The brutal killing of a pastor and his family has caused the church in Darfur to grow rapidly, it was reported in March.
Pastor Stephen lay asleep at home after a day of open-air evangelistic ministry in one of the slums of Darfur, a mainly Muslim area of Sudan. He had prayed with 56 new believers who made the decision that day, 1 March, to leave Islam and follow Christ.
Masked men
Soon after 1am at night, six Muslim extremists, their faces masked and carrying machetes, broke into the family home, rousing Stephen, his wife and daughters. They asked Stephen why he had continued to preach about Jesus although they had warned him several times to stop. Stephen’s answer was simply to tell them about the Lord.
The furious intruders kicked him, beat him and tried to force him to have sexual relations with his two daughters, aged 21 and 24, but Stephen refused. Then the Islamists tied up the whole family with ropes and began to chop off their limbs until they died. The daughters, Rachel and Priscilla, were the first to be butchered, and then their mother, Beatrice.
Stephen saw it all, and sang throughout ‘Hallelujah Hosanna’, a song much loved in the churches of Darfur. Finally he was beheaded and his hands and legs cut off. All this was seen by another member of the household who had managed to hide in the roof and thus survived.
Converts at the funeral
At the funeral of Pastor Stephen and his family, a Ugandan pastor preached a powerful message that led to another 214 people giving their lives to the Lord Jesus.
Over 450 people came to Christ as a result of his death, and were baptised on Good Friday. By publicly declaring their faith like this, they risk rejection, violence and martyrdom at the hands of their families and the Muslim community.
The killers also burned Pastor Stephen’s church building to the ground, leaving more than 120 people homeless.
The building was used by many women who had been converted and then rejected by their Muslim husbands – they had nowhere else to go. Many of the converts inside were injured and dozens were hospitalised, but by the grace of God none died.
A Sudanese church leader told Barnabas Fund: ‘The killing of Pastor Stephen made the Darfur Church grow very fast… There are 468 new members in the church; that makes a total of 1,368.’
