A young man walked in the door of his home after work and started heating up a meal before his planned meeting with friends that evening. While waiting for his dinner to get warm, he flipped on the TV.

 

A man on the screen was saying, “You’re coming back from your work today, and you’re planning to spend the night with your friends, but you want to eat your [meal], and now you’re opening the TV station and you see someone in front of you telling you Jesus loves you.”

 

The young man couldn’t have been more astonished.

 

The man on the TV went on: “What are you going to do with this message? I tell you what you’re going to do. You’re going to say, ‘This is a beautiful message; I have to repent. But not today.’ And you’ll turn off the TV and go out to meet your friends.”

 

Further startled that the man on TV, Ayman Kafrouny, seemed to be reading his thoughts, the young man was afraid to leave the house.

 

He heard that Kafrouny would be headlining a concert nearby in Sydney, Australia, so he went to find him.

 

Kafrouny was a popular secular singer across the Middle East who walked away from his glamorous career – and a drug addiction – when he gave his life to Christ.

 

Now the leader of Nazarene Broadcasting and Communications Ministry (NBCM) in Lebanon, Kafrouny most recently produced 35 episodes of an evangelistic series on MTV Lebanon, a popular Arabic-language station available in the Middle East and other countries.

 

The program, called Kad Oukmel (“It is Finished”), was designed to run in the 7-week fasting period leading up to Easter, from February 29 to April 15. This is the program the young man had found on TV while waiting for his meal to heat up, and which inspired him to seek out Kafrouny at his concert. 

 

The young man approached Kafrouny to tell him what had happened.

 

“How did you know?” he demanded. “I was so afraid, I couldn’t turn off the TV or go out.”

He attended several more of Kafrouny’s concerts in Australia, and during one he gave his heart to Christ.

 

Kafrouny is equally astonished at the story the young man told him.

 

“Every day I hear stories and stories,” he said of the responses pouring in from viewers of Kad Oukmel and his previous Arabic-language series, Aktar Min Kalam (“More Than Words”). “I always say it’s not my timing.”

 

Aktar Min Kalam aired for six seasons on SAT-7, the largest Christian satellite channel in the Middle East, and is now in syndication on Noursat, another Christian station.

 

Kad Oukmel gave the Nazarene denomination more prominence in Lebanon. It also created opportunities for partnering with other Christian organizations.

 

For instance, the Lebanese Baptist Society provided a grant to produce up to 1,000 free CDs that collected the best music from the series. The CDs were distributed to attendees at the closing concert of Kad Oukmel, which was broadcast live on MTV.
 

Although some doors flew open for the project, there was also heavy opposition from some who didn’t want an evangelical program on the station.

 

“We saw many people are so excited to see a Christian TV program on that channel … but it made other people crazy and they wanted to do everything to stop the program,” Kafrouny said. “We suffered with that the whole time, but praise God, at the end, all the episodes were broadcast on air and the feedback was outstanding.”

 

One producer at the station, affected by the outside pressure, insisted just days before the show debuted that every 25-minute episode had to be cut down to 17 minutes. The team worked non-stop over the weekend re-editing all the episodes and managed to deliver them on time.

 

Kafrouny and the NBCM team are praying that God will make it possible to create another such television show next year.

 

“Praise God, the ministry is reaching places we didn’t expect,” he said. “We didn’t expect that one day we might see a program on a TV station like MTV.”

This story appears courtesy of Engage magazine, the global mission magazine of the Church of the Nazarene.