One man’s amazing journey to faith
Jouma Khalil is a Kurdish Syrian, which was once nearly synonymous with being a Muslim. As a sheik-in-training, Jouma had read the entire Quran by the time he was 10 years old. But today, Jouma is a Christian. Despite threats from his family and an extremist Muslim group, Jouma became a pastor and missionary who boldly proclaims the name of Jesus and teaches believers to hide God's Word in their hearts.
As he prepared to be a sheik to preach the Quran, teenage Jouma studied zealously. But for all his studies, he could not understand when his Christian friend would talk about Jesus. Finally, three hours into one conversation about God, his friend said, “God loves you," quoting John 3:16.
“If God wanted me to be a Christian,” Jouma asked, “why am I not in a Christian family?
“It is not about your family. It is about God’s love for you,” his friend replied. The friend challenged Jouma to read the Bible, and he agreed, intending to find all the errors he could. In five days, Jouma finished the entire New Testament without finding a single thing to argue with.
“I couldn’t stop reading until I finished,” Jouma recalls. “I believe that was the hungriness inside me to know who [was] the creator.”
He knew he should go to church, but he had heard church was a place where Christians turned the lights off and did evil things. When he walked up to the doors of a church one day, he thought his fears were confirmed. The doors were closed, the lights were off, and he could see through the windows that people were kneeling and crying. Still, he walked in, and there, he heard a woman praying for people who were searching for God.
She was praying for him.
Six months later, Jouma was a regular attender of that church. As he listened to a sermon about Romans, Jouma saw the pastor point at him, offering to pray for him.
“I tried to raise my hand” Jouma says, “But a voice was saying, ‘Go enjoy your life.’” Still another voice said, “Are you sure you are going to be alive tomorrow?”
Jouma went home and cried. “[God showed] me all my life,” he says. “When I lie, when I steal … when I drink, everything.” When he stopped crying, he started talking to Jesus. “If you change my life, I will serve you all of my life,” he promised. From that moment, he knew his name was written in the Book of Life.
September 10, 1995, Jouma was baptized in Lebanon. His pastor warned him that his family would likely kill him if they found out. “Yes,” Jouma said. “but I know where I am going.” He hid a picture of his baptism inside his Bible and tucked it into his pillowcase.
Soon after, his brother found the picture and confronted him, saying he was so angry that he wanted to hit Jouma. “Okay,” Jouma answered. “You can do whatever you want. But what’s happened in my heart nothing can take away.”
Ashamed and furious, Jouma’s family shunned him. As he went into his village, Jouma prayed, finding the Lord was with him.
The Lord blessed him with new life. He married a woman from Madagascar, had five children, found Christian friends, got an education in theology, and ran a successful business. He became the pastor of a church, planting another a year later. But danger was at his heels.
In 2012, a group of Islamic extremists began hunting him from Syria, seeking his life. Jouma took his family and fled to Brazil.
He became a pastor to other refugees, evangelizing online, too, and specializing in reaching Muslims in the Middle East. He also connected with OneWay’s Equipping Evangelist, who teaches people to learn and tell Bible stories through a method called Heart Bible for the Nations. .
“Before, I never thought about the details in a story,” Jouma says. He thought Heart Bible sounded like “just stories for Sunday school.”
But after seeing Equipping Evangelist teach, Jouma began to use the storytelling method in his church. “It has helped me as a teacher, pastor, and helped the church to remember the stories,” he says. “Many stories now, the church can remember.”
Jouma is still just as captivated by the stories of the Bible as he was the first time he read it. Please pray with us that his partnership with Heart Bible for the Nations will lead many more to love the Bible deeply. Pray that God will make Jouma’s ministry continue to prosper as he reaches Muslims in Brazil and beyond.