United Kingdom

History: There has a been a settled Muslim population in Britain since the 19th century with the arrival of the Yemeni Lascars, but the major change occurred after the 1950s with immigrants from the Indian Subcontinent. The Rushdie crisis established the unique, faith identity of the Muslim community, and there is now a settled British Muslim community whose origins are of 56 different nationalities. After the Rushdie crisis, the biggest event in UK Muslim history occurred in 2005 when four British Muslims – three UK-born and one a Jamaican-born convert – blew themselves up on trains and buses in an Al-Qaida ‘martyrdom operation’ that killed over fifty people. This was Britain’s worst-ever terrorist incident.

Location: The Muslim population is increasingly spread out across the UK, with mosques as far north as Aberdeen, as far west as Belfast, as far south as Truro in Cornwall. Most Muslims live in major urban areas, with the largest concentration of one half million Muslims in London.

Language: Most Muslims living in the UK were born there and so they are English speaking, but their families still speak languages such as Urdu, Bengali, Gujerati, Arabic, Turkish etc.

Religion: Most UK Muslims are Sunnis, but there is also a thriving Shia community. There are also sects regarded as deviant by orthodox Muslims, such as the Ahmadiyya and a British branch of the Nation of Islam. There are several thousand white and black converts to orthodox Islam.

Muslims in the UK An Open Door To The Unreached In our world today, one in three unreached people is a Muslim but only one in 12

missionaries work among them! Preaching the Gospel is forbidden in Muslim

countries. However, many followers of the Islamic faith are now found in the West.

The 2001 census of the United Kingdom mentioned 1.6 million British Muslims.

Not listed are many Muslim asylum seekers from all over the world. More Muslims

have become Christians in the last 25 years than in the previous years of working

among them combined! Unprecedented opportunities abound. Will you enter this

open door with us?

Customs: Muslims are known for their wonderful hospitality. Subcontinental cuisine is now enshrined in the British palate. Relationships are more important than time. Religion is part of their everyday life. Therefore, it has been difficult for them to integrate into British cultural life apart from cricket in England and Wales, which is also played in the Subcontinent. Many Muslim women are adopting the head covering or veil as an expres-sion of commitment to their faith.

Muslims in the UK Young British Muslims are very missionary-minded. They regularly hold outreach events with display tables in centers of Muslim predominance on weekends. Literature on these tables frequently assaults belief in the Bible, often using liberal Biblical scholarship while ignoring conservative scholars. One of the major problems for Muslims is addressing the British tradition of free speech and post-modern secularism. Muslims have a sense of the sacred, where religious issues are sheltered from satire and abuse. The British, however, take pride in their long history of liberty of expression. This has caused major tension ever since there was an angry and even violent response in 1988-90 to ‘The Satanic Verses’, written by Salman Rushdie, a British Asian. This prompted demands from Muslims for legislation against such ‘blasphemy’, which in itself pro-duced a negative response from the wider community. It must be recognized that Muslims often have a very distorted view of Evangelicals and the Gospel message. This perception is not helped by the negative stereotype of evangelical Christians in the secular national media and in their own publications. Muslims themselves feel embattled by even worse media stereotypes and public suspicion following 7/7 – the London bombings in 2005. Government policy has introduced new security laws which have increased their sense of embattlement. This sense of being under attack adds to the problems of reaching Muslims. While wider UK society is often fragmented, Muslims retain strong ideas of community. In Islamic law, the penalty for apostasy is usually death. While this cannot be carried out in the UK, any Muslim who converts will probably become isolated from his community and family. The Churches often either don’t know how to reach Muslims or are scared to try. Evangelicals, though increasingly active, even in politics, are still viewed with some suspicion in Britain. Palestine is the central foreign policy issue for British Muslims and Evangelicals are perceived as all being anti-Palestinian. World Team in the UK World Team UK is one of the most diverse teams in the mission. The Team is known as ABC (Applied Biblical Christianity) and desires to glorify God by working together to see the Church being built among Muslims. The vision of ABC is to see a network of 25 multiplying churches having culturally relevant ministries to Muslims by the year 2010. We are pursuing the following plan in order to see our God-given vision become a reality: First, Muslims are reached and discipled through the personal work of our individual team members. Second, either churches are planted in Muslim areas or existing churches in Muslim areas are equipped to evangelize their local communities. Third, the emerging network of churches is linked together through resource sharing. Such a partnership is abso-lutely vital to the fulfilment of our vision. The challenge is immense, and there is an urgent need for more workers. Since Britain is the ‘mother country’ of America and Canada, with a proximate culture and common language, it is relatively easy for North Americans to move to the UK and get straight into Muslim ministry. It is not necessary to spend years learning the language. Most Muslim countries are closed to the Gospel, which makes the open door in Britain to reach Muslims so vital.

World Team has a passion and a vision to see Muslims in the UK reached with the Gospel. We are looking for commit-ted families and individuals to help in that endeavour. Opportunities include relational evangelism, discipleship and training churches. If you would like to know more about how you can be involved, please contact World Team today. www.worldteam.org

World Team Australia 61.3.9879.6377

World Team Canada 800.610.9788

World Team USA 800.967.7109