Summer PROGRESS AND PRAYER report: help us keep going!

We apologize for the months of seeming silence here, but want you to know that the mission and work of Bibles for Mideast continues apace. Following is a brief update on some of our boldest and bravest missionaries and their activities. All need prayer to keep going, and in some cases, to stay alive.

As reported a few months ago, our Pastor Ashwin had been hospitalized after a brutal attack by radical Hindus (Hindu festivals always mean trouble for converts from Hinduism: Please pray for Pastor Ashwin in India). After sixteen days in ICU and a week or so in a regular room, he was finally released in mid-May. He thanks all who prayed for his recovery!

Not to be kept down or out—and not that he had anything to prove but God’s goodness and saving grace—our indomitable Pastor Ashwin was soon back in frontline ministry.

In June we got the tremendous report that he and his team had ministered in a small rural village in western India, and the entire village came to faith in Jesus! With your help and prayers we are trying to supply him with the needed Gujarati language bibles for the many new Christians.

Rejoicing unfortunately soon turned to more struggle when the team began feeling sick with what they at first thought was simple stomach flu. Unbeknownst to them, the village they had just spent time ministering in had been in the midst of a cholera outbreak. Their symptoms turned out to be cholera as well, and the pastor and two of his team ended up needing hospitalization. While they were released a week later, by then Pastor Ashwin’s children had also come down with cholera and likewise spent a week in hospital.

Being the prevailing warrior he is, the recent trials have only strengthened Pastor Ashwin’s will and determination. He has returned to ministry with even more spiritual power, proving yet again the amazingness of our ‘upside-down Kingdom’.

Stranded people being evacuated following heavy rains in village of Chhara, Uttarakhand State,India [Reuters]

Intense monsoon rains across India have caused heavy flooding and landslides in many areas. Nineteen of our Bibles for Mideast families lost their homes but thankfully, managed to escape to the safety of refugee camps. With much prayer, fasting and hard work, church members—including Pastor Paul and his family—rebuilt the homes within two weeks. All the displaced families have now returned to their restored homes.

We have two more urgent prayer requests from this past week. Pastor Subhash, one of our pastors in North India, was brutally attacked by extremists while sharing the gospel with a group of villagers. They then handed him over to the police, who charged him with ‘forcefully converting people to Christianity’. The officers refused to allow him to be taken to hospital for proper treatment. It took Pastor Paul three days (while church members prayed and fasted) to get the police to finally release the pastor, who was then admitted to hospital. He, his family and his church are all poor—please pray for them.

Our Pastor Ram Behadur in Nepal has also suffered a brutal attack and been hospitalized. He had actually been praying for the sick, sharing the gospel and giving away New Testaments in a Nepalese hospital when a group of Hindu militants caught wind of it. Enraged, they grabbed him, dragged him outdoors, tied him to a tree and ruthlessly beat him. When someone let the police know, they fortunately had pity on him and brought him back into the hospital. Please pray for this brave pastor, his church and his family. He is still hospitalized.

Please also keep Pastor Paul, his wife Mercy and myself (Susanna) in your prayers. We all have had some health challenges but know God hears the prayers of faithful friends like you.

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“But He said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for My power is perfected in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly in my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest on me.”
—2 Cor. 12:9, Berean Study Bible

“I can do all things [which He has called me to do] through Him who strengthens and empowers me [to fulfill His purpose—I am self-sufficient in Christ’s sufficiency; I am ready for anything and equal to anything through Him who infuses me with inner strength and confident peace.]”
—Phil. 4:13, Amplified Bible

SHACKLED: one woman's amazing triumph over abuse, persecution and a death sentence

Our Lord shines brightest in the darkness, as so many of the stories we post here display and trumpet. A new book by Sudanese doctor Mariam Ibraheem—while gut- and heart-wrenching—also proves a remarkable testament to the power of Jesus.

Born and raised in the same Sudanese refugee camp that her mother, a refugee from Ethiopia, had grown up in, Dr. Ibraheem’s life has taken far too many dark twists and turns. Her Christian mother had at 16 married a Muslim man decades her senior who promised to protect her from the horrors of camp life. Instead, he turned out to be an abusive bully who brought the horrors indoors. 

Incredibly, Mariam’s mother did her best to raise her children in the Christian faith. Against all odds in Islamic Sudan, her efforts bore surprising fruit. Young and determined Mariam grew strong in her faith, studied and became a doctor, married a Christian man she met at church, and had a baby boy.

Then, one day in 2013, Sudanese authorities insisted she was Muslim because of her father’s background … which meant she had broken Sharia law by marrying a Christian man. Authorities insisted she abandon both her marriage and her son and adopt Islam. Yet no matter how intensely they pressured her, Mariam repeatedly refused.

Ultimately a Sharia court sentenced her to 100 lashes and death by hanging. She received the lashings, but because she was pregnant her death sentence was postponed till after the birth.

Imprisoned along with her toddler son, mentally and physically tortured, she never accepted Islam or rejected the name of Jesus. She was forced to give birth to her second child while in chains.

Her book Shackled: One woman’s dramatic triumph over persecution, gender abuse, and a death sentence details the young doctor’s gripping story from life under Islamic law, through imprisonment and childbirth while shackled, to her remarkable escape from death following an international outcry and advocacy that included diplomats, journalists, activists, and even Pope Francis.

 “You will be encouraged to persevere no matter the circumstance you are facing and to have faith that God will work it will out as you trust in Him.”
Amazon reviewer, Naghmeh Panahi

Hindu festivals always mean trouble for converts from Hinduism: Please pray for Pastor Ashwin in India

Hindu festivals always mean trouble for converts from Hinduism, especially in increasingly radical and authoritarian Hindu nationalist India. Hindus across Kerala and some neighboring areas of India celebrate Vishu, the beginning of their traditional new year today (the day is celebrated elsewhere but called by other names).

While some prepared for the festival in a home in Karnataka State yesterday evening, they overheard Bibles for Mideast Pastor Ashwin sharing the gospel and his testimony nearby. Enraged on learning he had converted from Hinduism to Christianity, they left with steel pipes to find and brutally attack the pastor. He suffered serious injuries and is now in hospital, desperately needing our prayers. He has three little children. The church where he has been ministering is as rich in the Spirit as its members are poor.

Please pray for Pastor Ashwin, his family and church and our many other converts from Hinduism: that God would protect, guide, and provide for miraculous growth.

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UPDATE ON PASTOR ASHWIN (April 30)

After spending 16 days in ICU, Pastor Ashwin has been finally moved to a regular room and is now able to speak—and praise and thank our Lord! Thank you to all who have prayed … please keep it up, for him and all of our workers.

PLEASE PRAY for the Ukraine, and for Bibles for Mideast believers there

All of the Ukraine and all Ukrainians now face a dire situation, so of course we must be praying.  Bibles for Mideast has an underground ALG (Assembly of Loving God, our umbrella organization) church in Kyiv, where about twenty converts from Islam have been gathering weekly to worship our one true Lord. While they face persecution from the Muslim community, some more mainline, orthodox Christians do secretly support them. 

Due to the Russian invasion, the Bibles for Mideast church in Kyiv has been under far more pressure and danger. Yesterday the house they have been meeting and worshiping in came under heavy fire and was completely destroyed. Most fortunately no worship service was ongoing and our Pastor Aadeel miraculously escaped physical harm, but his wife Amina and their young daughter Angel Mary were both seriously injured and are now recovering in a nursing home.

The Kyiv church members gathered under a railway subway for prayers, as you can see in the video below. Please join with us and with them in prayer for a soon end to the war and for protection, especially of our believers.

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UPDATE: All our Bibles for Mideast (ALG) church members in Ukraine have fled to Turkey. While Pastor Aadeel’s wife Amina and young daughter Angel Mary have not fully recovered, by God’s grace they were carried to safety on the believers’ shoulders. Our ALG church in Turkey received and is caring for them. Please pray for the churches in Ukraine and Turkey and the situation as a whole. God is good, powerful and will prevail.

She once ran with drug addicts and prostitutes; now she ministers to them!

While Sharon Dutra’s story is an American one, we share it with you because she shares this ministry’s heart for Jesus and for others. Her hardships and her tumultuous ‘life before Christ’ could all have happened in any country in the world—places where she also now freely shares her ministry and Bible Study books. Over the years, she has become a great friend, prayer partner and encourager of the ministry and of me personally.

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Sharon Dutra’s emotions ranged from wonder to worry and back again as she headed—voluntarily this time—into the California Institution for Women. She had shared a tiny cell at this women’s state prison in southern California with another inmate several decades ago in what proved to be the last stop in an already long series of arrests and incarcerations.

Like most who end up ‘on the wrong side of the tracks,’ Sharon’s early life reads like a dark thriller. Her mother left when Sharon was about five; her alcoholic, womanizing father had been married four times by the time she was 17.

Young Sharon, shuttled from one foster home to another, felt abandoned and alone. By 13, she resorted to drugs to dull the pain and growing sense of worthlessness and by 15, had run from her latest home to an even worse life on the streets.

In and out of various detention facilities in the years that followed, with each escape she learned more about ‘life on the streets’, while her self-hatred and contempt for others escalated.

Marriage with an ex-con and two children later, her life continued its increasingly dark and steep downward spiral. Hard-core drugs, near-death experiences, prostitution, homelessness, suicide attempts—all culminated in her thirteenth and final arrest.

“Because of my lengthy criminal record,” she explains,” I was sent to a women’s prison in Southern California, where I already knew some of the inmates from my time on the street.”

A view from Outside the California Institution for Women; photo: Tag Christof

That, thankfully, proved to be her ultimate conviction in more ways than one. While there, she read Al Capone’s Devil Driver, by and about George Meyer, the notorious crime boss’s chauffeur who had killed many people himself and ended up in prison, where he eventually traded in his life of crime for Life with Jesus.

The book helped open her eyes to the divine realization that God alone could help her out of her misery and pain and was right there with her, waiting to be invited into her life.

“I got on my knees and cried out to Him for over an hour,” she remembers, “weeping for all the wrongs I had done. When I got up off the cell floor, I was a brand-new person.”

A few weeks later, Sharon moved from 23-hour-a-day lockdown to the general prison population. She immediately began attending church, where the prison chaplain presented her with her very own bible.

“I read it for hours every day!” she recalls. “After a lifetime derailed by destructive lies, finding God’s truth felt like discovering a cool stream in the desert.”

“At first, I could hardly fathom that Jesus would love a sinner like me, much less that my sins were totally forgiven,” she marvels. “But the more I read, the more the Holy Spirit confirmed the shocking reality of the Gospel! I drew special encouragement from Joel 2:25, which speaks of God ‘repaying us for the years the locusts have eaten’.”

She couldn’t help but share the astonishingly freeing Good News with others in prison, and soon picked back up her guitar-playing to lead in worship. Eventually, she also began teaching Bible studies for fellow prisoners. When finally released, she returned to her hometown of Santa Cruz, California.

“But the only people I knew there were drug addicts and prostitutes!” she recalls. “I wondered why God had returned me to this kind of environment. How would I overcome my reputation there? But God graciously gave me many opportunities to witness to those I had run with.”

She eventually returned to school, earned a registered nursing degree, and married. She and her husband Michael, through their Be Transformed Ministries, now help people from many backgrounds both come to know Jesus and become His disciples.

She began leading Bible studies while still in prison and continues to, now using books she has written herself to fill needs and answer questions she couldn’t find in existing materials. Her books (Be Transformed, New Beginnings, and Fishers of Men) have been translated into Spanish, Japanese and Farsi; many have been freely sent overseas (mostly for pastoral training) and over 35,000 of her books have been sent to prisons, jails and rehab centers across the U.S.

250 Bibles and 500 of Sharon’s books were shipped to Ghana to be used in Churches and Prisons. Here is a presentation in a Ghana prison

Pastors in South Africa gather after training with Sharon’s books

On her December return to the prison where she had met Jesus, Sharon shared her story with a roomful of hungry inmates—making new friends and several new converts before ‘escaping’ into the waiting arms of her husband outside the prison. They rejoiced together over all God had done and continues to do through their own and others’ lives redirected to the One who created them.

“After so many years on the run—from home, from authority, from life itself—I praise God for giving rest to my weary soul,” she explains. “No life is too broken for God to heal. I am living proof.”

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Christianity Today recently featured Sharon’s story (I Used to Run with Drug Addicts and Prostitutes. Now I Share the Gospel with Them) and Victorious Living has her story in their January 2022 issue.

Michael and Sharon Dutra with one of Sharon’s books

To see and hear Sharon’s testimony, please visit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuH8U_dRdiw

To contact Sharon or learn more about her ministry, please visit:
betransformedministries.comor email her at: betransformed@betransformedministries