The pastor reported that his assailants said to him: “We have been following your movements and your evil plans of changing Muslims to Christianity.” And then, “immediately several assailants began hitting me with wooden clubs, and I became unconscious. I woke up and found myself surrounded by neighbors. I was rescued by the neighbors who found me in a pool of blood.”
This kind of vigilante mob violence is aided and abetted by official inaction. The Kenyan government and law enforcement agencies need to move swiftly to safeguard the freedom of conscience and protect these Christians. But as we have seen in so many countries where Christians face persecution, all too often the authorities are indifferent to the plight of the Christians, and sometimes even actively abetting or even initiating the persecution. Please pray for peace and safety for the Christians of Kenya, including its 600,000 Orthodox Christians.
“Pastor of Underground Church in Kenya Beaten Unconscious,” Morning Star News, March 11, 2019:
NAIROBI, Kenya (Morning Star News) – The Somali pastor of an underground church in Kenya near the Somali border suffered a broken thigh bone and other injuries after Muslim extremists beat him with wooden clubs on Friday night (March 8), sources said.
Pastor Abdul (surname withheld for security reasons), a 30-year-old father of three, had finished leading a prayer gathering at 9 p.m. on the outskirts of Garissa and was on his way back to his house when several ethnic Somali Muslims attacked, he told Morning Star News from his hospital bed, still visibly in pain.
Pastor Abdul said he did not know the assailants. As they approached him, he said, one of them told him, “We have been following your movements and your evil plans of changing Muslims to Christianity.”
Leader of an underground church of 30 former Muslims, he clandestinely met with them in smaller groups on varying days for worship, prayer and Bible study, he said.
“Immediately several assailants began hitting me with wooden clubs, and I became unconscious,” Pastor Abdul said. “I woke up and found myself surrounded by neighbors. I was rescued by the neighbors who found me in a pool of blood.”…
Somalis generally believe that all Somalis must be Muslim. Somalia’s constitution establishes Islam as the state religion and prohibits the propagation of any other religion, according to the U.S. State Department. It also requires that laws comply with sharia (Islamic law) principles, with no exceptions in application for non-Muslims.
Somalia is ranked 3rd on Christian support group Open Doors’ 2019 World Watch List of the 50 countries where it is most difficult to be a Christian; Kenya is ranked 40th.
Photo by Adam H T Geelle, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=60533234
