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Nigeria, with about 137 million people, has been a modern missionary success story. According to Operation World, a daily missions prayer guide, the share of evangelical Christians in the country has grown from 5.7 percent in 1960 to 23.5 percent in 2000. Anglicans, Baptists, the Evangelical Church of West Africa (ECWA), and other groups all report impressive growth.

But religious clashes have killed an estimated 10,000-plus Christians and Muslims since 1999. Christians here say violence has led to another casualty: the country's robust missions and evangelistic outreach. They say the violence has led to the killing and displacement of Nigerian missionaries and has severely hampered church financial support of their ministries. It has also scarred their spirits.

"Whenever Christians are attacked, their homes are burned, churches [are] destroyed, they are displaced, and they become refugees," Nahor Samaila, director of the Evangelical Missionary Society of ECWA, told CT. "So you cannot talk about the advancement of the gospel in this type of situation."

Ministry is difficult where fear is rampant and forgiveness does not come easily. "We had 12 missionary couples in [the] Yelwa area" in Plateau state, Samaila says. "But because of the religious crises we were forced to relocate out of the area. The reason is because our missionaries are in the remotest parts of the rural areas. Our fear is that Muslim attackers could attack them."

Such fear is justified.

Three major geographic regions have emerged as a result of colonialism—the largely Muslim north, the Christian-majority (but still closely divided) central region, and the strongly Christian south. A patchwork quilt of dozens of ethnic groups and competition to control the country's rich resources further complicate matters. The north is dominated by the Hausa and Fulani peoples, who controlled national politics with a succession of corrupt military dictatorships from 1960 to 1998. The south—which is 70 percent Christian—has escaped the brunt of the violence. While authoritative statistics for Nigeria are impossible to come by, Christians and Muslims exist in roughly equal numbers, with a smaller group following traditional African religions.

In 1999 the election of Olusegun Obasanjo, a former political prisoner and a southern Christian, broke northern dominance over the federal government. It also sparked a challenge by northern governors who sought to implement Islamic law in their respective states. Churches have been pulled down. Christians have been convicted and jailed by Islamic courts.

Most of the recent violence has occurred in the more closely divided central region, where Christian and Muslim missionaries are both active. In Plateau state, thousands of Christians and Muslims have been killed and injured, more than 300 churches have been destroyed, 250,000 people displaced, and $1.25 million spent on relief efforts. The Roman Catholic archbishop of Jos, the state capital, has asked for repentance and a return to God by both Christians and Muslims.

Since September 2001, Muslim militants have taken the religious war out of Jos and into the villages where Christians live. Alexander Lar, president of the Church of Christ in Nigeria, told CT, "Thousands of lives of our members have been destroyed. In Wase area [central Nigeria] alone, 173 churches were completely burned down by the Muslim fanatics. Seven of our pastors were killed. One of them was killed together with the other members of his family—wife and children."

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November 2004, Vol. 48, No. 11