Insider Movements: Biblically Incredible or Incredibly Brilliant?

In 1938 the Reverend Henry H. Riggs wrote Shall We Try Unbeaten Paths in Working for Moslems? He encouraged the church to help Muslim converts remain inside Islam so that they might not lose their cultural identity. These ideas were soundly denounced by leading missionary scholars of the time: Samuel Zwemer, J. Christy Wilson, and Hendrik Kraemer. In the 1980s Riggs’s suggestions bubbled up to the surface with new life in Bangladesh, but the proponents of these views--known as the insider movements (IM)--maintained a low profile. The church did not know what was taking place in Bangladesh until the 1990s when anonymous authors published papers with made-up locations reporting hundreds of thousands of new believers. Today, proponents of IM support their observations of what God is doing among Muslims with eight biblical passages. If the biblical support is real, it behooves you to support missionaries who advocate for IM; but if the biblical evidence is absent, you will have a difficult decision to make. The purpose of this book is help clarify the insider movements’ claims and paradigm by simply examining the Scriptures.

Jeff Morton is an adjunct professor at Biola University’s Cook School of Intercultural Studies. He is the author of Two Messiahs (2011) and coeditor of Chrislam: How Missionaries Are Promoting an Islamized Gospel (2011).