Author: Shalem John

Peculiar Chinedu thought October 10, 2024, would end like any other day—taking the bus home from her administrative job at a law firm in Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Nigeria’s capital region. The skies darkened and threatened rain, people crowded the bus station, and Chinedu decided to take a taxi home. A crowded taxi had one seat left, three of the four back seats taken by two women and a man. A few minutes later, Chinedu heard the male passenger shout, “Down!” She looked up from her phone and into the barrel of a gun. Chinedu remembers him bellowing, “Down!” again…

With helicopters humming overhead and traffic restricted south of Berlin’s Tiergarten, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky’s visit to the German capital transformed the city’s central district into a high-security zone on Wednesday.  Just around the corner, across the street from Germany’s defense ministry, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA) was holding its European Congress on Evangelism, with more than 1,000 pastors and evangelists from 55 countries.  And Franklin Graham, president of the BGEA and the nonprofit Samaritan’s Purse, had a surprise announcement. “Today I had the privilege to meet with President Zelensky and have prayer with him,” he said. “I prayed…

Francis Samaan’s body is in Jordan, but his heart is in Sudan. The third-year theology student sits in a quiet commons area adjacent to the darkened chapel of Jordan Evangelical Theological Seminary (JETS) in Amman, the country’s capital. Though he currently lives and works at the seminary’s imposing limestone campus—filling in for an Egyptian employee who’s traveling—Samaan’s mind is split between his studies and his home country, where civil war has raged since April 2023. Samaan’s wife, Hanaa Kalo, and his six-year-old twins are safe in Egypt—they reached Cairo shortly after war broke out, enduring a harrowing seven-day bus ride from…