The Forgotten Manifesto of Jesus
Phil Moore, author of the 'Straight to the Heart' Bible commentaries, was the guest speakers at Frontiers' Neighbours and Nations conference. We interviewed him about his new book, 'The Forgotten Manifesto of Jesus''
Your new book is titled ‘The Forgotten Manifesto of Jesus’, what is this?
It’s very simple. It is the instructions which Jesus gave to the Twelve when he sent them out in Matthew 10, and which he gave to the Seventy-Two when he sent them out in Luke 10. The gospel movement that I describe began in a region of Northern India which had been viewed as “the graveyard of Christian mission”.
An American missionary arrived there and equipped the local believers to go out and plant churches across the region, using the best Western missionary methods that he had picked up at Bible School. Six of those believers were murdered by angry mobs and the gospel gained no traction at all. As the missionary wept before the Lord during many weeks of prayer and fasting, he felt God draw his attention to the words of Jesus in Luke 10 and he sensed God asking him: “The Great Commission matters so much to me, what made you think that I would leave it to you to work out how to go about it?”
What happened next?
At first, not very much. It seems to take most people two or three years to learn how to partner fruitfully with the Lord as he commands us to in Luke 10. That was certainly the case in Northern India. But once the gospel gains traction, it spreads quickly. Within 15 years there were over 80,000 new churches in that part of India, with over 2 million baptised believers, and that was only the beginning. Over the past fifteen years, those believers have trained up disciple-makers in many other hard-to-reach nations, like Iran, which is explored in the ‘Sheep Among Wolves: Part Two’ documentary on YouTube.
How did you personally become connected with the Iranian house church movement?
I treated the COVID pandemic as a God-given opportunity to evaluate how we were doing as Western churches at reaching our nations. I found the statistics so sobering that I resigned as a traditional church pastor to do what a disciple-making friend in India had been teaching me to do. When I took this leap of faith, God was so good to me and I met somebody who was able to connect me with the underground church leaders from the ‘Sheep Among Wolves’ video. They explained that the Lord had told them it was time for the disciple-making movement they were leading to spread wider, to the post-Christian Western world. They were spectacularly generous with their time towards me, spending at least a couple of hours a week coaching me patiently out of many of my old ways of thinking and into the thinking of Jesus in Luke 10. What the Lord is doing in Iran is truly mind-blowing.
How are you putting this into practice in London?
That’s a massive question and that’s probably why I felt I needed to write a whole book about it! But in a nutshell, I’m treating London as an unreached city and I’m doing what Jesus tells us to do in Luke 10. I am believing the promise that there are “People of Peace” within the unreached segments of my community and that God is raising them up to become co-labourers in the harvest field. For example, I recently saw a physical trainer at one of my local gyms come to faith in Jesus. He has no church background of any kind, but he is taking a group of friends from the gym through a series of Bible stories from Creation to Christ. At the moment, I join them each time to encourage him, but it’s his group and he is leading. Together they are planning how to reach the rest of their gym with the good news that they are discovering together. I’m looking forward to the moment when they will all decide to be baptised together as committed disciples of Jesus. I’ll baptise the Person of Peace, then I’ll let him baptise the others. After that, he will be their church leader. What is happening in Iran is now happening at my local Wetherspoons, led by a personal trainer who, a few weeks ago, was a lost soul, very far from God!
