"Rob" - Creation Care and the Kurds

Healthy Gospel Church

Our guest this week is ‘Rob’, who works in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq as a language consultant with the overall goal of helping plant Kurdish churches and get the Bible completed in Northern Kurdish.

Rob has found the Kurds, though they are mainly Muslim and some Yezidi, love the Psalms, and often out of instinct pull out their mobiles to start videoing him when he reads them a Psalm in their heart language! He often proclaims Christ from the book that speaks so movingly of his sufferings and victory, and longs to see Kurdish believers develop more Psalm-singing to help them, in Christ, to make sense of their sufferings and be strengthened with hope.

He shares from the remarkable history of Psalm-singing in the Punjab, 100 years after the death of Shahbaz the poet who put the Psalter into metrical form for the Punjabi churches. Might there be someone in your church who could help collect and annotate Kurdish folk tunes and use them with metrical forms of the Psalms?

He also explores the ethnic identity of the Kurds - one of the largest people groups in the world without a state of their own - who are spread across Turkey, Iraq, Iran & Syria. As inhabitants of the Zagros Mountains, they are descendants of the Medes, who feature in the OT and were at the Day of Pentecost. In troubled times for the Kurds, Rob makes the point that it is not secular nationalism that gives the Kurds a secure future, nor the Western powers who divided up the Middle East after WWI to serve their own interests, but God’s unbreakable covenant with Abraham, which ensures that all nations will receive God’s blessing. God will ensure that the Kurds, along with people of every tribe and language and people and nation, through Christ’s redeeming blood, will be part of his eternal kingdom.

You can watch www.bit.ly/plan4medes to explore this biblical theme further.

If you want to try singing Psalms in English, the Sing Psalms app is a great resource. A list of tunes Rob recommends can be found on tinyURL.com/easyPsalmtunes

Presented by David Meredith

www.generation-mission.org