In his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, C.S. Lewis describes how God was pursuing him while he was still an atheist.

God was like a pack of hounds hunting the bedraggled fox. God was the Angler playing his fish, and Lewis never dreamed that the hook was in his jaw.

God was the cat, chasing the mouse. “Amiable agnostics will talk cheerfully about ‘man’s search for God,’” writes Lewis. “To me, as I then was, they might as well have talked about the mouse’s search for the cat.”

God was the chess player: “All over the board my pieces were in the most disadvantageous positions — my Adversary had begun to make His final moves.”

Lewis’ penultimate chapter is titled “Checkmate.” He testifies: “In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.”

I recently met a man — a former Muslim from Bangladesh — whose testimony is as miraculous as that.

Baptizing Muslims

Last Tuesday, I had the joy of participating in the baptism of a Muslim convert at Lake Bracciano, a few minutes away from my home on the outskirts of Rome. The convert had served as a soldier in the Bangladeshi army and the UN Peace Keeping Force in Africa. Along with him, I met other converts, including a former animist from Ghana — and AM, an evangelist who cannot be named here because he faces the death penalty for apostasy from Islam.

While puzzled Italians watched, we sang a hymn in Bengali, listened to our brother’s testimony, heard an American missionary preach the Word of God, and then baptized the men who had newly given their lives to Christ. I was fighting back tears, and I knew the angels were rejoicing in Heaven.

On Saturday, my wife and I had dinner with AM. He told us how he came to faith. Like Lewis, he was a reluctant convert. Like Jonah, he tried fleeing from his calling to be an evangelist in Italy. And God, like a pack of hounds, hunted him down when he was running like a helpless fugitive.

The 34-year-old AM comes from an upper-class family in Bangladesh. His father is a respected Muslim leader. His relatives are Islamic scholars and teachers. The clan even run madrassas (religious schools). AM’s mother is a sociologist, and his brother has a doctorate from a prestigious American university.

Binning the Bible?

In 2014, AM began studies at Queen’s University in London to finish his Masters in Business Administration. A year later, there was a problem with his fees and his student visa was canceled. AM and four mates each paid £5,000 to traffickers who smuggled them from London to Calais in the back of a lorry.

The quintet wanted to explore getting a free education in Germany before returning home. AM ended up in Cologne, where he began working toward a diploma in automotive engineering. To make ends meet, he worked at a Turkish restaurant. On his first day at work, the Muslim restaurant owner warned him to stay away from a trio of evangelicals who were preaching the Gospel in the town center.

Over the following months, AM rebuffed their repeated attempts to chat with him as he headed home from work. One night, he was due to catch the last train when they persuaded him to accept a New Testament. AM decided to chuck it into a trash can, but hesitated because he wouldn’t do the same to a Koran in Bangladesh.

At home, he hid the New Testament in a broom closet because he didn’t want his Muslim roommates to see it. Two weeks later, he found it while cleaning the house and flipped it open to Matthew 6:32-33:

“For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you.”

At that moment, AM was intensely worried about his future. “This was so good. I didn’t expect it,” he told us. He then spotted the verse where Jesus talks about turning the other cheek. “This was so cool because in Islam if someone slaps you, you are told to kill him!” AM exclaimed.

Dodging the “Holy Shower”

So AM decided to phone the street preachers, who had left a business card in the New Testament. “I called them thinking I would convert them to Islam,” AM said with a chuckle.

When AM met with the street evangelists, he was surprised that they didn’t bash him with the Bible. Instead, they simply treated him as a friend. He was overwhelmed by their love and concern for him. Over the next six months, he began asking them questions about Jesus.

“It was my pride that kept me from surrendering to Jesus as Lord,” he told us as we ate curry. “I phoned my father to find out how to challenge them. I watched videos by the fiery Muslim apologist Zakir Naik.”

On one occasion he was invited to a service of Baptism and Holy Communion. He wondered why new converts were getting a “holy shower.” But he was grossly offended when the believers refused to let him partake of the Lord’s Supper. Were they being racist?

A long explanation calmed him down.

Facing the Death Penalty

Finally, he told us, it was the Gospel of salvation by grace through faith and the love of God demonstrated in the atoning death of Jesus that brought AM to surrender his life to Him. He was now ready to be baptized.

It was late 2015. On the day of his baptism, fearing the death penalty his father would mete out when he discovered what he’d done, AM changed his mind on the train while going to the church where he was to be baptized.

“I decided to get off at the next station and take the train back (home). I would destroy my SIM card and get a new one and so they would never be able to contact me,” he said of the evangelists. As he got up from his seat, a German man walked up to him and asked if he was AM, the convert who was going to be baptized that day.

The German brother said a friend was waiting at the station and AM could join them in the car to the church. AM knew God had checkmated him.

“I felt like Jonah,” he said.

Jonah in Rome

“But I was also running away from my mission field,” he continued. “I had been to Italy and I didn’t want to live there. I wanted to minister in Germany.” Yet again, God was about to turn his ship around.

Weeks later, German police raided his house in the wee hours of the morning. They ignored his mates, who also had entered Europe illegally, but they handcuffed him and shoved him in a cell. A day later, they pushed him onto a plane and deported him to Italy, telling him he would be arrested by Italian police when he disembarked at Rome’s Fiumicino airport.

At Fiumicino, AM was given his deportation letter as he stepped off the plane. He was expecting the Italian police to meet him with a pair of handcuffs.

But there were no cops to be seen. He did not need to clear immigration since he was flying from within the European Union … so he simply walked out of the airport as a free man.

But he had only 40 euros, couldn’t speak Italian and his German phone wouldn’t work in Italy because it was a “pay as you go” SIM with no roaming abilities. (The EU changed those rules in 2017, so cell phones there now work the same way American ones do when calling between states.)

All he could do was follow a crowd to catch the first bus, which took him to Termini, Rome’s main station. There he bought a new SIM card and called the church in Cologne.

As are the ways of Providence, a member of the church had felt compelled to attend a service in another German city, where he had met a visiting preacher from Rome. As in the days of the Apostle Paul, connections were swiftly made and a pastor from Rome took AM to his home.

Prayer-Answering God

What he then told AM shocked the former Muslim: “We have been praying for 15 years for God to send a South Asian who can help us with evangelizing South Asians in Italy. So far we have had no success with our outreach to South Asians or with finding someone to help us. Now, God has sent you.”

The Italian authorities gave AM a residence permit and the church in Rome made him an evangelist at Centro Agape. AM is now leading dozens of Muslims to Christ every month. He visits refugee camps around Rome and preaches the Gospel every Friday at Piazza Vittorio Emmanuele, in the heart of Rome’s Bangaladeshi-dominated sector.

I asked him how he distinguishes genuine converts from those playing the system to get asylum.

“We don’t give them any documents or recommendations, we don’t support their claim for asylum,” he replied. “In any case, they all have their own traumatic stories to tell and they don’t need to convert to get a residence permit.”

An asylum seeker who wants to game the system in Italy will often get baptized in the Roman Catholic Church because, unlike the evangelical churches, it is recognized by law. Sadly, with Rome’s emphasis on interfaith dialogue, there is virtually no Catholic evangelistic outreach to people of other faiths.

It’s not just asylum seekers, but permanent Muslim residents of Italy who are coming to faith in Christ through AM’s ministry. And because he speaks fluent Italian (in addition to German, English, and Bengali), AM is leading Italians to surrender their lives to Jesus, too.

Readers of English poetry will recall the turbulent life of Francis Thompson, who ended up on the streets, slaking his opium addiction in London’s Charing Cross District. When Thompson finally succumbed to the pursuing Christ, he penned his poem The Hound of Heaven:

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days.

I fled Him, down the arches of the years,

I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways

Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears

I hid from Him, and under running laughter:

Up vistaed hopes I sped;

And shot, precipitated,

Adown titanic glooms of chasmed fears,

From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.

But with unhurrying chase,

And unpeturbèd pace,

Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,

They beat — and a Voice beat

More instant than the Feet —

“All things betray thee, who betrayest me.”

 

Dr. Jules Gomes, (BA, BD, MTh, PhD), has a doctorate in biblical studies from the University of Cambridge. Currently a Vatican-accredited journalist based in Rome, he is the author of five books and several academic articles. Gomes lectured at Catholic and Protestant seminaries and universities and was canon theologian and artistic director at Liverpool Cathedral.