Confusion to Conviction

In 2005, Ben Childs saw something he would never forget.

While he and his father were visiting his aunt, a math teacher in the United Arab Emirates, 16-year-old Ben looked out at the city of Dubai through his aunt’s apartment window.

“I watched a Muslim truck driver pull over to the side of the expressway in the fading twilight of the day as the traffic of a major urban center whizzed by him,” Ben recalls. “He got out of his truck, put out his prayer rug on the shoulder of this expressway, and he did his namaz [Muslim prayer ritual]. I had never seen that before. I remember that my dad and I prayed for him as we were watching him. We prayed that we would see him in Heaven someday.”

When Ben was 14, Ben’s dad went on sabbatical from his pastorate. “Instead of doing probably what ‘normal’ parents would do, like take their kids to Disney World, my parents took us to rural southern India to work at an orphanage for five weeks,” Ben says. “That was a very transformational trip for me. Up until that trip in 2003, I had never thought about living overseas or doing full-time ministry. I wanted to be a high school history teacher. After that trip, I only wanted to live overseas and do ministry.”

That trip and several others like it set Ben on a path to come to Moody. “I chose Moody because I couldn’t think of a better school to prepare me to do ministry in the Muslim world,” he says.

An unexpected meeting

In 2009 during his junior year at Moody, Ben was eating dinner in the student dining room when he was interrupted by “an underclassman,” he says, rolling his eyes. “I was feeling introverted, annoyed, and in a bad mood.” 

Enter freshman Ellie Kitchen. “It just so happened that the seat across from me was unoccupied,” he says. “She plopped herself down and started talking to me. She was cute and charming, and she seemed interested in asking me serious questions and getting to know me.” The two became good friends and eventually started dating.

Shaken in his faith

When Ben’s missions internship took him to Japan for six weeks between his junior and senior years at Moody, he never dreamed he would return to Chicago, as he puts it, “very shaken in my faith.”

The older couple Ben stayed with in Fukuoka, Japan, had no children living in their home and went to bed early. “As a young college kid, I didn’t go to bed early,” Ben says. “Instead of using my time wisely, I watched YouTube at night and stumbled across a cable access show hosted by an atheist group.”

Over those six weeks, Ben watched dozens of hours of the program. “I was just fascinated at the Christians who would call into the show, and they would just get demolished by the atheist hosts time and time again,” Ben says.

When he arrived back on campus for the start of his senior year, something was wrong. Ben could feel it.

“I never got to the point where I considered walking away from Christianity,” he says, “but I did recognize that I no longer had any epistemological foundation for my faith. It was just faith without any cogent explanation for why that faith was worth holding on to.”

Rebuilding faith, one dinner at a time

Ben didn’t tell many people about his struggle, but he did tell his girlfriend, Ellie. And he told one of his favorite professors, Dr. Kevin Zuber.

“Out of desperation I asked Dr. Zuber if he would just meet with me and answer some questions I had,” Ben recalls. “That ended up turning into a weekly dinner together through my entire senior year at Moody.”

“Students knew they could sit with me and ask anything,” says Dr. Zuber, now the Theology Department chair at The Master’s Seminary in Los Angeles. “I do not think that during my time as a Moody professor I was exceptional in this way; many of us knew we were dealing with adolescents in the process of becoming adults.”

Ben says those weekly dinners were a lifeline for him.

“I would bring any apologetics question I could think of—anything I had heard on that show or that I had questions about personally—to every one of those Monday night dinners,” he says. “Dr. Zuber just slowly rebuilt my faith. He answered my questions. He gave me confidence. And he was winsome in his answers.”

Dr. Zuber was honored to help Ben through his crisis of faith. “I think I saw in Ben a young man who wanted to regain the assurance of his faith, and I just tried to help him with that,” he says. “He did most of the work with—of course—the aid of the Word of God and the Spirit of God.”

As his senior year progressed, Ben grew in both assurance and peace. “I found myself settling down again and having a foundation to stand on for my faith,” he says.

Unique ministry opportunity

Ben completed his undergraduate studies in 2009 and began working on his Master of Arts at Moody Theological Seminary. Ben and Ellie married in December of 2012, just before Ben’s last semester at MTS and Ellie’s final semester at Moody.

In 2013, a unique opportunity took Ben and Ellie Childs to England. “I had the opportunity to become Greg Livingstone’s research assistant,” Ben says. Livingstone was influential in founding the missions organizations Operation Mobilization and Frontiers and also served as the North American director of North Africa Mission.

Three years of research produced a book called The Greatest Toil Ever Storied: Reflections on Early Protestant Mission to Muslims. “The book examines the history of Christian missions to the Arab-speaking Muslim world from the 18th to the 20th century,” he says. “Along the way, Moody—both undergrad and seminary—helped prepare me to do quality, professional research.”

Destination: Pakistan

While in England, Ben and Ellie joined a church-planting team in areas of the UK where large numbers of Pakistani immigrants lived. That focus turned their hearts toward Pakistan.

After years of challenges securing visas, Ben, Ellie, and their two children left for Lahore, Pakistan, in March 2019. Their third child was born just six weeks later, joined by a fourth in 2021. Part of Frontiers, Ben and Ellie focused on language learning, homeschooling, and developing a Bible curriculum for Christian students during their first years in the country.

In 2022, the family returned to the United States for their first home assignment, but their visas were canceled. “I reached out to a friend who happens to be the international director for Operation Mobilization in Pakistan. ‘Can OM give us visas?’ And he said, ‘Yes, we will do that!’ So we joined OM, and that's how we came back here.”

New role, same mission

Currently, Ben serves as a theological educator for the Pakistani church with Operation Mobilization. For the next year or two, he says his main job is to practice and improve his Urdu.

In Pakistan’s population of nearly 240 million people, about 98 percent are Muslim and just over one percent identify as Christians. However, a number of Catholic and Protestant churches operate in the city of Lahore where Ben and Ellie live. “It’s not like other countries where the church is totally underground,” Ben says.

Though the Pakistani church enjoys some semblance of freedom, proselytizing is forbidden and falls under the purview of Pakistan’s blasphemy laws.

“The laws are vague,” Ben says, which adds to the confusion and fear felt by many Christians. “Any perceived or actual offense, slander, or blasphemous words spoken about Islam or Muhammad or the Quran can legally result in imprisonment and even execution. Legal executions—performed by an official government entity—are rare. ‘Lynch-mob’ murders or inter-community ‘honor killings’ are more common.”

Ben and Ellie’s hearts long for the Pakistani church to walk in a faith that stretches beyond the boundaries of fear and restrictions, to know Christ personally and deeply.

“Many in the Pakistani church are unregenerate,” Ben says. “Of those who are regenerate, most have no desire to endanger their lives or their family’s lives by doing evangelism. Evangelism and discipleship are almost fully absent in the Pakistani church. Ellie and I are looking ahead to our lives here, if God allows us to stay for a meaningful amount of time, to see Pakistani churches obey the entirety of the Great Commission, to disciple the nations and to teach the nations.”

Family matters

In early 2024, Ben and Ellie welcomed their fifth child. As a husband and father on the mission field, Ben values what he learned from Dr. Elizabeth Lightbody in a missions class at Moody.

“Dr. Lightbody drilled into us to prioritize family, and that has become a conviction that Ellie and I have had since coming here.”

Ben and Ellie view their ministry focus in concentric circles. “The first and most essential ministry that she and I can have is our relationship to God. The second circle is our marriage. The third circle is our parenting.”

Getting the field ready

As Ben and Ellie focus on the slow process of becoming proficient in Urdu and making inroads toward evangelism and discipleship in the Pakistani church, Ben is reminded of a story he came across during his research for The Greatest Toil Ever Storied book. Robert Bruce, a Scottish missionary to Iranian Muslims in the late 19th century, was asked to report back to his sending church about the progress he was making and the harvest of souls he was reaping.

“Bruce basically responded, ‘I am not reaping the harvest; I scarcely claim to be sowing the seed. I am hardly plowing the soil, but I am gathering the stones. That, too, is missionary work. Let it be supported by loving sympathy and fervent prayer,’” Ben says. “That’s kind of how Ellie and I see ourselves right now. We are the rock removers, getting the field ready for planting so that some future generation can reap a bountiful harvest in Pakistan.”