Conference Helps Christians Prepare to Battle False Faith
by Chad Groening
February 23, 2004
(AgapePress) - A Christian evangelist who spent nearly 15 years of her life as a Muslim says she wants to take the gospel of Jesus Christ into every mosque in the United States.Zennah Ministries founder W.L. Cati is very familiar with the Islamic Center of Bradenton-Sarasota in Florida. She was a member there during her own years as a Muslim. And last Friday she returned with a group of Christians for her first visit since leaving Islam and rededicating her life to Jesus.
The group that accompanied the ministry leader on her visit to the Islamic Center are participants in the Equipping the Saints for Battle Conference, which took place in Bradenton last week. Cati says she wants to take door-to-door evangelism to a new level by literally going "mosque to mosque," handing out a book she calls For Muslims Only.
The evangelist tells Christians that they need not be afraid to tell Muslims the good news of the gospel, but Christian witnesses must be properly prepared to share their faith in Islamic centers of worship.
"You don't need to just go into a mosque uncovered, not knowing what you're doing," Cati says. "You need to go in with a conviction, you need to know what you're doing -- and you need to go in with love."
The former Muslim says the purpose of the group's trip to the Islamic Center was to give Christians at the conference some practical experience in sharing the gospel of Christ with lost people. But before entering the mosque, she adds, it was necessary for her to engage in some real spiritual warfare.
There was some apprehension, Cati notes, because "that was the mosque that I used to attend -- and knowing the people there, I hadn't seen them since I had come back to Christ, so I didn't know how I was going to be perceived. So it was a real step of faith for me."
But when some of the Islamic Center worshippers asked Cati the "ultimate question -- 'Are you still a Muslim?'" -- and gave her an opportunity to share her testimony, she says, "the presence of God was so real there -- and the love of Christ cut through everything."
Cati feels she made some headway with at least one Muslim at the Center, and she plans to do much more witnessing. The evangelist says Christian believers need not be afraid to introduce followers of Islam to Christ, even in the very heart of the enemy's territory. "We need to break off our fears and start going in -- but we need to be well-equipped," she says.
The Truth About Islam
One of the guest speakers at the Equipping the Saints for Battle Conference was Christian evangelist Peter Sayed, a native of Bangladesh and a former Muslim who suffered great persecution after his conversion to Christianity. He eventually wound up in New York City, where he has a ministry aimed at reaching that city's huge Islamic population.
Sayed says Islam has been a violent religion from its inception, and that Mohammad himself was a violent military leader who began by raiding a caravan from Medina and went on to attack other caravans, killing many people.
And now, the guest speaker says, followers of this religion conceived in violence are trying to justify their aggression against Americans by pointing to the religious oppression, intolerance, and violence in U.S. history. But Sayed says that is simply a way of obscuring the truth about their own religion.
Sayed warns that Muslim extremists have an agenda where the U.S. is concerned. "We need to be careful," he says, "because they have a strategy that if they can take over America, then they can take over the whole world."
Confronting New Agers
Another speaker at the conference was former yoga and meditation instructor Mike Shreve, now a Christian evangelist whose ministry focuses on followers of the New Age movement. In his address, he attempted to educate audience members about how to confront New Agers with the gospel without turning them off.
"People who embrace a new age worldview primarily believe that all religions are different paths to the same God," Shreve says. "If you promote an exclusive view of Christianity -- if you don't really know how to talk to New Agers -- you'll offend them very quickly and there'll be a wall and no communication."
Shreve discussed other false New Age beliefs, such as reincarnation and a particularly noxious but widespread notion -- pantheism. He explained pantheism as "the idea that all is God, and God is all, and that everything you see is an emanation of God. And because [pantheists] believe everything is God, then the next assumption is we are God. And if you say we are all God, that includes both the good and the evil."
The New Age expert says to reach people involved in such religions, a Christian must stress the power of the cross and the uniqueness of Jesus' resurrection as the only savior who has overcome death. Shreve encourages those witnesses who believe in the gospel to refute New Age ideas with it, both by asserting that God cannot be both darkness and light and by introducing New Agers to Jesus Christ, the light of the world.
