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Christ the Answer, Permit Pending

Christ the Answer, Permit Pending

The church is called Christ the Answer. I keep turning the name over, because for nine years the church called Christ the Answer has been waiting for one. Nine years of signatures, identity cards, village office stamps, and recommendation letters. Nine years of doing everything asked of them, and then

Stopped at the Checkpoint: A Pastor's Family Is Taken on the Damasak Road

Stopped at the Checkpoint: A Pastor's Family Is Taken on the Damasak Road

On Saturday, July 18, a commercial vehicle left Maiduguri, the capital of Nigeria's Borno state, heading northwest toward the town of Damasak near the Niger border. Among the passengers were the wife of Pastor Moses Guguma and their three children. She had just been discharged from a hospital

The Man Who Won't Rest

The Man Who Won't Rest

I have been thinking all week about a man who spent 266 days in detention and says that freedom felt disorienting. Pastor Jin Mingri, who goes by Ezra, founded Zion Church in Beijing in 2007. When the government shut its buildings in 2018, the church did not die; it scattered

No One Killed Shama and Shahzad: A Mob of Hundreds, Zero Convictions

No One Killed Shama and Shahzad: A Mob of Hundreds, Zero Convictions

On November 4, 2014, in the town of Kot Radha Kishan in Pakistan's Punjab province, a mob beat a Christian couple named Shahzad Masih and Shama Bibi, then threw them into the brick kiln where they worked and burned them alive. Shama was pregnant. They left three young

Permission to Stand

Permission to Stand

I read Pastor Ezra Jin's op-ed on my phone, in line for coffee, between a weather alert and a text I was avoiding. It took me four minutes. It took him 266 days. Jin spent those days in a Chinese prison cell with the other leaders of

He Baptized 175 People at the River. He Did Not Live to See Monday End.

He Baptized 175 People at the River. He Did Not Live to See Monday End.

On the last Sunday of June, Father Crépin Martial Monga stood at the Mbomou River in Zémio, in the eastern Central African Republic, and baptized 175 people. Most of them, 160, were members of his own parish who had fled their homes because of the fighting. He walked the newly

The Last Family Has Left Iran's Oldest Protestant Church. The Bulldozers May Be Next.

The Last Family Has Left Iran's Oldest Protestant Church. The Bulldozers May Be Next.

St. Peter's Evangelical Church has stood in central Tehran since 1876. American Presbyterian missionaries built it on land granted by a Qajar king. For a century and a half, Armenian and Assyrian Christians worshiped there, ran two schools there, raised children there. In July, the Islamic Republic moved