Pioneers USA recently added a new video to their "Multiply" Web series that takes viewers to the country of Chad where a church-planting team is meeting humanitarian needs and sharing the Gospel with a Muslim people group.

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  (Photo: Pioneers USA)
  Villagers from Guereda, Chad, are seen here. Pioneers USA has church-planting teams in nearly 100 countries around the world, including Chad.

The work is just beginning in Chad, and the challenges are geographical, cultural and spiritual. After landing in the capital city of N’Djamena, Dave Carter and his missionary team have to travel two to three days to get to the far eastern city of Guereda where they serve with the Tama people, numbering about 200,000.

Guereda is a city the size of Des Moines, Iowa, but with no known believers and no church.

"It's a challenge to live here," Carter notes in the "Multiply" video. "But a lot of the easier places to get to are already reached with the Gospel. It's the places like this in the heart of Africa, the forgotten places that just haven’t been touched with God’s word yet.”

Matt Green, vice president of Communications at Pioneers-USA, told The Christian Post that some of the challenges for missionaries in Muslim countries lie in the fact that “the religion of Islam is so closely connected to people's identity that they can't even imagine being anything but Muslim.”

“There are also global perceptions of Christianity that are more about political identity than about biblical truth,” he said. “Muslims mistakenly feel they have to identify with these perceptions to believe in Jesus.”

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Carter explains in the video that another problem is that "people are going through the motions of Islam, but in reality there's no deep spiritual fulfillment in their hearts.” This particular people group has been Muslim for hundreds of years and most don’t think that there's an alternative to that.

Although one way to break through this is by meeting physical needs, this often opens the doors for spiritual conversations with Muslim seekers.

Pioneers USA Ministers the Gospel to 200,000 Muslims

According to Green, “many Muslims live in countries that have deep social and humanitarian problems. When Christians demonstrate that they don't just want Muslims to become Christians but that they care for their well-being, it opens a door for the Gospel.”

Which is why Carter and his team want everything they do – whether it’s partnering with other Christian organizations to provide clean water, or meeting people in the market – to relate back to God. Carter said he wants “to show them the love of Christ and tell them ‘we’re not source of this goodness, we just serve a wonderful master.’”

Conversations, in turn, lead to discovery Bible studies, in which Muslims can explore the Scriptures and investigate the claims of the Gospel. Green told CP that Muslims respect the stories of the Old Testament, and because they point to Jesus, the Holy Spirit uses that to bring them to salvation.

"Our hope," Carter said, "is that from these Bible studies will come house churches that will be a very normal way of doing church here in Chad."

The Pioneers team in Chad is also addressing the humanitarian needs of their neighbors through medical care, teaching proper sanitation and working with well-drilling organizations to provide clean water for villagers.

Pioneers will continue to produce "Multiply" videos that explore church planting among Muslims in the Middle East and immigrant communities living in Western countries. The first episode highlighted their work in Indonesia, including a partnership between Western missionaries and Indonesian church planters among Muslim seekers.

Pioneers is an evangelical mission movement with 2,400 international members serving on 200 church-planting teams in 95 countries among 130 people groups in 70 languages.