The Pilot News

Pastor Doug Dieterly’s missions trip to Pakistan

PLYMOUTH — Doug Dieterly, the associate/ Executive Pastor of the Plymouth Baptist Church, recently went on a mission's trip to Pakistan where he did work to help people accept God into their life.

Dieterly left for Pakistan on Oct. 19 and returned home on Oct. 31. He spent nine days on the ground in Pakistan. During his trip he worked with a local Pakistani pastor named aslam Masih and his daughter Shanza. While there he took part in preaching at church services and prayer meetings. In addition to this he also would spend time with workers in brick yards and gardens in the area answering questions about Christiani­ty.

Pakistan is an Islamic nation, 98.5% of the over 240 million population of Pakistan is Muslim. Christians make up 1.5% of the population. Christians in Pakistan are very oppressed and face a lot of danger.

Dieterly talked about how there was a lot of violence in the area that he visited that took place a few months before he was there. Over 80 churches had been firebombed by Muslim extremists and Christians had been burned out of their homes and were forced to live in fields.

“Under Islamic law, for a Muslim to become a Christian carries a death sentence. Christians are highly persecuted. If a Muslim wife converts to Christiani­ty, her husband has the right to kill her and will. Her best prospect is to flee her village and get out. If a husband and a wife themselves convert to Christiani­ty and they have children, they will have to flee somewhere where they aren’t known or else the government will take their children away from them and give them to be raised by Muslims,” Dieterly said.

He further talked about how a 13-year-old Christian girl was taken from her home, converted to Islam and was forced to marry her abductor. He added that all of this is just the tip of the iceberg of what happens to Christians in Pakistan.

Dieterly gave these as examples to show that him preaching to Christians and Muslims in Pakistan was very dangerous. If he had offended a Muslim, then he could have faced two years in jail. Under the laws of where he was, converting Muslims to Christiani­ty faces a death sentence. Under Pakistani laws it faces a 10-year prison sentence, so he faced danger on two levels.

Dieterly came to Pakistan after being invited by aslam. He had known aslam for about seven to eight years before meeting him in person. He became connected with aslam through a man named adam Lefebvre.

Adam had come to the Plymouth Baptist Church when they were looking for a ministry on the other side of the world. Adam told them that this was what he was looking for, he explained that he had contacts in Pakistan which was pastor Aslam.

Aslam is a pastor at Christ’s Light Church of Pakistan. He asked Dieterly if he would teach him a Bible course. This course is called Experienci­ng God.

“It’s a 12-week course. I taught it to them every Saturday morning over the internet via Facebook messenger. When we were done, he said ‘there are pastors here who need this course’. I arranged through another young man that God brought to this church who happened to be Pakistani and with the permission of the publisher to have that course translated into the Pakistani language which is Urdu. With their permission received a license to provide copies of that to Pastor Aslam for use and teaching. Over the course of the next seven or eight years, Aslam and his daughter through their Christ Life ministry had taught over 122 other pastors and teachers in Pakistan that course. The result of which have been over 2,000 people in Pakistan coming to receive Jesus Christ as their lord and savior,” Dieterly said when talking about his connection with Aslam.

To add to this Plymouth Baptist Church has also assisted in getting funds to build churches near where Aslam preaches. One of these has finished, the other is still under constructi­on.

While in Pakistan Dieterly was able to preach at both of these churches.

Dieterly gave insight into how the different times he preached went.

“The reason for my coming was to preach not only in the church that got built a year ago but also to deliver a message to the pastors and teachers who had taken the Bible course over the last several years and to provide encouragem­ent and some advanced training to them. To meet with people who work in the brick yards who are slaves, essentiall­y, they are indentured servants,” Dieterly said.

The first people he preached to were those who worked in brick yards.

The people who work at brick yards owe a debt to the yard owners. They have to work to pay back their loan while being charged interest rates that they will never be able to pay back. This leads to their future generation­s to be stuck working in the brick yard too. The Christians who work here have it even worse as their rates are far worse than the Muslims.

When he finished preaching to them about two thirds of the group asked Jesus to come into their lives and their hearts to be their Lord and Savior.

From there word began to spread that Dieterly was here from America sharing the gospel.

His next time preaching was the church that Plymouth Baptist had helped fund. This church could usually seat about 100 people and usually only had 35 people in attendance. At this service the church was packed. There were even people outside of the church listening to the message.

Originally Dieterly thought it would be a small crowd of just Christians, once he saw that there was both Christians and Muslims, he had to change his message to an evangelica­l message.

There were 110 people in the room and many more outside. 80% of the people in the room raised their hand and said they wanted to accept Jesus Christ. 20 of those people also asked to be baptized.

“That was quite a humbling experience. I take no credit for it. God was the one who knew who would be there and prepared their hearts to hear and just spoke through me,” Dieterly said.

Word continued to spread which led to Dieterly being invited to another church.

At this church there were over 200 people present, many of the people were Muslims before the service. There were more outside again. Here he explained what being Christian meant. 150 people here requested to receive Christ. 75 of them requested to be baptized.

Dieterly discussed how baptism is taken very lightly in the U.S. in Pakistan it is very dangerous to make a public declaratio­n of your acceptance of Christ. They are opening themselves up to a death sentence by doing this.

Again, word spread about Dieterly, and he was invited to a third village. This time they could not fit inside a church, they had to use a courtyard for the sermon. This was a nighttime service because many of the people were brick yard workers. This service was also packed. As Dieterly looked around at the rooftops around the courtyard, he saw that there were also many people listening to the speakers from the surroundin­g buildings. This service had people watching the back doors to make sure everyone was safe. Outside the courtyard there were even more people. Again, many of the people listening were Muslim.

Inside the courtyard there were at least 220 people. Dieterly believes that there were at least 400 people at this one counting those outside. Out of the 220 that they could see, 80% accepted Christ. About 40% of those asked to be baptized.

“The Muslim people are desperate to know that there is a God that loves them and to know that they can know that when they leave this world they will be in Heaven. Because Islam is a salvation by works nation. Their god, who they call Allah, who is not the same as the Christian God is a god of vengeance, a god of punishment. Because they are works based, they never know if their life is good enough or not to gain them eternal life in Heaven and they want to know. Instead of a god of vengeance they want to hear about a God of love who really cares about them in this world and is a sovereign God that will care for them. So, when the word got out that this is whats being taught and preached from the Bible, people wanted to come and hear and they made decisions to receive him,” Dieterly said.

From here the crowds continued to grow.

For the second part to Pastor Doug’s story, make sure to pick up a copy of Monday’s Pilot News.