Michelle Sessoms serves with Freedom to Lead International, a ministry that comes alongside believers in North Africa and the Middle East. 

One Christian from a Muslim background told Sessoms, “Persecution is not the greatest difficulty that we face. The greatest need for Muslim background believers is identity.”

Sessoms explains that this need for identity comes because on one hand, these new Christians are persecuted by radical Muslims. On the other hand, they are shunned by the traditional church, which doesn’t know what to do with them.

Photo courtesy of Gabriel Almanzar via Pexels

“Part of our heart is that we want to cultivate these faithful, effective leaders so that they can guide this unique global family, because they don’t know how to fit into that traditional church,” she says. 

“We have a four year program where we walk them through leadership development from a ministry development standpoint and character formation focusing on the stories of Jesus.”

This equipping is for real-life, practical questions facing these Christians today.

“It changes our perspective of, ‘How do you lead a healthy church when there’s no structure of a church? How do you be a peacemaking leader when all these forces around you are happening? How do you mentor the next generation when it’s such a young church?’” Sessoms says. 

Ask God to build communities and leaders who can pioneer hard questions that Muslim background believers are going through today.

“We learned a lot from them (Muslim background believers),” Sessoms says. “[We realized] ‘You know, there’s bigger questions here that we don’t have answers to.’ Really [it’s] dependence on the Holy Spirit to guide in these ways.”

Learn more about Freedom to Lead here.

Header photo is a representative stock photo courtesy of Amir Hosseini via Unsplash.

“We talk about cultivating competent, Christ-centered leaders through story, symbol, and song to unleash their potential for impacting local communities with the whole gospel,” says Michelle Sessoms with Freedom to Lead. 

The ministry began partnering with believers in Middle East within the past five years. It’s led to deeper insight into what the Church there is really like. Sessoms points out a missing piece in common Western perceptions toward Muslim background believers.

(Photo is a representative stock image courtesy of mostafa meraji/Unsplash)

“The Muslim community is often seen as persecuted. You know, this is ‘the persecuted Church.’ They are at the center of a lot of conflict that we can’t control,” Sessoms says.

“I think what’s missing is ‘persecution is not their whole story.’” 

Believers in the Middle East are grappling with how to lead and grow as churches in gospel witness, not just how to survive. 

“They are just people like you and me. They [are] mothers wanting to raise their children. They are fathers that want to be a shining light in their communities,” says Sessoms. “They are trying to understand what it is to grow a church from the grassroots when you don’t have any kind of structure.” 

Freedom to Lead brings Christians from different nations together for conversations that are especially poignant for Muslim background believers.

“We work with them in just helping them have a shared experience of ‘what does it mean to be a leader in this context?’ They need to have a community to come together to really say, ‘Hey, how can we learn from each other on how we’re leading in this specific context that is different in this part of the world?’” Sessoms says.

Would you pray for these brothers and sisters across the Middle East?

“They do live in difficult and dangerous places, and so we do want to honor that part of their story. [Pray] that God will protect them as they are bold witnesses for Christ,” Sessoms says. 

Learn more about Freedom to Lead International’s mission and ministry here. 

“We really have a heart to connect national leaders with each other,” Sessoms says. Leaders can reach out to them at freedomtolead.net.

Header photo is a representative stock photo courtesy of Amir Hosseini via Unsplash.