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He was surprised to then discover a small multicultural fellowship for believers raised in Muslim cultures: "And I thought I was the only lunatic." For Tahir the group was a spiritual homecoming, albeit a tenuous one; it has disbanded three times in the last ten years amid discipline issues and leadership infighting.

Muslim cultures are highly communal, which can breed the clannish division and shame-and-honor system at work in the Sunni-Shiite, Hamas-Fatah, and Iraqi Kurd rivalries. "The same thing happens in fellowships of Muslim-background believers. It's indicative of the culture," says Roy Oksnevad, director of Muslim ministries at Wheaton College's Billy Graham Center. Last year, Oksnevad helped reorganize the Chicago group with a leadership team that includes Western missionaries.

In New York City, more than ten groups have folded in one generation, including the breakup two years ago of a rare Arabic-speaking fellowship. But leaders see momentum building among the 200 known Muslim-background believers loosely connected by the Jesus for Muslims (JFM) network. JFM includes an English-speaking fellowship, an embryonic West African group, an expanding Turkish group, and pockets of Indonesians, West Indians, and Bangladeshis.

Besides leadership training, the network's biggest need is social support for immigrants stranded between Muslim and mainstream society. Last September, JFM opened a transitional safe-house to shepherd persecuted Muslim-background believers through Bible studies and employment counseling. "We had some [who had been] sleeping in their cars and on people's couches," said executive director Fred Farrokh. "Christians talk of finding identity in Christ. But for Muslims, finding Jesus requires a loss of identity. Leaving Islam is [viewed as] an act of treason."

Most new converts have no access to fellowships. Like Samir in Kansas City, they are loners. Their sanctuary is cyberspace. Their stories, usually told anonymously, reverberate on websites like MuslimJourneyToHope.com and Answering-Islam.org. Samir helps manage the latter from his basement, tap-tapping words of counsel to Muslim seekers in closed countries. As an apostate, he's a target of fanatics—"I'd have beheaded you. Wait for your death; it will come from a source you don't know"—and a lifeline for isolated believers in America: "An ex-Muslim is always an ex-Muslim! I'll never get the new identity in Christ the Bible speaks of."

Samir knows this gridlocked psyche. Once a Muslim proselytizer and Sunni spy for Saddam Hussein, he's now a Christian missionary who also trains U.S. Army officers in Islamic culture. He is the only Muslim-background believer in his American church, but he is discipling a fellow Iraqi Christian who lost his gas station job when his Muslim employer learned of his conversion. "They are accustomed to community," Samir says, "but now they live on their own islands."

Some Muslim-background believers look at American churches as surrogate families. But like Gentiles in the first-century Jewish church, many still feel marginalized and ostracized. Some are placed on a celebratory "ex-Muslim" pedestal, only to find that American churches are often unable to make a relational investment in their complex lives, which include divided marriages, disoriented bicultural children, financial woes, religious persecution, and tangled immigration issues.

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September 2008, Vol. 52, No. 9