Update: More anti-Christian attacks in northern Nigeria

Women in Maiduguri, Nigeria, show the fruits of their labor at a 2008 workshop conducted by visiting Christians from the United States, Ghana and Greece. (Photo provided by Healing Hands International)

News of Nigerian minister Adebowale “Debo” Ajagunna’s death follows several reports of anti-Christian violence carried out by militant Islamist groups in the northern part of the West African nation.
(The Nigerian minister, however, was killed in the southwestern, predominantly Christian region of the country in an apparent robbery.)
The Christian Chronicle received many e-mails last week about an attack on a Church of Christ in Nigeria (COCIN) in the northern Nigerian city of Maiduguri. (See our recent coverage of the attack and a recent blog post, both of which explain the difference between the COCIN and the Churches of Christ we cover.)
Churches of Christ (the ones we cover) have a congregation in Maidurguri — the Wulari-Jerusalem Church of Christ. We reported on a team of church members that worked with Christians and Muslims in the arid Nigerian city, teaching food preservation and subsistence farming:

Peace-building is one outcome of the workshops sponsored by Healing Hands International, said David Goolsby, the ministry’s agricultural director.
In 2008 the Wulari-Jerusalem Church of Christ in the northern Nigerian city of Maiduguri hosted a food preservation workshop, attended by Muslims and Christians.
“Muslims saw that Christians also desire to better feed their families,” Goolsby said. “Christians saw that not all Muslims are terrorists.”
The next year, gangs of radical Muslims swept through Maiduguri, burning churches and killing pastors. But the local Muslims protected the church members from the gangs, Goolsby said.

(Coincidentally, one member of the team that traveled to Maiduguri in 2008 to conduct the workshops was Eleni Melirrytos, who worked with Ajagunna, the Nigerian minister killed in the apparent robbery.)
A Nigerian church member, Ebenezer Udofia, served as an agricultural missionary in Maiduguri, working with Healing Hands International. When the city became too dangerous for Udofia and his family, Healing Hands moved them to Nairobi, Kenya, to continue his ministry of teaching farming techniques in the drought-stricken communities of Africa. See our feature on Udofia.

• Feedback
  I pray constantly for the conversion of Muslim. How these misguided people are lead on the road to hell. Oh, Lord God of our savior and your Son Jesus Christ, send your Holy Spirit upon these misled people, and may they hear the Words of Christ and turn to Him for their Salvation.

  Jack Kline

  May, 11 2012