Engaging Sinbad City: What Research Shows About God’s Work among Workers in the Muslim World

by Gene Daniels

The world missions community has spent the past thirty years or so establishing footholds in many parts of the Muslim world. But now, unbeknownst to most of our church friends at home, some of those very cities have hundreds of workers in them. 

The world missions community has spent the past thirty years or so establishing footholds in many parts of the Muslim world. But now, unbeknownst to most of our church friends at home, some of those very cities have hundreds of workers in them. 

Granted, there is still much to be done in great Muslim cities like Istanbul or Dubai, but a pattern has clearly emerged. The majority of those God is calling into the Muslim harvest are ending up in the same locations year after year. Cities that may sound dangerous or exotic to people at home have become renormalized to us in the missions community. These were places of pioneering missions efforts thirty years ago, but now they have become more or less ‘normal’ places for workers to go. 

On the Ground

I was vaguely aware of this problem in the past, but a recent conversation raised it front and center. Some of my friends are in leadership among a regional partnership in the Muslim world, and they have realized their region is a classic manifestation of this phenomenon. While their large, cosmopolitan cities all have resident Christian workers, there are literally dozens of cities of over fifty thousand in population that are ‘unengaged’; that is, they have no resident Christian witness. These unengaged cities have become a serious gospel bottleneck.

The missionary side of me found this troubling, but I must admit the researcher side of me was intrigued. Despite obvious complexity, I was sure there was a good qualitative research question hiding in there somewhere. After a few more discussions, we came up with an idea. What if we looked at a place where missionaries had recently taken up residence? Could we look at the reasons they moved to an unengaged city as a case study that might give us insights for other similar situations? 

Fortunately, we were able to identify just such a case—a place we are calling “Sinbad City.” This medium-sized Arab city has ancient roots, but is today beginning to attract foreign investment and international business activities.

Research Design

Taking a case study approach offered two advantages. First, case studies are best when there is a small unit of analysis—exactly our situation since we had only a handful of missionaries in one city to look at. Second, case studies are often helpful in practical research (Willig 2008, 74), and our goals for this study were certainly practical. I visited Sinbad City for a week, and during that time interviewed each of the long-term Christian workers in the city.¹     

The interview protocols were designed with the expressed idea of discovering why people chose to move there, yet in retrospect this approach was slightly amiss. In a way, we were asking the wrong fundamental question; however, because we used open-ended research questions, the interviews were free to take unexpected directions. This proved to be critically important because it opened a different perspective I would have otherwise missed—which brings us to the findings. 

There were four specific findings from the case study that I will explore due to their missiological significance for those seeking to expand the presence of the Kingdom of God in harsh, restricted-access places like the Muslim world.

The Sovereignty of God

Without any doubt, the strongest theme that kept reoccurring in the interviews was the sovereignty of God. Below are just a couple of examples:

(Interviewer) What first brought you to this country?

God and God alone. I know that sounds somewhat silly… but we had no intention to move to here; we had no intention of moving to the other side of the world… Basically, my husband had a dream, and that is what moved us here… At first it was just like a piece of thread, but then other things kept coming until it grew into a whole bundle of yarn. (SinbadCity-female-2)

While I was working in our agency’s home office, someone had a prophetic word for us that we should come to this place… So we prayed, my wife and I, and we felt that this was an open door from God to come here. In fact, that was the prophetic word we came here with, “I’ve set before you an open door that no man can shut.” (SinbadCity-male-1)

Throughout the interviews it was obvious that God was the driving force behind workers moving to that country, and ultimately to Sinbad City itself. 

To be honest, however, I initially found this quite frustrating. At first glance, the topic of sovereignty seemed so big that I worried it would explain everything—while explaining nothing—about where missionaries locate on the frontier. We might as well just join Muslims in saying Inshallah and leave it at that.

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IN THE LIVES OF ALL BUT ONE of those I interviewed,
the Lord directed them through a process of narrowing
the burden on their heart.

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However, since it loomed so large in my data, I decided to step back a bit and spend time reflecting on sovereignty as a part of the data. That led me to eventually see some meaningful connections between God’s clear hand of guidance and the rest of the qualitative data I collected. Let me explain it in the following way. 

In the lives of all but one of those I interviewed, the Lord directed them through a process of narrowing the burden on their heart. First, it was the Muslim world, then it was the specific region, then to this particular country. But at the country level, it seems there was a change in the way God’s guidance functioned. 

Whereas dreams, prophetic words, and inner impressions were the means God used to move these workers to a certain point, they honed in on Sinbad City because of his sovereignty in the world at large, which drew them to Sinbad City specifically. This makes a good place to connect sovereignty to the social sciences. 

Locational Theory Applied to Frontier Mission

In the discipline of human geography, we encounter something called locational theory. This seeks to explain why businesses and industries locate in particular places by examining the factors that portend and facilitate their development. It proposes that various kinds of economic activity are drawn to certain places by existing features of that location—features which fit the needs of that enterprise to develop and thrive (Fouberg, Murphy, and de Blij 2015). It is not difficult to see how locational theory plays into this study because the frontier mission enterprise also has certain needs:

What really effects why people go to some cities and not to others is job opportunities. That’s the main issue…. After the capital, I think this place has the most opportunities for work… Universities, industry, colleges, or a port. SinbadCity has all of these and that is why it is a very good, very strategic city to be in. (SinbadCity-male-1)

These key pieces of human infrastructure—the presence of a growing trade port, a large university offering Arabic language studies, and even limited international schooling options—created a door of opportunity which workers needed to settle in Sinbad City. But let’s not leave the question strictly in the realm of social science. 

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THE STORIES I HEARD were not so much about
people ‘choosing’ Sinbad City as they seemed to be about
missionaries realizing that it was the right kind of place for them to locate.

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As Christians, we believe the existence of these kinds of infrastructure are the result of both created order (elements of physical geography) and the providence of God (determining where people will live and develop as a society; cf. Acts 17:26). 

In other words, thinking about locational theory through a mission-shaped lens causes us to see the sovereignty of God on a larger scale. We realize that not only does he give internal guidance to individual workers, but he also arranges the physical realities of places as a means to draw them there:

We were planning to go to another city… but we were looking for a place to study Arabic that could provide a visa. Not only that, but we were also needing a school for our kids. That’s what brought us here. (SinbadCity-couple-3)

In the natural realm the things that made the most difference to me were the visa opportunities at the university. Also the location, two hours to the capital, three hours to another major regional city, it is central location which was important to me for ministry. (SinbadCity-female-1) 

We first thought we were going to a different city, but they could not offer a visa for us to study. So we were looking at where there was an opportunity for us to study and an international school for the kids… and we still had to think about our visas for later… about where I could apply for my license to practice my profession later. (SinbadCity-couple-3)

The stories I heard were not so much about people ‘choosing’ Sinbad City as they seemed to be about missionaries realizing that it was the right kind of place for them to locate. In other words, a critical part of these gospel workers moving to Sinbad City was that it was ‘engage-able’ in the first place. 

Engage-able is obviously not a word, but since social scientists often make up new words, I am on safe ground here. The idea I am trying to convey is the degree to which a city offers opportunities for residence by expatriate Christians. Rather than showing the reasons why workers chose to move to Sinbad City, the interviews uncovered what about the city facilitated the move. This may sound like a small difference, but it is not insignificant.

Most of us are more familiar with a proactive model, one where missionaries identify where they want (or felt led) to go, then use whatever resources necessary to accomplish that end. For example, during the colonial era, missions agencies often placed personnel by building hospitals, orphanages, or schools in the locations they chose. 

Even in our day of restricted-access missions, we still tend to use the same approach, only now we do so by establishing offices and ‘platforms’. We may use many different kinds of criteria to decide where to engage, but fundamentally we feel we are in control of that choice. The model that played out in Sinbad City was different. 

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MISSIONS IS ALWAYS MOVING toward the telos
of world history; that is, the consumation of all things when
the gospel is preached to the whole world as a witness to all ethne.

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Rather than missionaries choosing a location and then developing the structures needed to support their presence, they were led by the providence of God—as it was manifest in those needed structures already existing. Thus, we can say that without a certain level of this human infrastructure in place, a long-term presence of workers would not be probable in Sinbad City, as demonstrated by past experience:

Some other workers tried to gather a ‘team’ here at some point, about three units. It may have lasted a year… it did not work out. But that was before the port and the international school… Even the leaders eventually moved to the capital because there was no schooling for their kids here.  (SinbadCity-couple-4)

However, in what must have been the timing of God, the necessary human infrastructure eventually did come to Sinbad City:

The industrial development here has made a big difference. It started in 2006, and the city has changed a lot since that started. There was a significantly smaller number of expats here before, and most of those were South Asians. But now because of the new industrial development plan, many more Western expats have come in and there is even a large international school that opened because of this. (SinbadCity-couple-2)

Or to state it from more of a theological perspective, we could say that God was ordering the human geography of Sinbad City so that it would have the structures needed to someday enable missions engagement. That brings us to our third, and very significant, finding.

Human ‘Connectors’  

Another factor that loomed large in the interviews was a human element I will call the ‘connectors’. For several of the participants, a critical part of moving to Sinbad City was knowing someone who was well-informed about the place—someone who could be a human point of contact between them and the information that would draw them there. This again fits with social science theory. 

In his landmark book, Linked: The New Science of Networks, Albert-László Barabási writes that “Connectors are an extremely important component of our social networks. They create trends and fashions, make important deals, spread fads, or help launch a restaurant” (2002, 56).

In the same way, it seems connectors play an important role in opening new cities for the gospel. Their knowledge about the country, and in some cases, Sinbad City in particular, was an essential element of many workers moving there: 

My mentor in our organization had worked in this country before. He recommended that I seriously consider coming here. (SinbadCity-male-1) 

The reason we came here was, we came through the country looking at job possibilities and spoke with one of the long-term leaders in the capital who had lived here a long time ago. He said, “Go to Sinbad City… please go there.” When we moved here, we were shocked. Within eight months, seven or eight units all landed here with a three-month period. (SinbadCity-couple-5)

The name of the leader mentioned in this second quote came up in almost every interview and is a perfect example of the power of Barabási’s social ‘connectors’. Conversely, perhaps one of the reasons that workers keep moving to the same cities in the Muslim world is that the connectors involved are much better informed about these particular cities. Also, this idea of connectors speaking out of their personal experience connects to an important part of the culture of the millennials who make up an increasing share of the missions work force:

Millennials are more likely to rely on peer review for services like UBER or other things they are interested in like finding the best surfing sites. Peer review is like, “Hey, this is my experience.” And when people are reporting a positive experience, new people will naturally come to a new place. (SinbadCity-couple-4)

Since so many of the up-and-coming workers are from this age cohort, this is something that missions leadership will do well to pay careful attention to. The mention of millennial workers also relates to my last finding from the case study.

A Sense of Community 

For several of those I interviewed, one of the intangibles that caused them to settle in Sinbad City had to do with a sense of community:

In our first country, a very tense situation, we had incredible community, and then we went to nothing. The next place we lived, there was such a lack of community that it was harming everyone… So this showed us how much we needed real community among the workers… We saw Sinbad City as a place we could build a real community. (SinbadCity-couple-4)

When I was just passing through, I met this family who were new arrivals. They told me about visa options here, but more important, they were likeminded about prayer, thinking that we could lay a foundation of prayer here. (SinbadCity-female-1)

This fits a pattern that researchers have already identified among the millennial generation—a high value on community. In the book Millennials Rising, sociologists Neil Howe and William Strauss stress that a key part to understanding this generation is recognizing their desire for a true sense of community (2009). And even when they go to the frontier edges of the missions world, the millennial seems to be drawn to places that either have genuine community among the workers or where they feel they can build this for themselves. 

In the case of Sinbad City, since they were starting from zero, they saw it as a place with the opportunity to build community. This was connected in the interviews to three factors: a very small number of workers, no single agency dominating the work, and the fact that the majority of workers are themselves millennials. 

Conclusion

Missions is always moving toward the telos of world history; that is, the consummation of all things when the gospel is preached to the whole world as a witness to all ethne. Yet as we move forward, the boundaries of missions are constantly pushed and reshaped. This case study was an attempt to understand one aspect of that reshaping—how we can keep pushing into new unengaged cities in the Muslim world. The major findings from this study were four.

1. The interviews offered a vivid reminder that we, as mere humans, do not actually decide where the gospel goes next, but the Lord of the harvest is firmly in control of his field and sends his workers as he chooses. 

2. The interviews also demonstrated that divine Providence plays a significant role in this as a location is shaped by the industry, business, and educational opportunities that will eventually draw workers to it. 

3. We saw the importance of the human connectors who help pioneering spirits find the right place to express their calling. 

4. These (largely millennial) workers were seeking for an authentic sense of community among those with whom they co-labor. 

This brief case study examined how workers are pushing the boundaries of missions engagement in one of the least reached parts of the world. And while the interviews behind this research concerned a specific location, the insights gleaned from them have wider implications for other parts of the Muslim world, and perhaps other restricted-access missions environments as well. 

Endnotes

1. Since expatriates from several countries work in Sinbad City, it is possible there are intentional Christian workers from the Global South who we were unable to identify for this study.

References

Barabási, Albert-László. 2002. Linked: The New Science of Networks. Cambridge, Mass.: Preseus.

Fouberg, Erin, Alexander B. Murphy, and H.J. Blij. 2015. Human Geography 11^th ed. Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley & Sons.

Howe, Neil and William Strauss. 2009. Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation. New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Willig, C. 2008. Introducing Qualitative Research in Psychology: Adventures in Theory and Method. London: Open University Press.

Gene Daniels (pseudonym) is a missionary, researcher, and writer. He and his family served in Central Asia for twelve years. He is now the director of Fruitful Practice Research, studying how God is working in the Muslim world.

EMQ, Vol. 53, No. 4. Copyright  © 2017 Billy Graham Center for Evangelism.  All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced or copied in any form without written permission from EMQ editors.