Today we are pleased to announce the launch of our new Arabic website, attuuqlilaah.org.

Last September, just before our National Conference, we told you about the need for more online resources in Arabic, and the opportunity we had to create a website. And we invited you to join in supporting that work.

Through gifts made on the web and at the conference, the Lord raised all that we needed and much more. Praise him! We are using that extra money to develop even more resources for the site.

There are already 20 Arabic resources available. Many more are on the way, which we will be adding gradually over the coming months (God willing).

Being a Christian doesn’t only mean that you assent to a certain set of doctrines. There are other equally important things that must be true. Jonathan Edwards explains.

It is essential to Christianity

• that we repent of our sins,
• that we be convinced of our own sinfulness,
• that we are sensible we have justly exposed ourselves to God’s wrath,
• that our hearts do renounce all sin,
• that we do with our whole hearts embrace Christ as our only Saviour;
• that we love him above all, and
• are willing for his sake to forsake all, and
• that we do give up ourselves to be entirely and forever his.

Religious Affections, 334; bullets added.

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Recent posts from "They Still Speak" —

• The Leading and Quenching of the Spirit (Martyn Lloyd-Jones)
• Do You Dread a False Deity? (Samuel Bourn)
• Why Some Prayers Fail (Charles Spurgeon)

Along with the amazing growth of the church and the Internet in China, Christian publishing is also blossoming in a remarkable way.

We posted Michael Haykin’s thoroughly interesting and informational article about this last January. In it he listed some encouraging statistics, like,

• There are 167,000 bookstores in China.
• Over the past ten years, more than 200 Christian bookstores have opened throughout China.
• 6.3 billion domestically-published books were sold in China in 2007.
• Currently, the total number of Christian books in legal circulation in China is approximately 600, using a broad definition of “Christian.” About 50 to 60 new titles are being added each year.
• Of that 600, only about 25 or 30 have a Reformed theme.

For at least two years prior to Haykin’s article we’d been praying that God would open a door for us to legally publish one of John Pipe…

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The church isn’t the only thing growing in China. Like in so many other countries these days, Internet use is booming too. At the Chinese government’s last official counting (June, 2010), 420 million of its people were online. No doubt there are millions more by now.

Along with the Internet, social media is also catching on. China Daily recently reported that over 300 million Chinese are registered micro-blog (think Twitter) users.

We’re excited about this growth because the Internet and social media are quick, inexpensive, and strategic ways for us to make gospel-centered resources available for the growing Chinese church.

Here are some ways we're working to serve Chinese speakers online:

• In April, 2010, we launched our Chinese language website, kemushen.org, and in the past six months we’ve had about 6,000 visits from Mainland China (24,000 worldwide)…

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Both BBC News and Aljazeera have written recently about the tremendous growth and increasing influence of the evangelical church in China. The news is no surprise, especially to those who have been observing and writing about it for a while; but the fact that it is making headlines internationally is a good reminder to the global church of our ongoing need to know the welfare of our own Body.

According to The Lausanne Movement’s recent analysis of five separate sources, the number of Christians in China (Protestant and Catholic) is somewhere around 100 million. Compare this to the estimated 2.3 million in 1920, and marvel at what the Lord has done.

Among today’s 100 million Chinese Christians, approximately 80% are Protestants. Within this group there are two primary movements: those in the government-registered “Three-Self” church, and those in the unofficial, of…

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It is illegal to own a satellite dish in Iran, because, according to the government, the Western channels available exist only to undermine Islam and the Iranian people (see the BBC report). But despite the law many Iranians still covertly install the devices and watch. It was through satellite programming in Iran, in fact, that our friend Hovik met his wife.

Hovik, whose real name we must withhold for security reasons, is a Persian translation partner with Desiring God. He was born and raised in Iran, but when he was twenty-two, to prevent them from having to fight in the Iran–Iraq War, Hovik’s father sent him and his brother to study in California. As an ethnic Armenian, Hovik had always identified himself as a Christian (ethnic Armenians are an accepted Christian minority in Iran) but it wasn’t until he attended church in the US that he first heard the gospel and…

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In his article this past Wednesday at Christianity Today, Bishop Hwa Yung considers how mistakes in missions over the past several hundred years have created a sense of guilt in the Western conscience.

But he says it’s important to understand where that guilt really comes from.

The very fact of Western guilt may be one of the supreme evidences for the enduring validity of the gospel in the post-Christian West. For it shows that the gospel has the power to shape the conscience of a culture, even when its propositional claims have been forgotten or largely rejected by that culture.

Then he exhorts Westerners to understand what the correct response to that guilt should be.

Yes, Western guilt should lead to repentance for presumptuous, insensitive, ethnocentric, and triumphalistic missions. The wrong conclusion, however, is to suggest that we must forgo Western missio…

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One way the gospel is spreading across borders this day and age is through the work of ministries like TWR (Trans World Radio). As their full name implies, TWR focuses on using radio waves (and other media) to overcome the ignorance of the knowledge of God around the world.

Here's a short description from their website of the kind of work they do:

Together with international partners, local churches and other ministries, TWR provides relevant programming, discipleship resources and dedicated workers to spread hope to individuals and communities around the globe. Whether using high-powered radio to reach people in the Middle East and Latin America, streaming content to Internet users in Asia and Europe or visiting face-to-face with listeners in Africa, TWR leaves a lasting spiritual footprint.

Desiring God has had the privilege of partnering with Malek, a wor…

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Patti Richter writes:

Operation World (2010) reports that the church in Nepal flourishes as a "remarkable indigenous movement" within a strongly Hindu culture. From the first Christian church formed in 1952, Nepal's believers grew to 200,000 by 1990, during times of persecution, and to some 850,000 Christ-followers by last year. Thus: "Leadership training is possibly the most urgent need in the Church."

"Nepal has 10,000 churches, but most of them have no resources," says Alan Ginn, Project Director for East Asia with Leadership Resources International (LRI).

LRI workers encourage church leaders by using a "TNT" strategy — training national trainers. They mentor and teach a group who will then train a "second generation." This model of multiplication is inspired by 2 Timothy 2:2, "The things which you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses, entrus…

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We're praising God today for the translation of John Piper's book Seeing and Savoring Jesus Christ into Persian (aka Farsi) and the permission we've received recently to post it online as a free download.

Download ديدن و چشيدن عيسى مسيح (PDF). You can also purchase hard copies in our online store.

Persian is the official language of Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan. But significant Persian-speaking populations can be found in many other countries worldwide, including the US, at an estimated total of 80-100 million people.

Seeing and Savoring Jesus Christ was written to unpack the Bible's teaching on who Jesus was as a person and teacher and Son of God, in the hope that people from every language will come to see him more clearly and savor him supremely.

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Recent posts from International Outreach —

• The Situation of Most Shepherds Around the World
• A …

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