You're Dreaming!

He said he would never forget the scene from that dream. It was a big room, like a hall filled with bunk beds reminiscent of a dormitory. But as he watched, the beds turned into gravestones—all except his own bed. And then, a framed picture on the wall, which he recognized as one of familiar paintings of Christ, slowly came to life. The figure beckoned him to follow and then said out loud, “You need to leave this place.”

Abdulaziz (left) with his mentor, Shimeles

I was interviewing Abdulaziz, one of the foremost church planting trainers in southern Ethiopia. Moments earlier, I had been watching this former Muslim Imam instruct a team of thirty-five men and women how to sensitively engage Islamic communities with the Gospel. Believe it or not, he was showing them how to start out by using key verses in the Koran that validate the authority and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

The dream was only the beginning of Abdulaziz’s conversion story, however. As he began to question his Muslim faith, he was ostracized by his friends and family who eventually got him thrown in jail without any specified charge. He was there for nine months and never once was given a trial. But, this breech of justice turned out to be a blessing in disguise. It was there that he met Shimeles, a Christian brother who came every week sharing Christ with Abdulaziz and eventually discipling him in his new-found faith.  After he was released, he soon learned how to plant churches among other Muslim communities. Today, Abdulaziz tells me, he has trained close to 4,000 other men and women to do the same.

Big brother, Hussien, with Yusuf

We walk together past an outdoor kitchen to where some injera wat is waiting for us for lunch. Sitting across the table from me is Yusuf, a young church leader of 27 ready to tell me another dream story. “It was actually fifteen years ago that my brother, Hussien, had a dream about me,” he explains. “I was very young then, but he saw me in his dream running toward a very bright light that was coming from a Christian cemetery. He tried to run after me, but couldn’t keep up. For years, he suspected that the dream meant I would become a Christian, so he was afraid to tell me about it. Praise God, we have now both given our hearts to Christ and are serving Him by planting more churches.”

As amazing as these stories may be, I soon learn that somewhere around 35% of all the people in this predominantly Muslim region who become Christians, do so because of experiencing dreams similar to these. Without question, God has chosen this particular method to transmit His truth into the hearts and minds of these Ethiopians he has called to be His own.