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Article of about 2,000 words requested by Peter Cotterell and Peter Riddell for the magazine

of the London School of Theology , The Centre for Islamic Studies and Muslim-Christian
Relations

2,137 pages

Vivienne Stacey

Confessions of a Practitioner 1954-2006

God arrested me and I became a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ in February 1946 while a
student at University College, London. About six weeks later God called me to work abroad
and very soon focused my attention on Muslims in my college, and on Islam in the wider
world. I realized that Muslims did not turn to Jesus as Lord easily. I wanted to see what the
living God would do in the Muslim world. For over half a century it has been like climbing
Everest – very difficult, exciting but possible When the Indian subcontinent received its
independence from the British in August 1947 Pakistan was created in the name of Islam. It
covered two areas separated by nearly a thousand miles of Indian territory. Islam, modern
communications and distrust of India held East and West Pakistan together until 1971 when
East Pakistan became Bangladesh and West Pakistan became Pakistan.

After graduating with an honours degree in English in 1948 I acquired a postgraduate


Diploma in Education and taught English and Religious Instruction in a Grammar School in
Cheshire for three years. Then I attended the London Bible College (now the London School
of Theology) for two years, obtaining an external B.D. from London University. I embarked
on my life-long call to the Muslim world in October 1954 when Interserve, then the Zenana
Bible and Medical Mission, sent me to the United Bible Training Centre in Gujranwala,
Pakistan. After a year of Urdu study I joined the U.B.T.C. to teach part-time while
continuing Urdu studies. It was the only place in Pakistan where Pakistani women were
trained in Biblical studies, Islamics, Church History etc through two year courses for Bible
teachers, three year, part-time courses for wives of theological seminary students, in short
courses often lasting about a month each for nurses, teachers, college students, new literates
etc. I saw myself as learning to understand how to share good news with Muslims through
joining my students in their endeavours.

By 1967 I realized that over half the nurses we taught in the annual course were recruited by
the oil countries of the Arabian Gulf or by Libya. I became aware of the Pakistani dispersion
in these lands and my need to visit them to see what God was doing through dispersion. I
needed to consider how to make my teaching more relevant to the ever increasing number of
Pakistanis involved. In 1969 I made my first tour of Lebanon, Kuwait, Bahrain, the Trucial
States (the United Arab Emirates from 1971) and the Sultanate of Oman. I had no agenda
except breathing the atmosphere and observing. In Lebanon I wanted to ask an Arabic scholar
a question, in Kuwait I went at the scheduled time to the Urdu service in Awali but no one
came. In Bahrain I joined with the Urdu congregation started two years before and was asked
to preach, in the Trucial States my host took me to various Urdu speaking groups in
courtyards where Pakistani and Indian Urdu and Hindi speakers met regularly for worship.
From there I flew in a Fokker Friendship plane to Al Ain which consisted of a number of
villages near an oasis in the desert. I stayed at the Christian Hospital and met groups of Urdu

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speakers. For my next stop in the Sultanate of Oman I flew to Muscat and stayed with a
Christian Doctor in the leper hospital in Muttra. A Pakistani laboratory technician recognized
me from a series of my lectures he had attended in Lahore, Pakistan. Gathering a group of
Pakistani Christians to meet me he requested me to lead an Urdu Bible study. I agreed on
condition that he would continue it after I left. After six weeks in all I returned to Pakistan.
This proved to be the first of scores of journeys I made following Pakistanis all over the Gulf
states, North Africa and the Middle East.

By 1974 I realized that God was calling me to leave the U.B.T.C. and make more frequent
visits to the Pakistani dispersion, to write some of the things I had been teaching over the last
twenty years and to accept the invitation to join the pioneer team of the International
Fellowship of Evangelical students (I.F.E.S.) for the Middle East, North Africa and the Gulf.
The area also included Iran and Turkey. God opened the way for me to live in Bannu, a small
strongly fundamentalist town near to the Afghan border in the North West Frontier Province
of Pakistan. I was thus firmly grounded in a strongly Muslim environment with a struggling
church. I also travelled in connection with Interserve to India, Bangladesh and thirty times to
Afghanistan. In 1991 I re-located to Paphos in Cyprus where I have been living ever since.

As I look back now after fifty-two years I realize that after twenty years I made some
significant shifts in my ministry among Muslims. I make the following confessions in the
hope that what I have learned may help others. Some of these things I learned by stepping out
into the unknown and then analysing how God led me.

My most mind-boggling conclusion is well set forward in the following quotation

Vol. 44 2002 No. 1 Outside the Camp Chrys McVey shares his experiences of 40 years in
Pakistan as a pastor and missionary…p.1, “the terribly depressing years of the martial-law
regime of General Zia-ul-Haq, whose policies (separate electorates for minorities, laws
against blasphemy, new laws of evidence and the introduction of ‘Islamic’ penalties ) haunt
us yet. It was during Zia’s time when violence has been part of daily life.” P4. It was Karl
Rahner, echoing Bonhoeffer, who years ago, urged the church to act her way into new ways
of thinking instead of thinking her way into new ways of acting. P6 Hebrews 12:1-2. This
‘pioneer’ is way out ahead of us, elusive never caught-up-with, but who leaves trail-markings
for us to follow and to perfect our faith to the extent we do so. Highly revered in the Sufi
tradition of Islam. Jesus is often called ‘the traveller’, or ‘the one on the road, not toward
certainty, but toward mystery and into deeper faith.

Making credal confessions rather than making proposition or pronouncements e.g.


outside the mosque in Pokhara, Nepal.

Whom do you follow?

Are you a Muslim?

Praying that Muslims will ask to study the Bible with you.

The importance of studying with individuals.

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Giving scripture with personal advice on how to read it bearing in mind that a Muslim
will approach the Bible as he/she does the Qur’an unless advised otherwise,

Deepening the categories, definitions e.g. Al-masiha.

The importance of praying for Muslim friends in their presence.

Folk religion – a radical shift in assessing it.

The Qur’an

It is always helpful to take a careful look at what so many people hold in such high honour.
We therefore begin by quoting a prayer that Muslims themselves use in approaching what to
them is an eternal book. The following prayer is included in Constance Padwick’s famous
book Muslim Devotions. It helps us to see the depth of devotion and reverence for the
Qur’an.

A prayer for Readers of the Qur’an


(from a prayer book by Ali Muhammad al-Qari, bought in Cairo):
“Increase our longing for it {the Word of God in the Qur’an}; multiply our delight in it, to the
number of raindrops and the leaves on the trees. Through it, perfect our confidence in the
guidance of the good and the glad tidings of men of spiritual experience. Bring to our minds
what we have forgotten of it. Teach us what we do not know of its radiant truths and secret
touches of meaning. Make it for us an imam (normally a religious guide) and light and
guidance and mercy in the abode below and the abode everlasting. And grant us the reading
of it in the hours of night and the seasons of the day”.

Christian prayers for use before Bible reading:


Psalm 119:18. Open my eyes that I may see wonderful things in your law.

Collect: Blessed Lord, who caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: help us
so to hear them, to read, mark, learn and inwardly digest them that, through patience, and the
comfort of your holy word, we may embrace and ever hold fast the hope of eternal life, which
you have given us in our Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen

MUSLIMS read the BIBLE the way they read the QUR’AN unless we teach them
otherwise.

1. How Muslims read the Qur’an together (men and women separately).

2. How individual Muslims use the Qur’an.

3. How a Christian reads the Bible.

4. How the Bible helps the believer in daily life.

5. How to teach Muslims (especially illiterates) Bible verses e.g. Romans 5:8, John 17:3 and
1 Timothy 2:5-6a. .

THE PROBLEM OF THE PROGRAMMED MIND

1. The rote system in education which stresses memorization more than comprehension

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2. The Islamic attention to detail with regulations for every aspect of life

3. The emphasis on the memorization of the Qur’an

4. The debate form, which is part of the cultural and literary heritage of Arabic and Urdu have
each contributed to a certain mind-set which is hard to change. There are set answers to set
questions and an agenda has been fossilized although the debate form has dropped away. We
are confronted with a stereotyped agenda to which we are required to give answers. We have
lost the initiative. Muslim women are not so much caught up in the debate syndrome as men.

NINETEENTH CENTURY STEREOTYPED FORM


One example is the Agra debates of 1853 between Maulana Rahmat Ullah, Dr.Wazir Khan,
Maulvi Saftar Ali and Maulvi Imad-ud-Din on one side and Rev. Dr. C. G. Pfander, Rev. T.
V. French on the other.
---------------------------

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Subjects on the agenda

Bible - its reliability?

Jesus Christ - his divinity?

Trinity - unity?

Prophet Muhammad’s mission

Qur’an - the eternal book?

------------------------------------------

-----------------------------

There is some revival of the debate form today by Ahmad Deedat, Josh McDowell, and
others.

Note 1. The Urdu words used for these debates are manazara and mabaza.

Note 2. Polemics = arguing against the validity of another system.


Apologetics = arguing for the validity of one’s own system.

In the nineteenth century, debates between Muslims and Christians like the Agra debates of
1853 engendered the writing of tracts, booklets and books on both sides. When Maulana
Rahmat Ullah went to Mecca some of the Urdu material was translated into Arabic and
started to circulate in the Arabic speaking world. We do well to question the value of
polemical debate.

What is needed is a new agenda with fresh initiatives

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The minds of Muslim women are less programmed than those of Muslim men so we have a
great opportunity. If we accept the programmed mind analysis we should ask how Christians
may regain the initiative. We need to ask: What are the new agendas through which we can
regain the initiative? If we can introduce new agendas we will not always have to answer the
Muslims’ points and we might stimulate them to think in new areas. We can seek spiritual
responses rather than reactions. We can address the Muslim mind and heart without
necessarily mentioning Islam, the Qur’an or the Prophet of Islam.

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A LIST OF POSSIBLE AGENDAS:

1. Using as a basis for Bible study:

i. A series prepared by Colin Chapman, published by the Bible Societies in Madras


(Urdu) and Beirut (Arabic, French and English), entitled The Message of the Tawrat,
the Zabur and the Injil.

ii. Learning About Jesus: Key ideas from the Gospel. Based on the gospel of Luke and
obtainable, together with Getting Through with the Message: Guidelines for Sharing
the Gospel with your Muslim Friend, from: Institute for Religious Research, 1340
Monroe Avenue, NW, Grand Rapids, MI 49505, USA.

iii. Selections from Bible Studies for Enquirers and New Believers, Vivienne Stacey,
published in Urdu by MIK, Lahore, Pakistan. Obtainable in English from Interserve
in Canada and UK

iv. For a one off Bible study Numbers 21:4-9 is often suitable. See example below.

3. Other suggestions

i. Use the parables of Jesus after putting them in the order of a theological syllabus.

The quotation is from an unpublished lecture given on several occasions. The quotation and
more of the lecture appears in the Work Book which goes with the distance learning course
on Women in Islam which I taught at CIU in 1998. The lecture goes on to point out that the
programming of the Muslim mind applies far more to men than to women. This means that
women have much more uncluttered minds! This gives Christian women a great
opportunity as their Muslim sisters are not plugged into the debate subjects but are much
more open to new approaches and ideas.
she quotes you and then describes the different ways in which the Muslim mind is
programmed. She did not have a proper citation in the paper and when I wrote her, she told
me the material was from the class with you, but that the textbooks for the class were in a
crate on its way to her in Africa. I was wondering if you could provide the citation
information. The quote and the other explanation of the Muslim’s programmed mind is
below:

Miss Vivienne Stacey, a veteran worker in the Muslim world, says, “In meeting
Muslims we are faced with the challenge of the programmed mind.”
The Muslim mind is programmed through the rote learning system of education that
characterizes most of the Muslim world. Rote learning stresses memorization over
comprehension, recitation over understanding. Rote learning is also the basic method used in
formal Islamic study in its emphasis on the memorization of the Qur’an and its recitation.
Using the method of Iq’ra, (repeat after me), children and women learn to recite the Qur’an
in the proper Arabic way. They learn and practice what to say and what to do in specific
situations. The Arabic words are learned and recited, but they are very often not understood.
Islamic teaching leaves little or no room for questions and answers. Curiosity or critical
questions are usually seen as incipient rebellion which must be stopped before it leads to
apostasy. Islam requires unquestioning, total acceptance and adherence to its teachings and
traditions. This closes Muslim minds and blinds their eyes to biblical truth.
Muslims are also programmed through Islamic attention to detail which regulates
every aspect of life. Islamic law or tradition dictates the positions of prayer, the direction of
prayer, the way of fasting, the dress and diet of Muslims and even many aspects of their
personal hygiene. A life with such clear, immutable boundaries lulls people into the false
security of a “works” based salvation. Muslims often ask, “Where are the rules and
regulations in the Bible?”
Finally, Muslim minds are programmed to use the debate form in conversations with
Christians. Muslims are trained in apologetics and to raise opposing arguments. This strategy
keeps us occupied answering the different Islamic objections and questions, so that we forget
to take the initiative to actually share the Good News!

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