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Kurds are a fragmented people. Occupied by stronger powers on all sides, divided from within, guilty of shedding the blood of Christians, the Kurds are, as Jesus said of the multitude, "harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd." A Kurdish proverb laments, kurdu heval nînen, "Kurds have no friends." Few outsiders, it seems to the Kurds, understand them or offer them friendship. In the 19th and 20th centuries, perhaps 200 missionaries lived in Kurdistan; few of these, however, spoke Kurdish or even had Kurdish acquaintances! Missionaries hoped to re-light the mission candles in the historical churches. These churches, in turn, would be a light to the Kurds. The plan failed for three reasons. First, because the minority churches derived fabulous advantages from the missionaries, which history destined them to horde instead of share. Second, missionaries could obtain neither local Christian permission nor government permission to evangelize Kurds; and in those exceptional moments when missionaries did work with Kurds, death brought their work to an end. Finally, Kurds, Turks and Persians resented the missionaries for empowering the church "tribes," a not unreasonable resentment. For these reasons, Kurds in the 19th and 20th centuries continued to live without light.

The rugged Kurdish mountains have bred a rugged people. Since the time of Xenophon (died c. 355 B.C.), foreign armies have complained of the karduchoi who harassed them in the mountain passes. Kurds were a bother even back then! Their mountains form a buffer separating Turks, Arabs, and Persians. These stronger powers continue to play Kurdish factions against each

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Table 2
Where the Kurds Are as of 1997

Kurds have resisted the occupying governments of Turkey, Iraq, and Iran. Ayatollah Khomeini promised Kurds a part in his new government if they would help him topple the Shah. However, after consolidating his power, Khomeini ordered Sunni Kurds to become Shi'a before they could take part as full citizens. Kurds felt betrayed. The Iranian government killed thousands of resisters. In their homes pictures of Kurdish corpses replaced the picture of the Ayatollah; Iranian Kurds swore an oath of vengeance to their dead (Gardiner 1982:4).

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Table 3
Deaths of Selected Minorities in Conflicts

Kurds in the security zone of northern Iraq fear the day that Arabs re-assert control over them. However, if Saddam is patient, the Kurdish factions will fight one another and lose the sympathy of the West.

Syrian ruler Hafez al-Assad meets every dissent with brutal repression. Kurds in Syria await another day to pick up their swords again.

Kurds have one attraction: the West pities them for the abuse they suffer at the hands of the Turks, Arabs, and Persians. That one attraction has dimmed since the Kurds have logged their own record of brutality. Amnesty International has documented the record of torture and murder in northern Iraq since 1991 (Amnesty 1995). Sadly, Kurds are doing to one another as others have done unto them. Islam, which all the players in the region

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Rare is the leader who acts for the public good in Kurdistan. Each chief seems to hope that his weapons will give him a victory in his struggle for supreme leadership. The way of the sword has cut the Kurds into ribbons of poverty and ruthless disregard of people beyond their kin.

What other people has so proved that sinful living reduces them to the "dreadfully wicked conditions" which Judith Grant found upon her arrival in 1835 (Kaplan 1993:25)? Every word of Jesus Christ bears hope for the Kurds. The gospel, which commands men and women love their neighbors and their enemies, must now come in power to Kurdistan.

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Map of Kurdistan

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A book on the history of mission to the Kurds would be slender indeed. But a history of mission in Kurdistan is twenty times larger. The difference illuminates our thesis: missionaries continued for a hundred years to "pass through the wilderness of Kurdish mountains, seeking in the most remote corners of the land the little companies of Christians" (Richter 1910:316).

Sift through the record, like a prospector panning for gold, and the occasional reference to evangelizing Kurds jumps off the pages. I fear that concentrating these references in one place, in this book, may dull the readers' feelings to how rare these nuggets are.

We must think about the failure to establish churches among the Kurds. We do not judge any missionary for his or her work; the reward for faithful service is not seen in this world. However, the mission in Kurdistan failed, as measured against Eli Smith's inaugural words, to find "the lever which would overturn the whole system of Mohammedan delusion" (Joseph 1961:44).

For three reasons Protestant missions—our main subject here—failed to evangelize Kurds. First, missions continued to invest almost exclusively in historical churches. By this, missionaries washed out any bridges to the Kurds. Second, missionaries

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What happened to the hope that Armenians and Nestorians would evangelize the Kurds? The ABCFM had "commenced with the expectation that the revival of gospel light and influence among the Nestorians 'would rekindle their ancient missionary spirit'" (Joseph 1961:44). The mission followed a logical plan: local Christians would more naturally, more numerically, and more economically preach to their Kurdish neighbors than would foreigners from across the sea. However, the experiment failed. It failed after ten years; it failed after 50 years; after a hundred years of Protestant mission, the Great Experiment proved only that it could not be done. To be sure, a Protestant church was carved from the soft belly of the historical church. William Miller, missionary to Iran, tells what happened next:

Foreign missionaries then became totally occupied serving these new churches they produced. Occasionally, one of these Protestants became a zealous and courageous evangelist to the Muslims. But, for the vast majority of believers, the walls of dialect, custom, prejudice and fear which have existed between Christians and Muslims for more than a thousand years were too high to scale and too ponderous to move. The "evangelical" churches have done little more than the Catholic or Orthodox churches had done to confront Muslims with the claims of Christ (Miller 1971:232, italics mine).

Mission leaders might reply that Ottoman and Persian laws prevented work among the Muslims. This is fair enough. The Ottoman and Persian Empires granted official permission to the Protestants to work among the Armenians and Syriac Orthodox and the Nestorians (Assyrians). All the Christian communities, however, were united by a common opposition to any mission to the Kurds. Protestant and Catholics continued to devote every missionary dollar and every brick school house and every hour of language study to the Kurd's "hereditary enemies," the Chris-

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Evangelism of Muslims failed because the historical churches opposed it.¹ Armenians, Assyrians, and Chaldeans were happy when missionaries learned their language, educated their children, employed their graduates, and defended their rights. However, a mission to Kurds was not on the church's agenda. When the Catholic mission in Aleppo gained quick success among Yezidi Kurds, Armenians became jealous; they opposed the mission to Yezidis. As a result, Yezidis stopped coming to worship. Catholic mission among Kurds ended. Catholics never again worked in Kurdistan except to convert the historical Christians. Never did the historical church envision what the missionaries intended, to love their enemies and offer them the Kingdom of God. What do Middle Eastern Christians say when allowed to speak for themselves?

[The Kurds] are a people without literature and without history.... It is amusing to notice them on their way to their work, dragging along their sluggish limbs as though they might drop asleep at any moment. They will waste two hours before they even start to work. After an hour of pretended labor, in which they have really accomplished nothing, they will have to sit down

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and smoke awhile. Poor creatures, they are good for nothing. . . . Robbing is their business, and they believe that God created them for this purpose only. I myself have conversed with many of them, and asked them why they steal. They answer that every man has some occupation. One is a judge, one a merchant, one a farmer, and "we are robbers.". . . Like Cain, their hand is against everybody, and everybody's hand is against them. (Yonan 1895:6-8).

Yonan bleeds for his Armenian people, but he feels steel-cold rage toward Kurds:

The Koords are profoundly ignorant and stupid, with neither books nor schools. Of the whole race, not one in ten thousand can read. . . . The name Koord is a terror to the Christians, who are treated by them as a wolf would treat a lamb, robbing them of their property, sometimes murdering them, and often burning their villages (1895:11, 12-13).

Missionaries worked alongside church leaders who referred to the Kurds as "profoundly ignorant and stupid, good for nothing, with sluggish limbs, without literature and without history." Nestorians demanded all the attention for themselves.

Protestants planned to evangelize Kurds by first revitalizing the Assyrian church; this was like trying to start a fire with wet matches. For example, a "brilliant future" for Euphrates College in Harput was threatened when missionaries tried to admit a few Kurds and Turks into the student body. Faculty members and well-to-do Armenians, who had begun to support the school, objected (Daniel 1970:107). Even today the historical church has no mission to Kurds. The church remembers every wound inflicted by the hands of Kurds. After I spoke at a church in San Mateo, California, a woman introduced herself as an Assyrian from northern Iraq. She admired the work we were doing. "But we could never do that," she said, "because the Kurds have hurt us too badly." She remembers Kurds as her enemy; her church does not imagine how it can co-exist with Kurds, so the members are emigrating to the West. Inviting Muslims into the Messianic feast is not on the to-do list for the church in Kurdistan.

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Each Sunday for more than two years I visited Iraqi Christians living in a refugee camp in eastern Turkey. I transported a Chaldean priest who conducted Sunday mass. After worship one day, a Chaldean said to me, "You have to help me get to America." We knew each other quite well, so I answered, "You have to help me stay in Kurdistan." He said, "You don't understand; I am willing to sell my house, my car and give up my job if I can go to America." I answered, "You don't understand; I gave up my house, my car, and my job to get to Kurdistan." He asked, "Why?" I replied, "Because the Kurds all around us do not know the blessing of Jesus Christ, as you and I do." He did not know what to say, so he blurted out, "The Kurds don't want it." I didn't know what to say, so I answered, "Let the Kurds decide whether they want to know Jesus Christ."²

At the world missionary conference held at Madras in 1938 the church's opposition was described in more general terms: "Too often [these] churches seem indifferent to Muslim enquirers, or look upon them with suspicion as to their motive in becoming Christians" (Joseph 1961:230). When the Great Experiment failed, the missionaries had no Plan B.

The second reason that the mission to the Kurds failed is that its workers, and their wives and children, died. Grant, age thirty-seven succumbed to typhoid. Samuel Audley Rhea died of cholera, age thirty-nine. Kurds killed Immanuel Damman just a few months after he arrived. During the attack, Detwig von Oertzen was wounded and consequently left the field. L. O. Fossum died of exhaustion after the First World War. Kurdish raiders murdered Bachimont the week he preached his first sermon in Kurdish. Roger Cumberland was shot in the back. The Presbyterian Church did not replace Cumberland; as he said, few if any envied him. The Presbyterian mission returned to its regular work alongside the Assyrian evangelical church. The Lutheran Orient

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The third reason that the mission to Kurds failed may have been that the right time had not yet come. Perhaps the missionaries knew instinctively that God's time for the Kurds was "not yet." John Joseph says that in Persia "the missionaries arrived at a difficult time for their spiritual campaign, for on this eastern front the Russo-Persian conflict had already intensified the religious animosities" (1961:45). In Turkey, successive Sultans and then Young Turks applied ever tighter bonds on the overburdened Christians. A mission to Kurds needed to wait for another time.

The lesson of God's timing, His kairos, has elsewhere helped the church to explain the failure of its mission. St. Francis explained his failure to win the Sultan of Egypt in terms of God's timing.

Francis lived while Europeans fought Muslims in the Fifth Crusade. Francis renounced the sword, and preached the refusal of power. He asked for an audience with the Sultan in 1219. To reach the Sultan, Francis crossed through the no-man's land separating the Christian army from the Muslim army. Francis and the Sultan met over a period of two weeks. When the Sultan bade farewell, he bestowed gifts upon Francis, who is said to have given away all but one (a prayer rug?). Francis worried that he did not see fruit. He viewed his mission as a failure. This troubled Francis and caused him to seek God for the reason. His followers came to believe that time (kairos) for Muslims had not yet come. The Franciscans who gathered at Assisi on the 8th centenary of Francis' death wrote:

When Francis speaks of mission, he is primarily thinking about the Muslims (Saracens). . . . At the same time Francis writes in the rule of 1221 that his brothers explicitly proclaim the Gospel only when it pleases God.

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We feel that, through the signs of the times, God is telling us that the "when" of Francis' directive has not yet arrived. In many countries the open preaching of the Gospel is not possible; Islam is renewing itself. Do these facts not show us that, as Francis waited for God's pleasure, we too have to place ourselves in God's hands? (Franciscan Mission 1982:1, 13, italics mine).

Missionaries to Kurdistan would agree with the Franciscans: open preaching of the gospel in Kurdistan was not yet possible. This predicament was partly due to the law in Turkey and Persia, and largely to the depravity of Kurds. Missionaries, including Franciscans, "waited for God's pleasure" to open the door to work among the Muslims. This waiting was an act of faith. They lived in hope that the "not yet" would give way to the "now" of mission to Kurds.

As recorded in the book of Acts, God's time for mission to some places is "not yet." Paul was prevented from preaching here and there (Ac 16:7); other times he was expelled from the region (Ac 13:50) and on occasion he fled for his life (Ac 14:6). In a similar way the missionaries had to wait, as Francis waited, "for God's pleasure." In some way, God Himself seems to have blocked the Kurdish mission for long seasons. How could the missionaries work among Kurds in the Ottoman Empire when the law forbade conversion to Christianity? Or in Iraq, where, though lawful, local sentiments endangered Cumberland? Paul went to where he could, that is, to where there was "an open door" (Ac 14:27). The missions in Kurdistan of the 19th and 20th centuries did the same.

We have tried to explain the reasons for the failure of the mission to the Kurds. We turn now to suggest some ground for new workers among the Kurds to cover.

Many kinds of Kurds exist; they are divided by terrain, by tribe, and by language. Wycliffe identifies at least four Kurdish

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To the outside world, Kurds present a common cause. However, narrower tribal loyalties bind Kurds more intimately, and fracture Kurds more obviously, than the slogans that cry for a unified homeland. Tribes separate Kurds into opposing politics. "The very fact that a certain chieftain participated in the nationalist movement was often sufficient reason for his rivals to oppose it, and most commoners followed their chieftains without question" (van Bruinessen 1992:7, italics mine). If one tribe would consider a movement to faith in Christ, a rival tribe may even more vehemently resist. When the gospel comes to the Kurds, it must come to Kurds who will reach Kurds in other tribes.

Tribal loyalties are pre-eminent.³ This loyalty defines one's friends and the borders of those friendships. Bride and groom usually come from the same tribe. Political parties seem to spread through a tribe, but no further. Front Turkish Kurdistan, van Bruinessen relates a story of tribal factionalism from the 1970s:

Down to the smallest towns, branches were opened, political tracts read and discussed. Ideological difference arid in particular personal rivalries caused many splits in the organizations; by the end of the decade there were about ten of them (1992:33, italics mine).

Even in large cities of Kurdish Iraq political loyalties run along tribal lines (Barzani, Surchi, Zêbari, Doski, Mizuri). The historian for the Lutheran Orient Mission Society was right: "The Kurds have little regard for any government further away than their own tribal chiefdoms" (Jensen and Oberg 1985:5). When the gos-

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Kurdish tribal chiefs are called aghas or shaikhs depending on the area. Martin van Bruinessen has definitively described their importance in his book, Agha, Shaikh, and State. In that book, the author describes the declining influence of the agha, as the modern states of Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria reward those tribal leaders which adhere to state policies, and replace rebellious aghas.

The village head man (mukhtar) acts as judge in disputes and representative of the village when visitors arrive. He is keeper of the peace. When the gospel comes to an entire village, it will likely come from discussions that take place in the house of the mukhtar.

The decision-making process often takes place in the group, not as individuals. Kurds believe, "we are, therefore I am":

The concept of "I" hardly exists in the context of a tribal culture's value system: "we" (the tribe) predominates. Individuals define themselves entirely in terms of their tribe. They are first a member of this or that tribe, then a Muslim, a Yezidi, or a Christian (Chaliand et al. 1980:24).

Therefore, when the gospel comes to the Kurds, we try not to extract individual young men or women from their family roots; we should wait for multiplied conversions that will happen in extended families. In a 1938 statement freighted with western worldview, the Near East Christian Council mentioned as a hindrance to Muslim evangelism: "In the thought of the Muslim a change of religion is primarily a change of group-communication and group-loyalty" (Joseph 1961:230). This group-loyalty is normative, and need not be negativized. Muslims should normally become followers of Jesus in company with others in their group.

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Kurds are class-conscious, ever aware of insiders and outsiders. Town-dwellers whose family moved from villages (gund) even forty years previously are considered outsiders (gundee). Look at the village or town and you will find wealthy Kurds and poor Kurds. Wealthy Kurds own land and animals. A landowner rents his land to peasants who work his land and tend his animals. The peasants retain half the crop or herd; the other half belongs to the owner.

Some Kurds have amassed a fortune by trading. They are absorbed in their wealth, more covetous by far than the poor peasants around them. When the gospel comes to the Kurds, it must require a repentance from these rich traders. Indeed, it would be better for some to "sell everything" to follow Jesus.

Most Kurds are poor, and do not know where their bread will come from tomorrow. They own a house and some animals, but that is all. Their sons cannot afford the dowry, so a marriage arrangement is made with the family of a poor girl. Roland Allen says that they poor make good church members: "Illiterate members often bring to the church a profound spiritual knowledge, and a sense of the practical application of Christian truth to daily life, which is hidden from the accomplished student" (1962:148). When the good news comes to poor Kurds, it must offer them Christ and His spiritual blessings. Followers of Christ must remember the poor in their charity.

Some Kurds are religious, and society respects their status . The religious family or even the religious tribe is proud of its reputation. If a Kurd makes the pilgrimage to Mecca, the title of hajj (pilgrim) is applied even to his sons for as long as they live. I know of no Kurdish women who have made the pilgrimage.

In some families, one young man or (more often) woman seems to take the role of keeper of the faith. (Other family members may feel no religious impulse.) He or she says the five prayers, reads the Qur'an, and preserves the family religion. When the gospel comes to the Kurds, it must face almost certain opposition

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Other Kurds are sinners, recognized as such by society. Some are prostitutes (never talked of in polite company). Some are men who visit prostitutes. One Kurdish woman in our knowledge was murdered by the men in her family for suspected adultery. Among Kurdish men are gamblers, drunkards, thieves, wife-beaters, and homosexuals. Among women are mothers-in-law who break their sons' wives through battering and contempt. There are traitors to their family or tribe, who have served the dictatorship for money, as surely as did the tax-collectors with whom Jesus broke bread. These are the outcasts, the public sinners. When the gospel comes to the Kurds, it must heal many sinners who know they need a Physician.

Some Kurds worship God with fear and awe. They seek Him with their hearts. God has planted in their souls a longing to know Him. Other Kurds gather around a holy man, or they gather in his memory. Sufis feel the intimacy of God's love. God-fearing Kurds may recognize followers of Jesus as fellow pilgrims on a spiritual path. God-fearing Kurds want to read the Bible. They will more likely decide to follow Jesus apart from their family approval. When the gospel comes, it must soon attract many God-fearers whom God has prepared to belong to Himself.

Kurds who have come to faith have one quality in common; they were on a personal journey to find God. These few elect souls wanted to know God, and they had an extraordinary desire for the truth. They would understand an old hymn:

I sought the Lord and afterward I knew
He moved my soul to seek Him, seeking me.
It was not I that found O Savior true.
No, I was found by Thee (Hymns 1976)

Dr. Sa'eed says that his search for truth led him to Christian faith. He once regarded the food of Christians to be unclean (Rasooli and Allen 1957:26); later he accepted their food and their faith as clean, an act that Sa'eed's biographer described as a bomb exploding in his father's house. When the gospel comes to the God-fearing Kurds, they are first fruits of a harvest.

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Mehrdad Izady estimates that two centuries ago a million Kurds lived as nomads, about thirty percent of their population. In the mid-nineteenth century Henry Layard called the Kurds a nomadic people. However, today less than three percent of the Kurds live as nomads (Izady 1992:229). Ismet Vanly writes, "The 'nomad tribes,' which are still equated with the Kurds in Western minds, do not in fact exist in Kurdistan" (Chaliand et al. 1993:144).

But Kurdish nomads in eastern Turkey still pitch their black wool tents in pasture land for a season and then move on. So we can still quote Freya Stark, who traveled a century ago and paid exquisite tribute to the Kurdish nomad:

The life of insecurity is the nomad's achievement. He does not try, like our building world, to believe in a stability which is non-existent; and in his constant movement with the seasons, in the lightness of his hold, puts something right, about which we are constantly wrong. His is in fact the reality, to which the most solid of our structures are illusion; and the ramshackle tents in their crooked gaiety, with cooking-pots propped up before them and animals about, show what a current flows round all the stone erections of the ages. The finest ruin need only be lamented with moderation, since its living essence long ago entered the common stream. No thought of this kind is likely to come into the head of the Turkish nomads; they are happy to shelter their goats in the warmth or the shade that they find, whether the ruins be of Nineveh or Rome. Their women were cheerful and fierce, unlike the peasant, and dressed in brighter colours—equals of their men or of anyone, as one may be if one lives under the hardness of necessity and makes insecurity one's refuge (Darke 1987:268).

Besides nomads, semi-nomadic Kurds have two homes, one in the mountains where they live during the summer grazing. They return to villages when summer ends. Only the most determined Christian worker imagines himself or herself traveling with Kurdish nomads. It has never happened to my knowledge.

Terrain divides Kurds between those whose home is in the mountains, and those who move to the plains (and thus to cities

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On the other hand, modern Kurds settle in the cities on the plains; they assimilate into the surrounding culture. The cities on the plain is the world of politics, and successful Kurds who go there may not be trusted to be the leaders of mountain Kurds:

It is as if he has lost his virtue by leaving the apron of mother-mountain and living among the crafty plains people. . . . To know the secrets of the mountains, the passes, rivers, and caves; to know the tribal customs; and to be brave, are essential characteristics of Kurdish chiefs and leaders (Izady 1992:189).

This distrust of the society outside the mountain fastnesses figures in two ancient stories that Izady summarizes. In both tales, a warrior man from the mountains is tempted by, and then betrayed by, a woman from the plains. These stories, told around the evening fires, would teach a lesson to every mountain boy: Don't go down to the plain, or it will make a fool of you. Conversely, when mountain Kurds come to the big cities, they may appear as simpletons to street-smart urban Kurds.

The political rivalry between Kurds in northern Iraq can be divided between mountain Kurds (Barzani) and Kurds who moved to the big cities on the plain (Talabani). When the gospel comes to the Kurds, it must take root in the mountains and also on the plains. From its beginning, the gospel in Kurdistan must bless all the families of the earth, even those families that the fathers and grandfathers taught their children to avoid.

Mistreatment of women begins early: boys do little work, girls do all the work; a teenage girl is forced to live in her house and seldom goes out until she is transferred to the home of her husband. Teenage boys, on the other hand, do as they please; orders

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Kurdish society seems patriarchal, but take another look. Women find ways to influence their families and to a lesser extent the society that oppresses them. Women are not left without power. They can make the home life pleasant or painful for the men. They have complete care of the children. Society expects women to preserve the family religion; wives remain faithful to Islam even when their husbands do not. Women also maintain the honor of the family, even when the men do not. Thus, women are a conservative influence; they are not change-agents. Henny Hansen, an anthropologist, says,

In view of the great part that conformance with the rules of Islam plays in the life of Kurdish women, her positive attitude toward the five pillars of Islam, any change in her life pattern in this quarter would involve a complete transformation. It is not surprising that the altered life of women in Turkey has had to proceed hand-in-hand with a sustained offensive on all things Arab (1960:183, italics mine).

For some women, the practice of the five pillars is the religion of God. All else may fail her, but the woman of Islam can rely on the unshakable pillars. Should an outsider suggest that a woman give up her practice, she would cry, "Blasphemy!"

In non-Muslim religions—Alevi,⁴ Yezidi, and Jewish—Kurdish women and men mix more in the religious life of the community. Kurdish Jews allow more freedom for their women, and this "gave rise in the 17th century to the first woman rabbi, the famous Rabbi Asenath Bârzâni" (Izady 1992:195).

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Missionaries usually think of gathering believers into congregations; however, missionaries should start mission orders. By mission orders, we mean groups of men or women who make a commitment to the task of evangelism and discipleship.

When they plant only congregations, missionaries neglect the means by which they themselves obeyed the Great Commission. The congregation invites like-minded people to join: children of members and culturally-near neighbors. However, the mission order blesses the strangers outside the homogeneous unit. This has been God's missionary plan since He blessed Abraham to be a blessing to all the families of the earth. Mission orders extended Christian faith through the Middle East and into Persia, Afghanistan and China.

Crucial to the missionary's task is his or her awareness that there are two structures to God's redemptive mission. Ralph Winter has described these as the warp and the woof:

Just as it is impossible to make cloth without threads going both crosswise and lengthwise, it is crucially important to regard these two structures working together as the warp and the woof, the fabric being the Christian movement—the people of God, the ecclesia of the New Testament, the church of Jesus Christ. Therefore, to make either of the two structures central and the other secondary, as the term para-church seems to do, is probably unwise (1977:1).

So two structures comprise the church: the congregation and the missionary band. The ministry of the congregation was given to elders and deacons. However, the work of the church—going into all the world to make disciples of the ethné—was given to the apostolic order:

While they were worshiping the Lord and fasting the Holy Spirit said, "Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them." So after they had fasted and prayed, they placed their hands on them and sent them off (Ac 13:2-3, italics mine).

When the gospel comes to the Kurds, the Holy Spirit will set apart some to the work of the apostles. These join the missionary order described below.

[End of excerpt]

This document should be cited as follows in a bibliography:
Blincoe, Robert. Ethnic Realities and the Church: Lessons from Kurdistan. Pasadena, CA, 1998: Presbyterian Center for Mission Studies.

Ethnic Realities and the Church: Lessons from Kurdistan by Robert Blincoe is available from the Presbyterian Center for Mission Studies / 1605 E Elizabeth Street / Pasadena CA 91104 / 1-888-698-2468 / 1-626-398-2468 / PCMS@PCUSA.org The price is $12.95 plus $2.50 for shipping. (As of Jan 2002)