Caravans of Splendor: Navigating Identity on My Journey with Jesus and Muslim Friends

Caravans of Splendor is a missiological, theological, and practical memoir. The author details cross-cultural experiences that, in conversation with Scripture, challenged his initial resistance to the idea that one born as a Muslim could call themselves a “Muslim follower of Jesus.”

Williams explores Scripture, theology, and sociology in the context of his twenty years living as an evangelical Christian in a Muslim community as he sought to invite his friends and neighbors into faith-filled allegiance to Jesus. He encourages and equips those working in non-Christian environments to lovingly engage and disciple non-Christian friends in such a way as to help them maintain, rather than reject, on-going community relationships and identity.

Williams provides a place to discuss the questions many in cross-cultural Christian work have been forced to ask while transparently exploring his thought processes and decisions on the journey to follow Jesus made in interaction with others. Though there are theories to these issues, he brings the theories into the dynamic realities of human interaction. The theories interplay with thousands of hours on conversation between Williams and Central Asian Muslims in his living room, their homes, the local bazaar, and workplace settings.

J. S. Williams invites readers to join him on a journey to expand their vision. This journey requires removing blinders and being uncomfortable. It may heighten fears and threaten stereotypes. Williams prays that this journey would open up new vistas of possibility, that it would undermine false images of Muslims and especially disciples in Muslim contexts, and that it would expand the readers’s visions for the heights, depth, length, and width of Jesus’s love and glory among all the peoples he created.