I want to share with you some notes from some African pastors I’ve interviewed recently who have lived in the center of conflict. Tough stories with amazing silver lining. Now, you will know how to pray for your Christian brothers and sisters in conflict. Please keep in mind these are pastors that lived through tough situations and not all ministry in West Africa is like this. (In other words, I'm safe mom! Don't worry!)

First, there were the Jos pastors.

If you didn’t know, the main city of central Nigeria erupted in riots Thanksgiving weekend over local election results that uprooted tension about everything from tribalism to land rites to M0slims v. Christians. Rioters destroyed homes, businesses, mosques and churches.

Jos has a thriving Baptist community. I had met some of them when I spent January 2007 in Jos, so I called to see how they were doing and wrote a short little story about it for imb.org.

I got Pastor A. on the phone. He was at the hospital with his sick daughter when the riots broke out. They watched dozens of people come in on stretchers. Some were burned. Some had been shot. Others wounded by machetes. He wasn't terribly upset when the hospital asked them to leave to make room for all the injured.

Then, I talked to Pastor M. Since the gunfire calmed and the federal curfew was lifted, he had ventured into the smoldering town to assess the damage to the Baptist Community. He saw at least 5 churches charred, a handful of pastors left homeless and churches mourning members who had been killed in the fight.

People told him in one church, people sent motorcycles into the sanctuary and ignited them like bombs. Another rural church said they sent their women to flee in the mountains while the men hid inside with bows and arrows to scare off any attackers.

The churches that survived are helping out those who didn't fare so well, and our missionaries are also finding ways to help.

Pastor M. himself actually ran into an unruly crowd about to overtake a man … he soon recognized the man as his neighbor, a local M0slim leader. Pastor M. somehow calmed the crowd so they would release him and his family. That's a huge gesture that I'm sure showed everyone around a glimpse of hope for the religious divide. What would I do in that situation? I can only hope I would be brave enough to do the same....

Jos is usually an amiable place where we have a lot of mission teams, and the missionaries expect that things will return to normal and Jos will still be a good jumping off place to take the Gospel to northern unreached regions. Pray it's true!

Then there's Pastor D. in the Ivory Coast.  

His church is in Bouake, the central part of the country where the civil war hit hardest from 2002-2007. His church is actually just a few hundred meters away from where the rebels set up the border to divide the government-controlled south from the rebel-held north. That’s where the soldiers from both sides armed with automatic weapons set up checkpoints for anyone who wants to pass through.

When the war broke out, his church was plundered. Multiple times. They broke down the doors and stole everything. They even pulled the electrical wiring out of the walls and took the light bulbs.

“Through it all, I never had it on authority from God to leave,” he said, determined to serve the faithful Christians who stayed. He stayed. Even though his congregation had dwindled from 250 to 50. Even though his wife was eight months pregnant when fighter planes dropped bombs nearby that shook their home. He stayed.

After years of such strife, the pastor's church still stands. He is amazingly sincerely free of all bitterness and somehow still hopeful.

“I used to teach about having faith,” he said. “Now I can teach from experience because I know what it is to have to live by faith.”

I could write forever about how these men have inspired in me, about their churches, about my shame at how much lesser things have caused my faith to flounder. But I’ll just let their stories speak and praise God for their testimonies.