Miriam moved from North Africa to a global city in the Middle East in order to find work. She loved living in the city but she was troubled. There was a war going on in her home country and here she was in a middle class job, enjoying life in a prosperous city while she knew people back home who were dying. That didn’t seem fair to Miriam. But what could she do? She felt small, like her life didn’t have any meaning or purpose.

One night, the answer came to her as she slept. She dreamt that a glowing man in white robes entered into her bedroom and gently sat next to her. His face shone like the sun so much that she couldn’t make out his facial features. The whole thing should have been alarming, but somehow she felt a sense of peace about this man. As if the closer she got to Him, the more everything in the world became okay.

“Miriam,” He said. “I can see your heart, and I want to teach you how to live your life.”

The man handed her a mysterious book. “Find this book and it will show you everything you need to know.”

Miriam woke up the next morning and groggily prepared her morning coffee. She sat down on the sofa and startled at what she saw. There, sitting on the coffee table in front of her was the same mysterious book she had seen in her dreams.

She could recognize it by the letters on its spine: B-I-B-L-E.

“What is that book?” she asked her roommate.

“Oh that?” he replied. “That’s just my Bible. I meet at my friend’s house every week with some people here in the city to read it and practice doing what it says. Would you like to join us sometime?”

Miriam ended up getting involved with a house church network led by a DMM practitioner we’ll call Sam. In many of Sam’s house churches they used Waha to facilitate a Discovery Bible Study (DBS). Waha makes starting a DBS super easy. You just have to push play and the app will facilitate the group for you. Within just a couple meetings, Miriam had already started several groups. After a couple months, Miriam got baptized and a bunch of the people in those discovery groups got baptized as well. These groups all decided to identify as house churches, and even reproduced to the second and third generation.

Miriam was so excited about what God was doing that she made a TikTok video about her experiences and shared it online. To her surprise, she found a huge community of other Muslims who were posting videos about meeting a Man in White on TikTok. She started reaching out to them and explaining that the man in the dream is Isa al Mesih, and that people have mistakenly said that His book, the Bible, is for Christians only. But it’s not! It’s actually for anyone who wants to know God. These people asked her how they can know God the way she knows Him, and she tried to teach them how to do a DBS. But, she found it difficult to teach people how to DBS over a messenger app.

That’s when Miriam had a great idea. She just told them to download Waha and go through the Foundational Lesson sets. This made it easy for people online to meet with their real-life friends and families even when Miriam wasn’t present to coach. She eventually gathered everyone from Tiktok into the same Whatsapp group and recorded herself teaching everyone how to download Waha and use it to do a DBS. Over the next year, groups were started in countries all over the Middle East and North Africa. These groups eventually became house churches, and reproduced. Now there are several streams of new DMMs spreading throughout the region.

One day, however, Miriam received a much less exciting message. One of the leaders of a house church in a very closed-access nation had his home raided. She gathered people both online and in person to pray, but in a few days, word came through that the leader was captured and had been killed for his faith. Miriam was devastated. The whole reason she began he search for God was because she was so unsettled by people she loved losing their lives. And now people were dying because of her efforts to love and obey Jesus. Did she miss something? Maybe she wasn’t on the right path after all.

Then one night the Lord gave Miriam another dream. This time, Jesus entered her room in those familiar white robes, but someone else came with Him. She strained her eyes against the light, and when they adjusted she saw that it was the house church leader who had died for his faith. In the same way that Jesus held out a Bible to her in the first dream, this house church leader now held out a bouquet of flowers. “It’s okay, Miriam,” he said. “I’m with the Lord now, it’s all okay. He has promised to be with my family and I am not suffering anymore. Thank you for what you are doing, Miriam. Keep going! Keep going so that my whole country can know!”

As far as we can tell, Miriam is still catalyzing movement across the Middle East and North Africa. One day Sam sat down with her and asked how she does it. How is she so effective in planting and multiplying churches? “It’s simple!” She responded. “I just tell people that the Bible is different from other books. The only way to read and understand it correctly is to do it with a group and put it into practice. If any Muslims ever have any objections I just tell them ‘you haven’t understood the Bible. The only way to understand it is to do it with a group and put it into practice. Come back once you’ve studied the Bible with your family and friends and put it into practice. If you still have objections then, we can talk.’ But, they never come back because them and their family gets baptized.”

Whenever I talk with people about Waha, I love to share this story, because Waha is not the hero. It is just a supporting character in a beautiful story God is telling about Himself. That’s why we created Waha. It’s not meant to replace the people who are engaging with God to catalyze movement in the nations. It’s meant to be a support. It’s meant to remove obstacles so movements can continue doing their work more effectively than before. To explain how Waha does this, I’d like to share a short video about how the app works, and yet another story of it playing a supporting role in movement catalyzation…