A country in Central Asia. I have just been to Central Asia. In addition to visiting the Danish European Mission's partners, I also met a pastor whose name I cannot mention for security reasons. He knows what it means to be persecuted and has been seconds away from martyrdom.
I asked him various questions about how Christians are persecuted in the country. When I asked if the persecution takes different forms depending on whether you live in the city or the countryside, he says:
It's easier to be a Christian in the big city. I'm from the village where all the strict Islam believers live. Several times they wanted to kill me. It was quite normal for us - maybe you won't understand. Once I was in our church. The Mujahideen came and said to me: If you are a Tajik and do not return to Islam, we will kill you. They had guns with them.
I said to the congregation: Let us hold hands and pray that we die together. And let us pray that this heaviness will disappear from the land.
The gun did not work
When we were praying, a mujahideen hit me in the stomach and face. I started to say: I forgive you and Jesus, the true God, forgives you. If you kill me, he will love you.
He tried to shoot me two or three times, but none of the times the gun worked. He dropped it and it came apart into several pieces. He said that for the first time in four years it didn't work.
We praised God and went out. They beat me badly and said: If you don't leave the church within a week, we will kill you. Every day after the meetings they came and beat me.
The others in the church said: That's enough, we can't go on. Only my family and I stayed in the church. On Sundays after a week, they came at 2 a.m. and said: This is your last day of life.
Should dig his own grave
If they took my wife and me, we would both die, so I told her to lock the door and I went with them. Usually they took their victims to dumps where the victims had to clear a space for themselves where they could be buried.
I prayed that I could talk about God's love.
Someone wanted to make a joke and held a knife to my throat and said: You're going to die. I said: You will die one day too. He said, 'Don't think you're the smartest person here,' and then he took a stone to kill me with it.
He said: Say your last prayer. I said: You who created the earth and sent Jesus, Jesus I pray for my brothers, guide them to know the truth. Receive my spirit, may my blood not be on their shoulders.
They said: You are crazy. We want to kill you and you bless us? They released me and I went free."
He ends this account by saying: "We do not preach ourselves, but Jesus Christ, and for his sake we serve these people." He quotes 1 Corinthians chapter 4, v. 5: Do not therefore judge before the time, before the Lord comes. He will bring to light what is hidden in darkness and reveal what the heart desires. And then everyone will receive his praise from God.
God didn't want me to die then, because he still has something for me to do.
Fact Check
To check the credibility of this testimony, I spoke to people with intimate knowledge of the church in the country. Of course, they could not confirm the incident itself, as only the pastor and the mujahideen know about it. But the pastor has a good reputation in the country and there is nothing to indicate that this dramatic story is not true.
