A dinner discussion last weekend with an old associate reminded me how I first became aware of him when he and three other young people were imprisoned in Morocco.
The year was 1982. We had sent out summer teams on evangelistic outreaches from the Heidebeek training community where I was leader, to various locations in Europe and North Africa. Paul de Kloe, a 23-year old schoolteacher, had ridden his bike from the Netherlands to join a team in southern Spain to cross over to Morocco. Their plan was to combine a camping holiday with friendship evangelism among locals. Paul and his team mates befriended some locals in their campground in Fez, some of whom seemed to show real interest in the Bible. One evening Paul offered a young man a copy of the Gospel of John.
Early the next morning the team awoke to discover the whole campground surrounded by police, who moved in to arrest the team. Paul and teammate Peter were herded into a cell with criminals crouched around the walls. The two women, Anneke and Joke, also found themselves in a dormitory cell shared with other female inmates.
After two weeks, a Moroccan court sentenced Paul to two years’ imprisonment for distributing Christian literature without authorisation. His tall stature led them to assume (incorrectly) that he was the team leader. The others were released. While Morocco allowed freedom of worship for existing Christians, ‘proselytising’ Muslims was (and remains) highly restricted.
I remember the sleepless nights I had as the Heidebeek leader at the time, firstly thinking about the four in the crowded prison, and then for Paul facing two years in those cramped conditions. After Paul’s parents came to see my wife and me at Heidebeek, his father travelled to Morocco and visited him in prison.
A letter writing campaign was organised appealing to the Dutch government, the embassy and even Queen Beatrix. Her intervention eventually led to Paul’s release after five weeks in prison.
Paul’s imprisonment was not the first YWAM imprisonment story. In 1973, two young women had been imprisoned and threatened with execution in communist Albania, before being unexpectedly released in a dramatic story told in Reona Peterson Joly’s first-hand account, Tomorrow you die.
A year after Paul’s Morocco confinement, several members of a Heidebeek discipleship school on outreach in Lebanon were held hostage at gun-point along with a Swiss doctor, Josianne André. Some local militia probably had tried a ‘fund-raising’ venture as was common there in the mid-eighties, releasing the hostages after three anxious days for family and for us as mission leaders.
One day at a time
In 1998, when I was serving as European director, I received an urgent phone call from our YWAM leader in Rostov-on-Don in Russia. A newly married Swedish couple, both 22 years old, had been walking home from church in Makhachkala, Dagestan, when masked men forced them into a vehicle and drove them into neighbouring Chechnya. Daniel and Paulina Brolin had become the latest hostages in the region’s lucrative kidnapping industry. When I arrived in Stockholm with an international lawyer to talk with family, church leaders and government contacts, they were the second item on the television news.
Their book 165 dagar: Ett kidnappningsdrama (‘165 Days: A Kidnapping Drama’ – only in Swedish) tells a gripping hostage narrative and a testimony of Christian faith under extreme pressure. Daniel and Paulina describe the monotony and terror of living for twenty-three weeks in a dark, mouldy underground cellar. They had almost no daylight, poor sanitation, little food, and constant uncertainty about whether they would be killed. Scripture, prayer, hymns, and memorised Bible verses became their daily nourishment. They learned to survive one day at a time.
The Brolins reflect in their book on forgiveness, trusting God’s justice, and refusing to allow their kidnappers to determine the rest of their lives. In later interviews they have said the experience taught them to treasure every ordinary day and to use their lives more intentionally in God’s service. Daniel and Paulina eventually returned to overseas service—this time in Thailand—with their four children.
Suffering stripped away everything
Last month in Amsterdam I met Els for the first time since her husband Jeff Woodke, an American aid worker with YWAM, had been released after six and a half years in captivity under al-Qaeda-linked extremists in Niger. Jeff and his Dutch wife had devoted more than 25 years to serving some of the poorest communities in Niger, developing schools, water projects and agricultural initiatives.
Then on 14 October 2016, he was abducted by armed jihadists in Abalak, Niger. He was taken across the border into Mali, where he was repeatedly beaten, chained for long periods, deprived of adequate food and medical care, and pressured to renounce his Christian faith and convert to Islam. Yet he clung to hope through prayer, Scripture and the conviction that God had not abandoned him.
After a multinational effort involving the governments of the United States, Niger and France, Woodke was unexpectedly released in March 2023 alongside a French journalist. Reunited with Els and his family, he began the long process of physical, emotional and spiritual recovery.
His forthcoming memoir, All the Way Home, explores how suffering stripped away everything except the essentials of faith, hope and love. Jeff writes candidly about trauma and PTSD, but also about forgiveness, freedom and the sustaining power of God’s faithfulness and the possibility of returning home—not only physically, but spiritually.
The new normal?
For us in the west, such stories are not part of normal church life. But kidnappings and imprisonments are a recurring theme both in the biblical narrative and in church history. Think of Joseph, Jeremiah, Daniel, John the Baptist, Jesus himself and Paul.
Patrick was trafficked as a 16-year old to Ireland where he later returned as as missionary apostle. Jan Hus, Thomas Cranmer, William Tyndale and John Bunyan are among the many who suffered imprisonment and death for the gospel’s sake. As are Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Corrie ten Boom and Richard Wurmbrand last century.
Yet for millions of believers today, arrest, imprisonment, kidnapping, torture and even martyrdom is an ongoing part of ordinary discipleship. Open Doors reports that some 388 million Christians—about one in seven Christians worldwide—live under high, very high, or extreme levels of persecution and discrimination because of their faith.
Seven in ten Christians killed worldwide last year were Nigerians, the epicentre of lethal anti-Christian violence. India has the largest number of Christian detentions, often through the use of anti-conversion laws. Thousands of Indian believers have been arrested or imprisoned following accusations of unlawful evangelism. In countries such as North Korea, Eritrea, Iran, China and parts of Central Asia, many Christians right now have spent years in prison. The greater danger in parts of sub-Saharan Africa, however, is kidnapping or murder rather than formal imprisonment.
Increasingly, the ‘normal’ Christian experience is no longer that of the comfortable Western church but of believers who worship under pressure. The exhortation of Hebrews 13:3 is as relevant today as when penned: “Remember those in prison as if you were together with them in prison.”
Till next week,
