Monthly Archives: November 2025

With Thanksgiving now behind, we begin the full-on avalanche to Christmas. My hope for you (and me) is quiet Advent moments when we mourn a messy world and look for hope in the coming of a good God. Those will be a challenge to find and the hope is sometimes hard to believe. Grace to you. 

Idea One
Invite a Muslim to your Christmas Eve service. This is a good time when Jesus and culture overlap, cute kids sing and the sermon is usually brief. If there will be dessert afterwards, be sure to bring something obviously halal. 

Idea Two
Our good buds at Crescent Project are looking ahead to Ramadan (February 17 – March 18, 2026) and helping us with a new Ramadan Prayer Night Experience. It is “a free, ready-to-use event kit designed to help churches gather for prayer for Muslims during Ramadan.” RPNE includes a 60-minute video with testimony, teaching, and guided prayer topics, along with a Leader’s Guide and promotional materials. Use it at church with 100 or in your living room with ten. Join me in checking it out. 

Rich Advent blessings of hope, peace, joy and love to you. 

On September 12th of this year, Texas governor Greg Abbott signed into law legislation “Banning Sharia Compounds In Texas” (his words). 

You’ll be forgiven if you didn’t realize how big a problem “Sharia Compounds” have become in Texas. Here’s the lowdown: Developers are working on a Muslim oriented planned community outside of Dallas, TX. Initially called EPIC City (East Plano Islamic Center), the name is being changed to The Meadow. There will be housing, retail, a religious school, parks, a mosque and a hospital.

The state of Texas has launched a slew of investigations to stop the plan. They may have finally found a securities violation. The federal investigation ended over the summer with no charges being filed. 

Further, on November 18th, Governor Abbott officially declared Both CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) and the Muslim Brotherhood as “Foreign Terrorist Organizations.” The U.S. State Department has not made this designation. 

On November 9, 2025, Abbott announced his candidacy for reelection to a fourth term.

I’m confident Governor Abbott has done many good things in his lengthy tenure as a public servant. And we’ve all been around the block enough to realize that often politicians do what they deem necessary to attain and hold power. 

But if he’s bloviating against Muslims, who make up less than 2% of his state, and in doing so is bolstering his chances of re-election, what does that say about his constituents? Are Texans (67% of whom identify as Christian) really concerned with what is being legislated against, or does it just feel a little safer to be against Muslims? Better safe, than sorry? 

Quick closing thoughts:

1. What if one of the main reasons God is bringing Muslims to the U.S. is to find Jesus?! 
2. Dig deeper by reading this thoughtful article on Sharia in the U.S. and beyond.
3. I struggled to find a curated list of public concerns with EPIC City. If you’re interested, watch this news report, but maybe skip the comments.

I met with a pastor this week who followed God’s leading to a hugely challenging church planting assignment. While there must be 100 distinct communities in Colorado that are growing (Welcome Californians, Arizonans and other foreigners!), he and his wife went to Walsenburg, a town in near uninterrupted decline since the mines closed after WW 2. But God called, they went and prayed their heads off. Now, by the grace of God, they’re seeing some harvest. 

Outreach to Muslims is the Walsenburg of missions. 

It comes with some of the same questions: “Do I want to move there?” “Will my kids be safe?” “Will I be able to feed them?” “Will we ever see any fruit?”

While we all agree we need to move forward by faith, not sight, some occasional “sight” can be encouraging. Here’s two:

Juman Al Qawasmi
When you’ve got a couple of minutes, watch this amazing video. (It’s 17 minutes long, but once you start you’ll be hooked!) Juman is a Palestinian woman, born in Qatar and raised in Gaza. Her dad was a leader in Hamas. Her story of Jesus reaching out to her is wonderful and the way she shares it is winsome. You might not agree with her on everything, but I appreciated the reminder that God is still at work, that Jesus loves Muslims and the Holy Spirit still surprises us. 

Ali Boualou
I met Ali a few weeks ago. He’s a Muslim background guy who’s now following Jesus. Ali served in the Moroccan Special Forces, spent time in a Moroccan prison and lived in Indiana (A hat trick of hard times!). His story is one of divine provision, personal resilience and goodness of God’s grace flowing into one’s life. 

If Ali’s book, The Apostate, is half as good as the personal testimony I heard him share, you’ll be amply encouraged and strongly challenged. 

Take heart, Muslim Connect tribe: God is at work. Jesus’s prayer in Matthew 6.10 is being answered by God with a resounding yes! His Kingdom is coming! 

Surely one of the great gifts of God is the possibility of learning new things. Thank you for opening this email. I think you may learn something new in the next couple of minutes.

Many Muslims have a soft spot in their hearts for spiders. I didn’t know this until very recently. 

The story goes that when Muhammad was making the move from Mecca to Medina he hid from his pursuers overnight in a cave. When the would-be assassins came by the next morning, they saw a spider web built over the mouth of the cave and assumed no one could be inside. 

Although the story comes from a Hadith that is not considered reliable, it carries a lot of cultural cache throughout the Muslim world. Can’t you just imagine a Muslim mom encouraging her child not to fear harmless spiders with this story? 

Protecting the prophet not withstanding, it seems most scholars agree we are allowed to kill poisonous spiders before they kill us!

Now get this: The Talmud, roughly the Jewish equivalent of the Islamic Hadith, written a few hundred years before Muhammad was crashing in caves, records a similar story in David’s life! 

Apparently he’d asked God as a young shepherd boy about the purpose for spiders. God told him the day would come when he’d understand. Later on, while fleeing King Saul, the king-to-be hid in a cave, but expected to be discovered. Out of nowhere a spider showed up, webbed up the mouth of the cave, tricked Saul’s soldiers and saved David. The spider also presumably justified the existence of arachnids to the future king.

Finally, there’s even a story floating around about a spider with a similar “cover the cave” web saving the holy family en route to Egypt. Its origins are the least reliable of the three. 

Just to be safe, should we maybe agree not to kill them?