World Cup football kicks off conversations about Jesus

He meets others around the same age at the fruit stall, the butcher and the fish market, buying vegetables and meat from young men he is quietly getting to know. 

“Somehow God just arranged me to meet with these young people,” he says. 

For now, Tony knows that the first priority is learning the language. Over the next two years, he is determined to become as competent in Arabic as he possibly can. He knows that being able to speak comfortably will allow him to move beyond the everyday conversations and into more in-depth discussions about faith. 

“The more Arabic I speak, the more doors will open,” he says. 

“During the game, it’s the emotion, the passion,” he says. “I see them totally focused on the games… it makes me feel like I’m one of them.”

Tony’s week is also giving him plenty of opportunities to meet people. He helps teach English to young mission workers from Asia who have come to the Middle East to learn Arabic. Because English is the language they share, it gives him a natural way to spend time with them, get to know them and disciple them. 

On Thursday evenings, the exchange is reversed. Tony joins an English conversation group for local professionals, helping them with their English while they help him with his Arabic. It’s an unlikely classroom, but one where conversation can quickly become friendship. 

Tony’s approach to discipleship comes from his own experience. He grew up going to church, but it wasn’t until his first year at university that he began to understand what it meant to follow Jesus, through a ministry called The Navigators. Someone took him under their wing, teaching him how to spend time with God, read and understand Scripture, and bring his faith into the everyday decisions of life. 

“Everything changes after you accept the Lord,” he says. 

That experience of being personally discipled stayed with Tony. Now he wants to offer the same kind of investment to someone else. 

“I would ask God to give me one guy, 365 days. I’m just going to focus on one guy and equip him.” 

He reminds us that this kind of commitment, and mission work in the Middle East more broadly, comes at a cost. When he and his wife moved to the Middle East, they left their two adult children behind. 

“It’s life-giving work, but you’ve got to count the cost.” 

“The more Arabic I speak, the more doors will open.”

That is why Tony encourages anyone considering mission work to come and see for themselves, just as he did on a short-term trip before he moved for good. It’s worth experiencing the country firsthand, he says, rather than arriving with fixed ideas of what life there will be like. The church may be small, but God is at work, and the fruit of that may take years to see. 

“You’re not going to be a pioneer,” he says. “You can’t be. You just join what God is doing.” 

*Names have been changed.