"Although scarcely known by Westerners, the Ethiopian church offers one of the most heroic success stories in Christianity," writes Philip Jenkins in The Next Christendom (Oxford, 2002). Jenkins was thinking, perhaps, of the Ethiopian Orthodox Christians' tenacious survival in the face of Islamic conquest during the Middle Ages. But Ethiopians endured persecution from Europeans too. In 1936, Mussolini's army captured the capital, Addis Ababa, and the following year expelled all Protestant missionaries from the country, including those from the Sudan Interior Mission (SIM). SIM missionaries feared for the fledgling ministry they had started in southern Ethiopia. They had hoped to create an indigenous church that propagated and supported itself. But the work was less than ten years old andstill small and seemingly reliant on the missionaries.

With only 150 members, the church faced an uncertain future and suffered harsh persecution by the Italians, who saw it as potentially subversive. Despite ...

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