"Aslan is on the move in the Muslim world"

Joel Rosenberg has a powerful piece at his blog about the amazing influence of Christian Evangelism in the Middle East:

"Aslan is on the move in the Muslim world.

Last week I took my wife and kids to see the Egyptian premiere of NARNIA in Cairo. The film was as wonderful as we had hoped. But I must confess that far more interesting to me than watching digital lions and beavers come to life was being in a theater jam-packed with Muslims mesmerized by a thinly-veiled parable of Jesus Christ, penned by one the 20th century's greatest Christian writers. Every seat was taken, and when we left, the theater's lobby could not contain all those hoping to get into the 10 o'clock show.

The same was true in the spring of 2003, when scores of Muslims packed movie theaters throughout the Middle East to see Mel Gibson's THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST. They were watching Jesus teach. They were watching Him suffer and die and rise again. They were crying -- sobbing, in many cases -- as they continued to flood the theaters night after night. One Arab evangelical leader tells me the DVD of THE PASSION didn't do so well when it was released in 2004, but that's only because hundreds of thousands of bootleg copies had already been snatched up from street vendors from Beirut to Baghdad long before the official version arrived.

Did you know there are at least ten different evangelical Christian satellite TV networks now beaming their programming into the Middle East? Or that evangelical Christian websites in Arabic and Farsi are springing up by the hundreds and being visited by thousands every day, including Saudi sheikhs and Iranian mullahs? Did you know that more than one million Sudanese have become followers of Christ just since 2001. Not despite of the genocide, but because of it.

"People see what real Islam is like and they want Jesus instead," one Sudanese leader told me. Indeed, the church there is growing so fast new pastors are having to be trained in make-shift seminaries held in caves!"

Be sure to read the entire piece.

A verse in the book of John comes to mind:

John 4:35... Do you not say, It is yet four months, and the harvest comes? Behold, I say to you, Lift up your eyes and look on the fields, for they are white to harvest already.