Invisible People

There is something worse than being hated as a people group: being invisible to the rest of the world. Such is the case for the ethnic Malays. To be a Malay Christian means you are invisible to society, where the Muslim majority prohibits you from converting. Tom White notes: “If a Malay sat publicly in a church building, that church could targeted by the Muslim government [in Malaysia]. You can eat with a Malay and work with a Malay, but if you are a Christian, they are not part of your religious world. Worse than being hated, the Malay are invisible.”

This people group is extremely unreached and tragically, very little effort is being made to change that. In 2007, there was less than two hundred Malay Christians out of the total population of 28 million. Today, that number is believed to be only approximately one thousand. When ethnic Malays choose to convert to a religion outside of Islam, the Muslim government will continually harass and imprison ethnic Malay Christians simply because they changed religions. On each Malaysian’s ID card, their religion is listed. They are not allowed to legally convert to Christianity.

Christians who have converted from Islam are under constant threat. The common term in the country is: “to be Malay is to be Muslim.” Those who are not face the consequences. One church leader, called Jon, was beaten with bamboo rods fourteen times, kicked, and threatened with death if he did not renounce Christ After three days of torture, Jon was turned over to the custody of the local police, where his church was able to pay his bond. For the time being Jon is free; after the horrendous experience he had been put through, he said, “I was okay with being beaten. They beat Jesus, too.”

So here is the question: Church, do we care? Do we care about the ones who have never heard of the Gospel, for the ones who are persecuted for their faith? What are we doing to change these problems? To make it more specific, what are you doing to reach out to the unsaved?

As I mentioned above, incredible amounts of the Malay people are unreached by the Gospel. Those who are Christians are in danger and not legally allowed freedom of religion. Most likely you cannot personally go to Malaysia and help resolve the problem (though God may well be calling you to do that); what you can do, however, is pray for the situation there. If you are not going, than support those who are. We are in an intense spiritual battle and at stake are the souls of untold multitudes; please don’t stand by and do nothing. May God’s Church rise to the challenge, so that we can see the Great Commission fulfilled in this generation.

-Reagan Schrock, GOA blog manager