The Silk Road Reopened
The men and women along the Silk Road have never heard the gospel. They have never met a Christian. They have never even stood in the same marketplace with a Christian, lived in the same town as a Christian, or imagined that a Christian, in their isolated Muslim world, would ever touch their lives. After many centuries of the expansion and domination of Islam and the Soviet Union, the gospel along the Silk Road has all but been lost. There is hardly one Christian for every 10,000 souls in the region.
“Today the Silk Road is almost entirely Muslim. In fact, in many ways that is the heart of the Islamic world,” said George Moore*, who has devoted his whole career to church planting in this barren land. Through his and many others’ efforts, the gospel is again beginning to break through amidst the hundreds of millions in this difficult place. The means is through business, moving along the once gospel-bearing ancient Silk Road.
The gospel once thrived along the Silk Road. For centuries, before Islam’s rise in the Middle Ages, God’s truth spread throughout the interior of the continent carried along this trade route between the Far East and the Mediterranean. The Silk Road, which was really an extensive network of trading roads and highways, snaked through all of the modern nations now centered in the 10/40 window. The Road’s main highways moved west from China through Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, India, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Lebanon.
In ancient times, the Christians who first brought the gospel to the Silk Road region were themselves the very same merchants and traders who took to the Silk Road for its commercial opportunity. Their exchanges of goods in the marketplace gave way to a priceless exchange of ideas. The Christians traded as a means to build relationships with the lost. In turn, these relationships were the means to proclaim the gospel to the many who did not yet know. From this preaching, churches were born. This very same pattern of evangelism is now in revival.
“We’re talking about business now as a means of carrying the gospel because that is in fact the best way for us to get into many of these areas,” said Moore. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the Silk Road region has resumed the ancient network of trade and business activity of a millennium ago. The governments of the region, freely encourage entrepreneurship within their borders.
The Silk Road is again opened, and Christians are entering and finding access to long-unreached peoples. Business and entrepreneurship again provide the universal entry point.
Access Partners helps church planters enter, live, and form relationships for the gospel along the Silk Road by aiding and establishing businesses. Access Partners develops business models that are useful across the Silk Road region. And the need continues to grow as opportunities for overt missionary activity decrease while there are increasing opportunities for business that enable church planting.
The missionaries who need the businesses are each skilled church planters, experts in language and culture, blessed by God in their fields, and eager with a passion for the gospel. They and their teams concentrate on communities where less than 2% of the population are Christians. Access Partners wants to help them use business to sustain their presence along the Silk Road for years to come.
As a result of this joint labor, the gospel of truth again rings out in a once dark land. Men, women and children are coming to a knowledge of the truth. And God’s glory is being made known.
Please pray:
… ask God how he may use the talents he has given you, in business and entrepreneurship, technology and support, to help in the new proclamation of the gospel along the ancient Silk Road.
…for Access Partners and church planters to have the wisdom to identify viable business models.
…for the Lord to sustain the strength and endurance of the church planters along the Silk Road.
*Note: For their safety, the names of the church planters have been changed.