Faith on the front lines

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: Today is Wednesday, January 29th.

Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Lindsay Mast.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: peace under fire.

Authorities in South Sudan imposed a nationwide dusk to dawn curfew this month, following clashes in the capital city of Juba.

MAST: The rioters were retaliating after video clips appeared on social media, purportedly with images of Sudanese soldiers to the north killing civilians from South Sudan.

It's another clash in one of the world’s longest running conflicts. It resulted more than a decade ago in mostly Christian South Sudan gaining independence from the larger, predominantly Muslim nation known simply as Sudan.

EICHER: Yet, Islamic raiders still cross the border into the country.

But there’s a group of Christian military chaplains—all of them from South Sudan, all of them armed.

Still, they say they are trying to bring the peace of Christ into the conflict. Today we meet a few of them. Men like this, Lino Emmanuel.

LINO: Yeah, we are preaching.

RAMIREZ: While the bullets are flying?

LINO: Yeah! We pray, and we go. Even bullets are coming, we pray, and we go.

MAST: Patrick Henry College journalism student Clay Ramirez met Emmanuel last fall in South Sudan during a chaplain training conference. And he has this story.

CLAY RAMIREZ: Lino Emmanuel recalls when the original civil war broke out in 1983. The North was attempting to impose Sharia law on the South.

LINO: Our enemy from the North has come to destroy our country. Killing people, killing our mothers, our brothers taking everything, even the cow, they can looting, burning all the house. They want to convert us to be a Muslim.

Many of the chaplains were caught up in the violence of the Sudanese civil war as children in the 80s and 90s. They lived in constant fear of air raids, death, and pain.

DICHIEK: At the time, my father was a soldier, and at that time, he was killed by Arab Muslims. South Sudan and those of Khartoum were fighting. And my mother also died.

Twenty-eight-year-old Emanuel Dichiek has served with the chaplaincy corps for just under a decade. He felt his only path in life was to follow his father’s footsteps and fight.

DICHIEK: Muslims are my enemy up to date. Because they killed my father, my uncles, and many peoples.

It was a vicious cycle. The Islamic North would brutalize the South, and the South would retaliate fiercely. By the time the war ended in 2005, about 2 million people had died.

Wes Bentley is the director of Far Reaching Ministries, the organization that runs the chaplaincy training program. Bentley is a former marine. In the late 1990s, he was serving as a missionary in East Africa. One day, a soldier walked into his camp in South Sudan. The soldier said that Arabs from northern Sudan had killed every single member of his family.

BENTLEY: He said, “We recaptured a village from the Islamic north, and when we did, I captured a pregnant Islamic woman.”

The soldier confessed that he had brutally murdered the woman in revenge.

BENTLEY: And, of course, it was quite shocking to hear. And I had to think for a moment. I said, “All I can tell you is that Jesus Christ offers forgiveness for sin and hope.” And he said, “Will you come and share with my soldiers?” And I said yes.

Bentley started the chaplaincy school in 1998 to teach the Sudanese army and people how to win the spiritual battle—not just the physical war.

AUDIO: [Chaplains singing]

The conference brought about 350 chaplains from their various military posts to the program’s castle base in Nimule. There the chaplains ate well, rested, and heard Bible lessons from American pastors. Despite the African heat, for the chaplains this was like a vacation.

On the front lines their job is to preach, plant churches, and spiritually encourage the troops. But they go into battle fully armed.

BENTLEY: You know we're not there to be soldiers. I went there to be a pastor, but the rebels started coming down and killing all the women and children. So when that happened, I realized that we needed to train these men to be able to defend those who cannot defend themselves and protect those who cannot protect themselves.

For Lino, it was simple.

LINO: If I come to you and I say I am going to kill your father and your brother, your children, are you going to allow it? No. Yes, that is what we are doing.

I spoke with dozens of chaplains at the training conference. Almost all had amazing stories from the battlefield. None of them seemed afraid to die for Christ.

Peter Akesh is a senior chaplain with the South Sudanese army.

AKESH: Jesus can command, “Those are mine, bullet!” And the bullet will obey the voice of the Lord.

He said, “Jesus can command, ‘Those are mine, bullet!’ And the bullet will obey the voice of the Lord.” Once, during a battle, he told me, other soldiers in his unit were talking about how the bullets seemed afraid of the chaplains.

AKESH: And I say, yeah, we are slaves for Jesus Christ…

Akesh told me that one time, a piece of shrapnel wounded his wrist and penetrated his uniform. But it stopped at his clerical garment. One of the soldiers told him, “It’s a good thing your garment and collar are bullet-proof.”

AKESH: And I said to them, Yeah!

After that, all the soldiers wanted Bibles.

The young chaplain Diechiek says he changed his perspective after joining the chaplain corps:

DICHIEK: But for the Muslims that are not Christian--up to now, they are different, they are not in Christ. I tried to forgive them. But when I see my life now, a life without family. It is very pain in my heart to forgive the Muslim. Yeah. But I need to forgive but for the sake of the gospel, I can forgive them.

Many of these men joined back up with their military units shortly after I interviewed them. Out of the 560 chaplains Far Reaching Ministries has trained in the last 25 years, 70 have lost their lives in the service to date.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Clay Ramirez in Nimule, South Sudan.

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