EMQ » Jul – Sep 2025 » Volume 61 Issue 3
Summary: This article describes a Central Asian house church network‘s approach to evangelism, focusing on creating curiosity through surprising statements about Muslim practices, Christianity, and acts of kindness. This technique leads to friendly, challenging religious discussions, helping Muslims come to Christ. The movement emphasizes contextualization to overcome local objections and uses curiosity to engage people in studying the Bible and following Jesus.
By Stan Nussbaum with Hussan
This article describes an approach to evangelism in a Central Asian, locally controlled, small house church network. A key feature of the process is the creation of curiosity in three ways: using surprising statements about Muslim practice, Christianity, and through surprising acts of kindness and honor. This deliberate technique, an alternative to much current mission practice and Western apologetics, opens the way to substantial, friendly, yet challenging religious discussions through which a small but growing number of Muslims are coming to Christ.
The time is ripe for missiology to pay closer attention to curiosity. As Francesca Gino asserted in the Harvard Business Review: “When our curiosity is triggered, we think more deeply and rationally about decisions and come up with more-creative solutions.”i
Jesus was a master at raising curiosity. As we explore the potential of curiosity for mission communication, let us take some lessons from a Central Asian house church movement led by my good friend, whom we shall call Hussan.
When integrated with contextualization of both theology and church structure, the creation of curiosity circumvents many common local objections to the gospel. These are often objections to foreignness not to Jesus. Several short examples will illustrate the use of curiosity and the fruit it bears, followed by a brief biblical and missiological reflection.
This case study draws on stories provided by Hussan, the leader of this movement. This is possible because of our unusual 15-year friendship. He is an indigenous leader who has no formal theological training. I am a Western missiologist with no missionary service in the region, no Russian, and none of the local language. The insider, Hussan, supplied the description of the movement, usually by narrating stories. I, the outsider, abstracted ideas from the stories, checked the abstractions with the insider, and related them to relevant missiological discussion.
As the missiologist and author of this paper, I am acting as a reporter. I am not connected to any church or mission agency active in the country under study, though I am the member of a network that promotes prayer for it and ministry there. I have never lived there. My mission experience is on two other continents, but I have made numerous short trips to the country over the last 15 years. My relationship with Hussan slowly emerged as one of the major fruits of those trips. We now spend an hour or so each week on Zoom or Signal talking in English as friends and colleagues. I find Hussan’s curiosity-based approach to evangelism intriguing and worthy of missiological attention.
Raising Questions Based on Muslims’ Beliefs and Practice
The most basic curiosity-building technique of the movement under study is to raise questions. These are not about the authority of the Qu’ran, the hadith, and the Prophet but about how Muslims practice their faith. Consider this example which is converted to syllogistic form to make the logic more obvious for Western readers. The technique involves moving through the following steps in conversation with Muslims:
- The Holy Qu’ran commands us to study the Torah, Zabur, and Injil (Law, Psalms, New Testament).
- We don’t do that, and our leaders don’t teach them to us.
- Why not? We are not good Muslims if we don’t obey this Qu’ranic command.
Muslim hearers do not want to admit they are defying the Qu’ran! What could be more un-Islamic? But they cannot demonstrate their knowledge of the Torah, Zabur, and Injil. They therefore find questions pouring into their minds. “How can I be a good Muslim without even trying to obey this command? How could I find out more about the Torah, Zabur, and Injil?”
When that curiosity is aroused, the witness mentions, “We have a group at my house that talks about the Torah, Zabur, and Injil every week. We read the stories and discover what they mean for us. Anyone may join us.”
There is no mention of a “church” or any group name. It is just a meeting at someone’s house. New people might think of it only as a “Torah–Zabur–Injil group,” though the movement itself does not use even that as a name.
If people with these questions go to Muslim authorities for help and they receive a traditional authoritarian reply, “Don’t ask that question,” the reply may generate even more questions, especially among curious youth. “Why can’t I ask? Is there no answer? And if there is no answer, is this whole system of Islamic teaching true and worth holding onto?”
In using these questions, Hussan is exploiting the first of “five dimensions of curiosity,” which is “deprivation sensitivity – recognizing a gap in knowledge the filling of which offers relief. This type of curiosity doesn’t necessarily feel good, but people who experience it work relentlessly to solve problems.”ii They are bothered that they don’t know something they feel they should know, and it is hard for them to put it out of their minds until they resolve it somehow.
Questioning Rumors About Followers of Jesus
Hussan’s house church network arouses great curiosity with its claim that people can become followers of Jesus without doing three unacceptable things that Muslims think are required of all Christians:
- Believe in three gods
- Change their religion identity and call themselves Christians
- Become traitors to their family and the local culture
The claim that these are not required of all followers of Jesus leads Muslims to two questions, one of which is a very scary thought.
The scary question is, “Have I been spreading false rumors about Christians? I just assumed they were true, and I repeated them without checking. But the Qu’ran strictly forbids repeating unverified negative information.”iii They therefore must hear Hussan out to determine the truth or falsehood of the three statements. If they are untrue, Muslims must stop spreading them.
Meanwhile they are also naturally asking the question, “If those three rumors are not what it means to follow Jesus, then what does it mean?” Perfect! The communication succeeded in arousing curiosity and eliciting a desired question.
This opens the way to further discussion of Jesus. However, this technique of generating interest depends on the surprise factor in the information. But surprise is a relatively weak emotional motivator as shown in the pie chart below. When replying to the question, “Then what does it mean?” the witness must transition fairly quickly toward stronger emotions – awe and joy.iv
Figure 1 – Emotional Triggersv
Contextualization of Theology: Three Gods?
We need to say a little more about the way the movement makes these surprising assertions while staying faithful to Scripture. Here is an example based on the Trinity.
To avoid the charge of “three gods,” the movement does not use the word “Trinity” or talk about “three persons” in the local language. This is because locals hear that as “three gods,” an unbiblical idea. Similarly, in evangelistic settings it does not call Jesus the “Son of God.” This is because to local people that phrase can only mean “the biological son born through sexual intercourse,” which is not what any followers of Jesus teach.
The movement does use a translation that says, “Son of God.” So, this does come up in home groups, where there is time to talk about it. They do not alter the translation, but they do point out that “son” can be used figuratively. For example, a local person may be referred to as “a son of the mountain” without implying that he is literally a boulder or that the mountain had sex with anyone.
Baptism is done only in Jesus’s name (as commonly reported in Acts) not in three names (Matthew 28:20). This is because three names mean three gods to local people. The movement uses the Islamic term ghusl for full-body ritual purification. However, they explain that ghusl in Jesus’s name is a one-time event that makes a person ritually clean forever. Unlike Islamic ghusl, it is not repeated weekly or at other intervals as preparation for participating in other rituals. Using a familiar term in an unfamiliar way is contextualization, and it arouses curiosity.
While they believe in and teach the biblical mystery of the Father, Son, and Spirit, space does not allow us to go deeper into these obviously thorny issues. We only note that Muslims find the movement’s ideas intriguing. Of course, in mission history, valid contextualization has often been condemned as syncretism and/or heresy by foreigners and any cultural insiders who are beholden to them, and that has happened in this case under pressure from foreign missionaries.
The movement is careful not to say that the doctrine of the Trinity is theologically wrong but that its use is missiologically unwise in this context. This is because it kills opportunities to call people to follow Jesus as Lord of heaven and earth. It happened that a different local Christian leader, after a visit from an American leader of Oneness Pentecostalism, began condemning all other views. Hussan was careful not to do that. He has no link to that leader or to American advocates of that view, but some of his views overlap theirs. Critics lumped him together with that other teacher, condemning both.
Hussan multiplies opportunities to share by using a specific technique:
When someone says to me that Christians believe in three gods, I shout, “Astagfr Allah!” (Arabic for “Seek the forgiveness of Allah!”) I say it just as sharply as a Muslim would when someone has unknowingly spoken blasphemy and put themselves in real danger. That gets their attention since “Astagfr Allah!” is something Muslims say and Christians don’t. Then I say that Torah and Injil teach only one God. And they say they want to talk to me some more about this.
People who hear Hussan say this assume he is a Muslim, but at other times he does not talk like one. So, who is he? Their curiosity is off the charts.
Honorable Actions That Raise Questions
This movement makes disciples in the true sense of the word. That is, it engages people in studying the Bible and obeying it, listening to the Spirit for guidance, and depending on the Spirit for power. Whether disciples have evangelistic intent or whether they are simply doing the right thing, their Spirit-directed lives show surprising kindness and honor, and their actions raise questions.
There is a leader who sponsors a camp for local youth every summer with his own money, which he earns as an auto mechanic. He lives in an area where Muslim fundamentalists are active. It happened that a member of a radical Muslim group had his car break down near the leader’s house one afternoon. He stayed overnight because the repair could not be finished that day. In the evening the visitor, seeing that his host was not wealthy, asked why he supported that youth camp so sacrificially. So, he told him about Jesus. In the morning, the man said he wanted to follow Jesus. This happened during the COVID quarantine time. The leader is now in touch with him often. Sometimes they go to the mountains together. He shares the word of God every time he has a chance, little by little.
Hussan’s wife recently started a sewing business, employing several Muslim seamstresses. She had a social gathering for them to get acquainted since many work from home. During the gathering, the question came up, “Why are you so different than other employers?” She answered, “I guess it is my belief in God.” They replied, “That’s not it. We all believe in God. What else?”
Hussan does a little IT training, and he was recently asked by a young man, “Why are you so different from my parents? I came from the village to the capital, and they did not even contact me for six months. You hardly know me, and you paid for my IT class so I could get a job here. Why?”
These are examples not of generating new curiosity with new or shocking information but of capitalizing on a type of curiosity that is already there. This is social curiosity, the third of the five dimensions of curiosity. It is defined as “talking, listening, and observing others to learn what they are thinking and doing.”vi Social curiosity is especially strong when the behavior observed is impressive in a good way. This pushes the Awe button which, as we saw earlier, is the most powerful of the emotional buttons in promoting virality of Internet content.vii And it works just as well on the grapevine as on the Internet.
The other three dimensions of curiosity are less used by this movement. They are “joyous exploration, stress tolerance [willingness to risk], and thrill seeking.” Joyous exploration is built into the discovery [exploratory] Bible study method, but we will not expand on that here.
Jesus Dreams
We have not mentioned dreams earlier in this paper because they are obviously not a technique the movement uses to create curiosity. We mention them now as God’s own way of creating curiosity. Nothing raises more compelling curiosity than a Jesus dream. These dreams are not particularly common in this movement, but a recent instance is noteworthy.
A barren Muslim woman, a friend of Hussan’s wife, told her of a dream in which Jesus promised her she would have a child if she joined a church. Hussan’s wife, to Hussan’s great surprise, opted not to tell her the whole gospel on the spot or give her instructions about joining their house group. Instead, his wife told him that she “expects to talk to her about it some more soon.” She apparently is letting the curiosity ripen, and she plans to pick its fruit when the Spirit tells her it is time.
That is so counter-intuitive that I believe it may qualify as a concrete example of “transcending the term mission,” as Stroope proposes:
Rather than operating from “mission,” a modern paradigm, wedded to outdated ideas of distance and erroneous notions of power, we might choose to undertake the pioneering task of imagining life and witness anew from the perspective of a pilgrim who travels along the uncharted terrain of the boundless and coming reign of God … free to reorder our participation in the gospel and to position ourselves for fresh and revolutionary witness.viii
And who would be better suited to lead this pilgrimage of discovery than a group of Central Asians with a nomadic cultural heritage? And in that group, who better to lead than a woman in tune with the Holy Spirit’s use of curiosity?
Postscript
God surprised Paul with his “jealousy-of-Gentiles” strategy for drawing Jews back to him (Romans 11), and God surprises us with his curiosity-piquing strategy to draw Muslims. “Have you ever come on anything quite like this extravagant generosity of God, this deep, deep wisdom? It’s way over our heads. We’ll never figure it out” (Romans 11:33, The Message).
Instead of seeing ourselves as messengers carrying an explanation of a gospel we understand well, we are messengers who are always on the alert for God’s next surprise. We know, in general, what he is doing but we are permanently curious about how he will get it done. Each time he takes another marvelous, counterintuitive step forward in his campaign, we laugh with delight, and we praise him.
Stan Nussbaum, DTh, founder and innovator at SYNCx.org, is a senior missiologist with a lifelong interest in the creativity and contextualization of locally initiated Christian movements. He is passionate about communicating deep theological truth not in the jargon of the church or the academy but in plain English, e.g., Peterson’s The Message or his own Reader’s Guide to Transforming Mission (Orbis, 2005). He and his wife Lorri live in semi-retirement in central Illinois. They have two children and four grandchildren.
[1] Francesca Gino, “The Business Case for Curiosity,” September-October 2018, Harvard Business Review, https://hbr.org/2018/09/the-business-case-for-curiosity.
[1] Todd B. Kashdan, David J. Disabato, Fallon R. Goodman and Carl Naughton, “The Five Dimensions of Curiosity,” Harvard Business Review (September–October, 2018), https://hbr.org/2018/09/the-five-dimensions-of-curiosity?ab=seriesnav-spotlight.
[1] Huda, “Lessons from the Qur’an Regarding Gossip and Backbiting,” quotes the Qu’ran 24:12–15: “Why do not the believing men and women, whenever such [a rumour] is heard, think the best of one another and say, “This is an obvious falsehood”? … When you take it up with your tongues, uttering with your mouths something of which you have no knowledge, you deem it a light matter. Whereas in the sight of God it is an awful thing!” Learn Religions, January 26, 2021, https://www.learnreligions.com/gossip-and-backbiting-2004267, updated January 6, 2019.
[1] Dan Shewan, “6 Ways to Use the Curiosity Gap in Your Marketing Campaigns,” January 25, 2024, https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2017/04/10/curiosity-gap.
[1] Dan Shewan, “6 Ways to Use the Curiosity Gap.”
[1] Kashdan et al, “The Five Dimensions of Curiosity.”
[1] See figure 1. Note that if the categories laughter and amusement were merged for 32%, they would exceed Awe as a motivator at 25%.
[1] Michael W. Stroope, “Reimagining Witness Beyond Our Modern Mission Paradigm,” International Journal of Frontier Missiology 36, no. 4 (2019): 168, https://ijfm.dreamhosters.com/PDFs_IJFM/36_4_PDFs/IJFM_36_4-Stroope_ResponseAccad.pdf.
EMQ, Volume 61, Issue 3. Copyright © 2025 by Missio Nexus. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced or copied in any form without written permission from Missio Nexus. Email: EMQ@MissioNexus.org.
