Free Republic

In the 8th century, the Great Imam, Abu Hanifa (699-767), coined the term "House of Islam" (Dar al-Islam) as those places where Muslims enjoyed peace and security under the rule of an Islamic government. The rest of the world Hanifa designated Dar al-Harb or "the House of War." Hanifa's triumphalist worldview had been earned by Islamic armies that had already defeated both the Byzantine and Persian superpowers in their first century of existence. In Hanifa's own lifetime, these Prophet-inspired warriors rolled unabated across Buddhist Central Asia and South Asian Hindustan. By the time of Abu Hanifa's writing, Islamic kingdoms stretched...

Hundreds of asylum seekers from the Middle East, including from Iran and Iraq, have converted to Christianity in Finland, according to officials in the Finnish Evangelical Lutheran community. ....While some who are seeking to covert cited disillusionment with Islam as the key reason, others said they felt conversion will help them fit into the Finnish culture, according to Sputnik News, which also speculated that an underlying reason also could be to guard themselves against possible deportation. In Finland, 4.1 million of the 5.5 million people are members of the Evangelical Lutheran Church....

With more than 16,000 students, Universitas Pelita Harapan is one of the largest Reformed Christian universities in the world. Started just 22 years ago, the university offers a law school, medical school, engineering school, and teachers college—all from a distinctly Reformed worldview. “We don’t even have that in the United States or Europe,” said Ric Cannada, chancellor emeritus for Reformed Theological Seminary. “Here it is in Indonesia. Isn’t it just like the Lord to do something like this in the least likely place—the country with the largest Muslim population in the world?” Though Christians compose only 10 percent of Indonesia’s...

Forced to live in secret, Christians in Saudi Arabia are being supported in their faith online. Islam is the state religion of Saudi Arabia, where the legal system is based on Sharia law. Courts regularly impose severe physical punishments, including the death penalty, for apostasy, and non-Muslim places of worship are prohibited. According to the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), Saudi Arabia "remains uniquely repressive in the extent to which it restricts the public expression of any religion other than Islam". The government prosecutes, imprisons and flogs individuals for dissent, apostasy, blasphemy and sorcery, and imposes "systematic,...

Hundreds of thousands of Christians are worshiping secretly in a rapidly accelerating house church movement in Iran, as a London-based theological center is aiding the movement by training the next generation of its spiritual leaders. The Iranian government labels Christianity as a threat to the nation's Islamic identity and imprisons over 100 Christians for worshiping Christ. Such crackdowns on faith, however, have not prevented Iranian house churches from blossoming into a movement too big for the Iranian religious police to contain. Some estimates, such as one provided by Open Doors USA, record as many as 450,000 practicing Christians in Iran,...

THE "greatest turning of Muslims to Jesus Christ in history" is taking place across the world, the author of a new book, on tour in the UK, suggests. A Wind in the House of Islam, by Dr David Garrison, a missionary pioneer with the Southern Baptist International Mission Board, documents a Muslim "movement to Christ" in more than 70 places across 29 countries. Converts, it says, now number between two and seven million. Dr Garrison defines a "movement" as being at least 100 new churches started, or 1000 baptisms, within a 20-year period in one people group. He estimates that...

WASHINGTON – An ISIS fighter who reveled in killing Christians now follows Jesus Christ after a “man in white” repeatedly appeared to him in dreams and said, “You are killing my people,” according to a missionary leader. A worker with the international evangelical group Youth With a Mission, or YWAM, came in contact earlier this year with the ISIS fighter, who, though understandably guarded, confided that he had become a Christian.

It has become a common occurrence over the years for Muslims in the Middle East who have converted to Christianity to claim to have been compelled to do so after dreaming of a person who they believe is Jesus Christ. Now, one militant belonging to the brutal Islamic State that has massacred Christians has converted to his victims' religion after dreaming of "a man in white" with a startling message, according to one missionary's account. "One of our YWAM workers in the Middle East was contacted by a friend earlier this year and they met up and he was introduced...