ICC Note:  “The Harvest is great, but the workers are, indeed, few,” said a Christian Pastor from a Middle East church, recently.  “We don’t even have enough people to disciple and mentor Muslim-born Christian converts.” With such violence and destruction in Syria and throughout the Middle East, reports continue to come out about an reawakening of Christ’s church and a large amount of people coming to faith in Christian, their eyes having been opened to the violence of what they were raised to follow.  The power of God is evident in the miraculous awakening of His church in the Middle East.   

3/12/2016 Syria (Christianity Today) – “We’re in a big harvest. God is waking up a sleeping Church,” one pastor told Open Doors. “The Muslims coming to faith are ready to die for their new beliefs; that is a different kind of Christianity.”

The war in Syria has devastated its population, with 7.6 million people internally displaced and 4.6 million refugees having fled the country.

While the number of Christians officially in the country has decreased since the beginning of the war due to persecution, people – including Muslims – are still coming to faith in Jesus.

“What attracted me is the loving environment of the church,” said one Syrian believer from a Muslim background living in Aleppo.

In February this year a church in Damascus, Alliance Church, planted a new church close to Homs; a city once dubbed the “capital of the revolution”.

While the recorded number of Christians in Syria has fallen – from 1.9 million before the war to between 600,000-900,000 now, the number of Christians secretly worshipping is unknown.

New converts from Islam can face serious consequences for leaving their religion.

“We [my wife and I] both became Christians,” a Syrian refugee in Lebanon told Open Doors. “My wife took her veil off, but people started to threaten us.”

There are glimmers of hope on the ground in Syria. A church in Homs, alongside Open Doors, opened a furniture factory in February, which is now providing work for over thirty people and has already received orders internationally.

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