Middle East Uncertainty Impacts Muslim Efforts on U.S. Campuses

“There’s a day of dialogue. There’s a new energy around the identity of Islam. And that is going to give Christians an opportunity.”

That’s York Moore with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, talking about how the winds of revolution in the Middle East are affecting Muslims students in the United States. He says, “I think that the recent events throughout the Middle East are going to shape how we connect with Muslim students on [U.S.] college campuses.”

Intervarsity works on college campuses across the United States, but especially in the Detroit area were the largest U.S. Muslim population lives. Moore says Muslims now see themselves differently. “When we look at some of these regimes and see these regimes fall, that challenges the very foundation of what it means to be Muslim. And at the crucible is where Christians need to be asking the hard questions and engaging in love with their Muslim neighbors.”

But do Muslims respond to this? Moore says, “What really draws them into InterVarsity Christian Fellowship is the authenticity, the power that they sense, that there is something different in the Christian community that I don’t think Muslims often find. And the missing element that you and I know is Jesus Christ.”

Moore says this is an opportunity to change the Muslim world. “God has already brought the future leaders of these countries to the United States. That’s to influence nation builders who have come here to get a world-class education.”

Muslim background students are turning to Christ, and “their conversions are almost always extremely costly,” says Moore. “Sometimes they have to be announced and shared and discipled in secret” because their lives are in danger.

Moore is asking Christians to pray that Muslims will begin asking questions and that Christians will begin sharing answers with love and compassion, which will ultimately lead them to Jesus.