great commission

What WikiLeaks Reveals About Uzbekistan

December 13, 2010, by 1 comment

If you read this blog much, you know that I spent most of a year in Uzbekistan, and that the situation there is not a good one.

Islam Karimov is a murderous thug who rules through fear and intimidation, and millions of people suffer every day because of him.

Christians are routinely arrested and harassed, and prisoners are treated terribly.

This is an unexagerated reality for anyone who has spent any time there, yet the United States continues to maintain that they are our “partners in trade” and “partners in freedom”.

The recent wikileaks release of diplomatic cables shows that Karimov’s corruption is well-known among those who deal with him.

Check out this article where diplomats compare Karimov to a mafia thug.

Or this one, which includes a section from an actual cable:

Corruption is rampant in the GOU. Tenders and government positions can be fairly easily secured by paying the right amount of money to the appropriate individual, leading to a situation in which unqualified individuals have every incentive to engage in further corrupt activity to pay off the large debts they usually incur making down payments on the jobs.

Or this one, which begins:

The post-Soviet state of Uzbekistan is a nightmarish world of “rampant corruption”, organised crime, forced labour in the cotton fields, and torture, according to the leaked cables.

But the secret dispatches released by WikiLeaks reveal that the US tries to keep President Islam Karimov sweet because he allows a crucial US military supply line to run into Afghanistan, known as the northern distribution network (NDN).

Did you catch that? Basically, Uzbekistan is one step above North Korea, but our government says we need to be nice to them and ignore it all so that we can have a military supply line.

Sigh…

Please pray for this broken country, plagued by an evil ruler and hundreds of years of demonic oppression.

Pray for the thousands of believers who suffer daily for their courage to follow Christ.

Pray for 30,000,000 lost people with no good access to the Gospel of Christ’s saving work.

And pray for God to destroy the work of Karimov’s hands and open doors for a flood of missionaries and aid groups to come bring life to this dark place!

Pray For Persecuted Christians In Uzbekistan

November 12, 2010, by 1 comment

(Those reading from email or an rss feed will need to click through to see the 2-minute video above)

This is very personal to me.

There are somewhere around 30,000 believers in Uzbekistan, which is roughly 0.001% of the population.

I know a handful of them personally. They have been arrested, interrogated, spied on, sabotaged, and end up forced to live on the run, often to other countries.

This video is not an exaggeration or an isolated case.

Openly following Jesus in this context will cost you everything.

Please pray with me for our brothers and sisters in this part of the world.

ServeRDU

July 20, 2010, by No comments yet

Our church body did 6,566 hours of community service.

Last year week.

Seriously.

Check it:

ServeRDU from The Summit Church on Vimeo.

(Have I ever mentioned that I LOVE our church?)

Please, please, please pray for Osh, Kyrgyzstan

June 21, 2010, by No comments yet

Three weeks ago, Osh, Kyrgyzstan was a very large city with a very large population of Uzbeks, a people group very dear to my heart.

Today, a significant portion of the city lies in ruins. Hundreds are dead, and tens of thousands have fled the city.

Many Uzbeks have gone back to Uzbekistan, where it is much more difficult to reach them with the message of the Gospel.

My dear friends and former teammates were living in Osh. They are safely back in the states, but very uncertain of their future. It is possible that their whole neighborhood has been burnt to the ground.

Please pray with me that God will use this to advance the cause of the Gospel in Central Asia.

Another Devestating Story From Uzbekistan

April 30, 2010, by 3 comments

screenshotPlease, please, please pray for Uzbekistan!

The article I just stumbled over begins:

WHEN her baby died soon after delivery, Gulbahor Zavidova, 28, a poor farmer’s wife, longed to be pregnant again. After months of trying she and her husband visited a doctor who told her she could never have another child because she had been sterilised.

The procedure had been performed immediately after she gave birth, by doctors who did not ask her consent. On learning she could not bear children, her husband left her.

“Not a day passes without me crying,” she said. “I was outraged when I found out what they had done. How could they do such a horrible thing without asking me?”

According to human rights groups, tens of thousands of young women like Zavidova have been sterilised without their consent in the authoritarian former Soviet state of Uzbekistan.

Uzbek sources say the measure was ordered by Islam Karimov, the president, who has ruled with an iron fist for 20 years. The policy is aimed at keeping down the country’s poor population — with 28m people, it is Central Asia’s most densely populated state.

I think something about our demoralized American sense of reality will tempt us to assume this is some kind of over-dramatization or over-simplification. But it isn’t. I saw the corruption of the Uzbek government for just shy of a year while I lived there, and I have no problem believing this.

It’s a dark, hopeless place with a dark, murderous, and thoroughly corrupt government.

Please pray for them with me.