setting prisoners free

From Casa Blanca we take a train to Meknes, Morocco. This is a city of about a million Muslims, about 200 Jews and a smattering of Christians. The smattering is mostly underground.

The train ride is an uneventful four-hour trip through the Atlas Mountain range- except for the sprint we did from train to train looking for our seats- and the train running over a guy on a moped. We stopped for about 20 minutes as they tried to sort that out.

For those of you who have never heard of Meknes- it is a city that has a two thousand year history dating back to the time of the Romans, with Christianity reaching back to about the 2nd century. The Berbers first became Christian as a result of the influence of church fathers such as Tertullian, who was from Carthage, North Africa. Islam came in the 8th century with the arrival of Moulay Idriss, a descendent of Muhammad. As a result of his influence here, there are shrines and mosques that if you visit seven times, are the equivalent of Mecca- and the population is now almost totally Muslim. The worship in these shrines is a kind of mixture of folk Islam and demonic trance. Worshippers dance around in a frenzy and call on the spirits to possess their bodies.

How sad to think that this once was a land dominated by Christianity. Islam was able to stamp out Christianity with persecution and economic incentives. The Berber people here now engaged in demonic practices are the descendents of a people who were once Christian. One of the tragedies of that ancient church was that they never took their worship out of Latin and never translated the Bible into Berber. Therefore, when persecution came, there had been no discipleship. Families did not pass down their faith or teach a kind of Bible literacy. The Word of God was read by the priests but was not hidden in people’s hearts. What a great lesson for our time!

There is a darkness that hovers over the city. It may be the vestiges of the 17th century Sultan who established his kingdom here. “Moulay Ismail was a megalomaniac who made Nebuchadnezzar look humble” my friend John says as we tour the remains of his castle with it’s incredible granaries, stables and apartments for his 900 wives (Ironically, the wives quarters and garden has now been converted into a golf course). The walls he built extend about 40 miles in circumference. “How in the world can one king build all these walls in his lifetime?” I think to myself.

The answer is “slave labor”.

He was so serious about his slave force that he constructed a catecomb prison which encompasses the entire underground of the city of Meknes. Many of his slaves were European Christians taken off of captured ships on the Barbary Coast. The pirates of the Barbary Coast were Berbers taking advantage of the narrow passage at the straight of Gibraltar (“Barbary” is a derivative of “Berber”- we also get the word “Barbarian” from this word). The locals call the underground dungeon, capable of housing 60,000 slaves, the “Christian Prison”.

Ismail built an Ambassadors Hall for greeting European envoys who came to offer money and gifts for the release of Christian prisoners. He built it right above the dungeon catcomb- so that the people who came looking for their captured compatriots would literally be standing on top of them as they begged.

My friends here are dynamic and capable Christians who are committed not just to the spreading of the gospel- but also to taking care of the poor and the orphaned - the blind and dispossessed and marginalized people who suffer most in a place like this. The hospital here has an entire floor for orphaned children who are born out of wedlock. Muslim culture has no place for these children- they are born in shame. By the time the children are older, most of the healthy girls have been adopted out- as they are in much demand to be brought into homes as family servants- so the older children are almost exclusively boys and handicapped girls.

Our friends are working hard to help give these children a life- they are committed to the strengthening of the support network that houses and feeds them and takes care of them. They contribute their time to educating them and making sure they are well fed and they invest into the physical needs of the children by teaching them sports and exercises. The children are about three years behind physically- the result of being raised in a big room with no space for running around. It is obvious that their work is having an impact. A few weeks ago a radical Mullah came into the orphanage and told the children that Americans hate them and are their enemy. The children all looked at each other and then looked at him and said, “Not the Americans we know- they love us, they take care of us- we love them!”

We spend the entire day walking around the city and praying for these people.

At night we gather with a group of believers and have an awesome time of worship and praise. The songs we sing are some of the new ones that our 10:45 worship leaders have taught us over the past several weeks. Our Christian friends here are very young- most of them in their 20s and 30s.

As we reflect at the end of our day here, my friend John says of the smattering of Christians in Meknes, “They are not unlike the ambassadors who stood before the barbaric Sultan and begged to have their captives set free- only this time they are working to liberate millions from the chains of a different kind of slavery.”