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What must we learn, and unlearn, to be agents of God's mission in the world? That is the Christian Vision Project's big question for 2007. Evangelical Christians have been learners in mission for several hundred years: learning new languages and cultures, and learning about our own cultures along the way. In the past few decades, though, an increasing number of young evangelicals have pursued advanced training in international relations and apprenticed at the highest levels of diplomacy and statecraft. Joshua T. White, a 27-year-old graduate fellow at the Institute for Global Engagement and a student at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, embodies this new generation of mission-minded Christians. As Josh's story shows, they bring with them a commitment to incarnational witness that transcends politics as usual.

It was, by any measure, a rather large funeral. When I arrived on the morning of the third day, the weary-looking colonel at the gate told me that "about 125,000" people had already filed through the Durrani ancestral home to pay their respects. It was a staggering number for such a remote corner of northwest Pakistan, but I believed him. No one goes to Bannu just to visit. Yet when news spread that the uncle of the province's chief minister—its top elected official, representing the mma Islamist alliance—had been killed, people came.

I had met the uncle once or twice. He was a soft-spoken man, quietly energetic; I remembered spending an afternoon sitting in his courtyard, trying to coax English phrases out of his shy young son. His death was a family tragedy, but beyond that it was a symbol of the instability that was slowly gathering in Bannu—just a stone's throw from the restive North Waziristan tribal area that had become the heartland of the new Taliban and a hideout for Al Qaeda.

By strange providence, I was the chief minister's guest in northwest Pakistan. It was an unusual relationship, begun in 2005 when the Institute for Global Engagement (IGE) invited Durrani to Washington, D.C., for a week of relational diplomacy and face-to-face conversations about the troubling new Shari'ah law his party had proposed in the provincial assembly. In 2002, for the first time in Pakistan's history, Islamists had been elected outright in the North-West Frontier Province. Religious freedom advocates like IGE had become concerned that the frontier would come under the reign of "Talibanization."

The chief minister's visit was filled with meetings at the National Security Council and the State and Defense Departments, as well a trip to Ground Zero. It also included plenty of informal yet significant conversations: about Thomas Jefferson (while enjoying Häagen-Dazs ice cream on the National Mall), about Jesus and Muhammad, and about the implications of Shari'ah for Pakistan's fragile minority communities. In spite of our political and religious differences, we found the chief minister to be something of a moderate in his context. Before departing, Durrani invited us to see the frontier for ourselves.

A few months later we did, amid the terrible October earthquake. While there, the chief minister signed an agreement with IGE to work together on religious freedom through interfaith and education projects. I was so taken with the history and hospitality of the frontier that I decided to stay for a year in the provincial capital of Peshawar, pursuing these programs.

That a 27-year-old American Christian was hanging out in Peshawar as the guest of an Islamist political party that four years earlier had come to power on a pro-Shari'ah and anti-American platform caused no end of wonder to the local diplomats and church community. To them, it seemed a bit crazy. For me, it was an extraordinary opportunity to glimpse Islamist political leadership from the inside; to get to know these people as people; to begin to tease apart rhetoric from reality, slogans from conviction; and to find myself, on a certain scorching May morning, the only Westerner making a trip down to Bannu.

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April 2007, Vol. 51, No. 4