Michael Youssef’s dual-language broadcasts of the gospel have uncovered a great spiritual hunger.

by Madeleine Collins

Michael Youssef – Moore College graduate, pastor of an evangelical church in Atlanta, the persona of a TV and radio ministry spanning the globe – was never meant to have been born.
His life is peppered with startling facts – his mother planned to abort him due to ill health, but a family pastor intervened at the last minute. He is a TV evangelist but despises the term (“all kinds of preachers buy airtime, but I’m Bible teaching, none of that ‘razzamatazz’ and prosperity and falling down”). He was born in Egypt and became a Christian at 15. He immigrated to Australia at a time when visas were almost impossible to obtain. He went to Moore College and married a Sydney girl, Elizabeth.
He is now an American citizen and pastor of The Church of the Apostles, an Anglican ministry that began 25 years ago with 28 adults that has since grown to over 2000.
Wait. From a few dozen people to 2000? Does he have any tips? “There are certain principles that operate,” he smiles. “Number one, you have to do it in obedience, not just because ‘I want to plant a church somewhere’. The second thing is you find out what your gifts are, who your target congregation is, and you have to match your gifts with the type of congregation.
“I felt my target audience and my ministry was to train leaders, so I started in an area with a lot of business leaders. I lived in Atlanta for nine years before I started the church. I got to know the city, what works, what doesn’t work and basically I became part and parcel of the culture. They are the leaders today, these friendships that I formed 25 years ago. You bring people who have strengths in the areas you are lacking.”
And having a vision is paramount. “You get your congregations to focus on the great commission of taking the gospel to the ends of the earth. I really believe that is the key for a church to grow.”
Good advice. But the project Dr Youssef is really eager to talk about – the reason he is in Sydney – is his media ministry, Leading the Way. The venture is an outgrowth of his globally-minded congregation. Specifically, he wants to spread the word about the ‘75/2’ project, a scheme that aims to reach 75 per cent of the Muslim world with the gospel via radio within two years.
In fact, he has just reached that goal ahead of the April 2004 deadline. It is part of a larger project to reach 3.9 billion people with the gospel by 2009. As an American would say, that’s ‘3.9 by 09’. And he aims to do it all through broadcasting dual language radio programs that proclaim the gospel.
Leading the Way’s radio broadcasts are in 91 countries worldwide and have become an essential tool to learn English. It is the only dual-language program of its kind in the world. Its beauty seems to lie in its simplicity: one sentence in English, the next in languages that include Bahasa, Turkish, Mandarin and, most recently, Farsi and Urdu. It is believed to be the Middle East’s most popular radio program, coming on right after a news bulletin. Many people, according to the ministry’s Australasian General Manager, Nathan Brown, “have just sort of stumbled across the program and come to Christ as a result.” The unreached corners of the globe, it seems, are at Michael Youssef’s fingertips.

Michael Amerhom Youssef, 55, talks candidly about almost everything. His mother’s plan to abort him, he says, was stopped at the last minute with an early morning phone call from his parent’s pastor who had a revelation that this baby was going to grow up and serve the Lord. “The miracle was she lived for 16 years after I was born,” Dr Youssef says. “I came to the Lord in March and she died in July. She knew the risking of her life wasn’t in vain.”
He has fond memories of the class of ‘74 at Moore College. Bishop Robert Forsyth and Canon John Woodhouse were among his classmates. Principal D.B. Knox ‘fashioned his biblical thinking’ and laid the foundation for his long and varied ministry. He plans to dedicate his 20th title, Divine Discontent (due out in March 2004) to the College.

But his obvious passion is for Muslims living in the world’s trouble spots. Leading the Way’s first dual language program was a result of hearing a BBC report in 1995 that said 75 per cent of the Arab world was under the age of 15. A ministry that started as a hobby now broadcasts in 13 Middle Eastern nations with a daily audience of three million. The translator is a respected elder in Egypt’s Presbyterian Church and each message is customised for a non-Western mindset, deleting overtly ‘American’ references. Critiquing the translation is now part of the curriculum for thousands of Middle-Eastern university students.
To date, Leading the Way has received 11,000 letters from people who have either become Christians or started investigating Christianity as a result of the program. They include Muslim shop owners, members of the Indonesian Army, even young men who were going on to study terrorism. Most tell the same story: they tuned into the program to learn English but were amazed to hear the gospel message for the first time. “There is a spiritual hunger,” Dr Youssef says. “We continue to see people put their faith in Jesus Christ. Every single one of the thousands of letters, emails and phone calls says ‘I’ve never read the Bible, I want to read what you said for myself’.”
Bibles continue to flow out of Leading the Way’s headquarters in Atlanta. Yet the aim is not to proselytise their audience. It is more the other way around. “We have received letters from Muslim leaders who are trying to convert us to Islam, telling us how misguided we are and we need to read the Koran,” Dr Youssef says. “But we’ve never really received hostilities because I never mention anything about Islam, anything about Mohammed, anything about the Koran.
“I try and slip it in every second message that I’m not promoting Christianity. [Muslims] have all sorts of fears; to them Christianity is [Western] Christians. Those who try to compare the two faiths, or Mohammed with Jesus, make a terrible mistake.”
While Dr Youssef believes it is worthwhile to educate Christians about the Islamic faith, it should not be the only way we seek to reach our Muslim neighbours. “We need to focus on a passion for the lost, share Christ and let the Holy Spirit do his work in their life. Because after all he’s the one who’s going to convert them – not our knowledge, not our strategy, good as all those things may be.”