Most of Jordan is under 25. Half the country is younger than that. And in a nation of 11 million, the number of true believers is measured in the low thousands. Rakan Milkonian knows what it feels like to be overlooked as a teenager. Bullied. Left out. Now 28, newly married, and part of the SmallCircle Team in Zarqa, he sits with teens one-on-one behind closed doors and does the slow, unglamorous work of listening and disciple-making. Not running programs. Building actual relationships in a culture where everything else feels like another program—school, Instagram, family expectations, even religion. He talks about “hidden persecution”: the quiet pressure that young believers in Jordan deal with every day. You’ll hear about Nidal, who just needed someone to listen, and five years later is leading Bible studies and serving shoulder-to-shoulder with Rakan. Rakan shares about the teens who have been baptized and how they are discipling in slow motion preparing the next generation of leaders in the faith. You'll learn about Jordan's missing generation of men in the church (almost no leaders between 38 and 55) due to a lack of discipleship and the deliberate work of raising the next ones so that gap never happens again. This isn’t a success story with tidy numbers. It’s real people in a hard place choosing presence over performance, one conversation at a time. Here Rakan helps us to understand the deeper work, where “Discipleship is a relationship, not a program.”
Episode transcript: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2534947/19599262-the-hidden-challenges-of-jordan-s-youth-rakan/transcript
Egypt Summit Reel: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DZvjeb6p6iI/
Ep. 10
