How God Used a Mafia-Man to Build His Church 

Greg and Julie Dye moved halfway around the world to an unreached language group. They may have expected the hurdles of learning a new language and culture, but they could not have predicted how God would establish the first church among a people who had never heard of him.

Eager to learn the local language, Greg and Julie diligently worked to establish connections and build friendships in the community. As Americans living in a city near the Mongolian border, they were impossible to miss.

But none of the people they met were glad to see Americans. 

The Cold War had just ended. Tensions were tight. Their new area of the world had only recently opened to outsiders. Greg and Julie were followed, spit on, and they encountered persistent hostility. Greg was often picked up, interrogated, and then left in the woods to find his way back home. But one man noticed them and was glad to engage in conversation. 

Dava was deaf. Between his ability to speak and write a little, and Greg’s perseverance in the local language, a friendship began.

Because the deaf people in the country spoke a language no one else could understand, the government had been suspicious of them. During the Cold War, they were gathered and sent by train to a remote city far away from the capitol. Signing in public became an illegal activity. As outcasts, they gathered scraps from the garbage to sell and worked the worst jobs available—anything to try to live. 

Greg and Julie knew none of this when they arrived in their new city, but God knew. He sent them to Dava. Dava was eager to teach his language. Greg and Julie, facing incredible opposition learning the local spoken language, began also to learn sign language.

Dava was eager to know all about Greg and Julie. Every morning, he showed up at their little apartment, bounced their toddler around on his shoulders, and worked to teach them his language. 

When Greg had a break from the job that allowed them to stay in the country, he began the meticulous work of putting the gospel narrative that he’d come to share into sign language. When Dava heard about the upcoming story nights, he was excited and promised he’d bring some friends. 

AN UNEXPECTED TWIST

On the first story night, Greg and Julie’s two-room apartment was packed full of deaf people. Those same people filled the tiny apartment every story week, month after month, to watch the telling of the gospel narrative. It was a story they had never been told, beginning at creation and the fall, then moving through the Old Testament. 

Each story left them wondering who would come to save God’s people.

One night, in the sixth month, when the Redeemer had been revealed, Dava stood up, and his larger-than-life presence filled the room. “Okay!” he bellowed. “I believe now.” He gestured to the two rooms of people and said, “You don’t have to keep coming if you don’t want to!” 

Greg and Julie watched the scene, not understanding what was happening. No one moved an inch. Dava turned to them. “I’m part of the deaf mafia,” he confessed. “I only made a friendship with you so that I could rob you. But now, I believe in Jesus.” 

He told Greg and Julie how, for the past six months, he’d threatened to hurt each individual present if they did not come to his American friend’s house once a week to listen to their stories. Knowing he was a murderer and wanted by the police, the deaf people in the apartment had taken his threats seriously. The moment Dava believed in Christ, he freed them from his threat.

Now, 30 years later, Julie tells the rest of the story with joyful but tearful eyes: “The thing is, they didn’t leave. Nearly all of them came back. They became the seed of the first church in that city, a deaf church, that God built as only he could do.” 

Shortly after his conversion, Dava turned himself in to the police. He spent hard years in prison for his crimes. “It was a difficult thing for him,” Julie says, “but he is back in the church and active today.” 

The story does not end there. There is more gospel fruit. That first-generation church now sends missionaries from their congregation into the even more remote areas of the country, to places closed to foreigners. 

It’s a wild story that drips with this truth: God can and will use anything, even the evil intentions of a murderer, to accomplish his will and establish his church. 

Author’s note: Greg and Julie continue working to bring the gospel to the unreached through Global Service International.