Aug 27, 2021
Karen Bejjani along with her husband Renod are the founders of I Hope Ministries. She is the host of two podcasts, I Hope Empowers and The Blue Chord Women's Initiative.
Her words:
"I’m a farm girl, turned corporate executive. On September 11, 2001, I was in a high-rise when the Twin Towers came down. Until then, I’d lived my whole life without meeting a Muslim, and I began to fear them. I was like Jonah in Ninevah. I had no desire to share the gospel with Muslims.
But God confronted my fears. And I knew I needed to take action. So, I consumed countless books and seminars. Yet all the “book knowledge” left me feeling overwhelmed and intimidated. It seemed the more I learned, the more ineffective I became.
My husband, Renod, began interviewing hundreds of former Muslims locally and globally to discern what drew them to Christ. He discovered several common elements among Muslims who converted to Christianity. With that insight, Renod began practicing what he’d learned with nearly 1,200 Muslims, 550 whom accepted Christ.
She shares what she has witnessed in the persecuted church.
Inspired, I started practicing the simple steps Renod discovered. And soon, I started sharing the gospel with Muslims myself. Now, I take other women by the hand to teach them what I’ve learned."
They set out to change the way everyday Christians think and feel about sharing their faith with people of other faiths and cultures, and so at that time, we had a blended family, we had five sons, and I was fully entrenched in corporate America, living the American dream. Pursuing the American Dream doing all those things, checking all the good church girl boxes. Her husband was actually born and raised in the Middle East, as a Christian amongst Muslims. And so throughout his lifetime, he spent time at war with Muslims. Imagine, for those for a listener who has a son maybe imagine you have a 13-year-old son that has his machine gun fighting a war.
When I was a kid, you know, we would read this verse in Matthew, called the Great Commission, when Jesus said, Go be My witnesses amongst the nations and make disciples of many nations. I thought that meant that you gave money to missionaries who went overseas and they're the ones who share Jesus. Not, not everyday normal people like me. But God has a way of changing things. And so he, he did a mighty work within me.
I think about the threats that we are facing in our culture here today, there are more insidious. There are threats about this whole post-Christian godless culture, threats that say to us that Christians are, naive or, or just kind of bashing a faith in a biblical worldview, in fact, 6% of Americans right now say they have a biblical worldview. So we're seeing the impact of all of that in our culture right now a godless Society of post-Christian society. And so it's easy for us to kind of slink back and conform to the world because that feels safe. And yet, that's not what we're called to do. We're called to declare God's glory, and, and it's not that we're doing this in our own way or in our own power. We know that nothing's impossible with God
There are five simple things we can do:
1. Love through our words, action, and needs.
2. Look for someone God is wooing to himself. A person of peace.
3. Look for clues
4. Identify yourself as a follower of Jesus
5. Offer to pray with them....in the name of Jesus.
Contact Karen through: