to two Iranian believers, been invited to attend ESOL classes and an English conversation group, invited to a midweek community lunch and to play football! He is so happy

Ladies from a local Mahabba group knew of an asylum seeking family and were able to make a ‘socially distanced’ garden visit, taking a gift box from the local church. They were warmly welcomed. They were then moved to another town; people from the Mahabba group there were contacted and it turns out they live nearby and will soon  be visiting!

September 2020

One Mahabba group’s story

“We started our Mahabba group in 2018 following the Open Doors ‘Month of Ramadan’ prayer initiative. At that time we had a godly gospel-centred Syrian refugee family with us who had been following Jesus for several years. We felt we wanted to support their outreach among the Arabic speaking community, and that the best way would be through a Mahabba prayer group.

Furthermore we had garnered interest among folk at church who had a leaning towards Internationals Ministry, who had also been very active in our Ramadan prayer. 

By the time we started we had four Iranian Christian asylum seekers in our church who were anxious to join any ministry that was working with believers from Muslim background. The first meeting, which was hosted by our Syrian family, was less of a formal ‘British’ prayer meeting, and rather a Middle Eastern time of fellowship involving, testimony, singing, food and prayer. The prayer focused in small mixed groups praying in their own language, for families in their home country, salvation and courage in Home Office interviews.

After a couple more meetings we had as many from Muslim background in the group as the English (roughly ten and ten). They came from Syrian, Iranian and Kurdish backgrounds. It was felt it was very much their meeting which I co-ordinated. The English were getting a taste of the Middle East, which by this time included singing and Arabic/Farsi TV and more food than you could shake a stick at – it became a God-given social highlight for them.

We continued to see numbers of believers from Muslim background grow. We started to run weekly Bible studies, one for beginners (Mark’s Gospel) and the other for people who’d been with us a year (Genesis).Our Morning and Evening services were translated live through wireless head sets in Farsi.

We thank God for his grace – we took up the ‘Ramadan prayer initiative’ because we thought it would be a good thing to do – but to be honest, not with any great vision. God answered our prayers anyway and brought more asylum seekers to our church. In his goodness the Lord also gave us a couple of believing Farsi translators – who had a vision for God’s work. Without their gifts we would have struggled to communicate effectively. God also touched the hearts of the English people in the rest of the church who opened their hearts, homes and wallets to needs. It was this as much as anything that grew relationships and gave us retention and growth.

Today, I’m writing in lockdown. We can’t have such social gatherings (although it doesn’t appear to be stopping some in spite my protestations!). Nevertheless, we have managed to master Zoom meetings with various success (not everyone has WiFi – sometimes it’s a matter of what we prioritise data allowances for). And one of the blessings that has come out of this ‘Exile’ is that although many of our former members got moved out of the local hotels to around the country – we have been kept in touch via Zoom every week, feeding these new believers with the Word of God. If it were not for lockdown – we certainly would not have been thinking about continuing our teaching with them. Therefore, we are considering how we can keep the relationships going when things open up again.”

May 2020