By Gordon Pettie and Charles Gardner
Courage in the face of brutal persecution
Brother, I Have Come to Arrest You
By Dr Berhane Asmelash
I have just finished reading the story of a remarkable man, Dr Berhane Asmelash, an Eritrean who endured imprisonment for Christ.
Fiona Bruce, the former Vice Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for International Freedom of Religion or Belief, who, sadly, lost her seat in July’s election, writes: “This book needed to be written – and needs to be read. The world should know of the suffering and bravery of thousands of Eritreans, barbarically imprisoned, tortured, and killed – simply on account of their beliefs. And to know that this is happening right now, in the third decade of the 21st century.”
“I cannot believe this is my life, these four metal walls, all of us corralled like cattle, the pain, the hunger, the fear”
Conditions for many prisoners of faith in Eritrea are unbelievable. Many – Dr Berhane believes as many as 2,000 – have been held in shipping containers where they bake in the African sun in the day and freeze by night.
One such prisoner was the Christian Gospel singer, Helen Berhane. Of her experience of a freezing winter’s night in an Eritrean shipping container, she wrote:
“A single candle flickers, its flame barely illuminating the darkness. They never burn for more than two hours after the container door is locked: there is not enough oxygen to keep the flame alive.
“Condensation drips from the roof and slides down my cheek, and when it moistens my lips, I taste rust. The air is thick with the ever-present stench of the bucket in the corner, and the smell of close-pressed unwashed bodies.
“I cannot believe this is my life, these four metal walls, all of us corralled like cattle, the pain, the hunger, the fear. All because of my belief in a God who is risen, a God whom I am forbidden (by the authorities) to worship.”
Life was hard for Dr Berhane as a boy. Skinny and weak, he was bullied at school and hated himself. When still in his teens, he was diagnosed with diabetes.
In his early 20s, with Eritrea in the midst of civil war, he committed his life to Christ. From then on all he wanted to do was to talk about Christ.
One day, the Communist cadre in the town sent him, and some other Christians, a letter informing them they were to be executed. They were accused of being CIA spies. Copies of the death sentence were posted around the town.
At the time his small group was studying Daniel chapter 3, the story of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego and the threat of a fiery death that they faced. They read how Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego told the king (Nebuchadnezzar), that they would serve no god but the living God. Despite the Eritrean Communist cadre having a reputation for executing many young people, they stood firm, and saw more and more young people join their Bible study group.
Today Dr Berhane Asmelash has been freed from prison in Eritrea, granted asylum in the UK, is married and runs a ministry called Release Eritrea, which, as the name implies, is seeking to help those still suffering persecution for their faith in Eritrea.
The painful heart-to-heart that turned Hugh Osgood’s life around
Unstoppable Church – Embracing God’s Development Plan
By Hugh Osgood
Malcolm Down Publishing Limited, 2024, 95 pp
Nowhere does Hugh explain the title he has given this book, ‘Unstoppable Church’. When I first saw it, I assumed it referred to the Church on the march around the globe. But when you read the book, Hugh is clearly talking about individuals – who make up the Church – on a constant, unstoppable development in their own Christian walk.
“He described all the things I had been getting wrong”
The Lord has used Hugh in a remarkable way over the years. He has been a successful pastor, and a great influence for good across cities and through missions in different parts of the world. His roles have included the Free Churches President of Churches Together in England and founding President of Churches in Communities International.
What is different about this book is that Hugh takes the reader back to his own beginnings as a Christian, long before all his success in ministry. He uses his personal story – not to brag about his early beginnings – but to illustrate New Testament principles for discipleship and relationships.
When he became a Christian, he was studying dentistry and immediately wanted to switch to theology, but God’s plan was for him to become a dentist and initially work in that field. He wanted to use his work skills overseas on the mission field – but God’s plan was for him to be in south London.
Initially as a young Christian he was part of a house group and considered himself an up and coming ‘travelling speaker’. One day the leader of the house group asked to see him for a heart-to-heart talk.
Hugh describes the conversation: “Then the list began; all the things I had been getting wrong, described one after another as ‘Here’s another nail in your coffin’.”
Hugh writes: “At the end of the conversation, the house group leader said to me, “Your teaching opportunities are put on hold for three months”.
For three months Hugh did nothing, except listen and pray. That one-hour heart-to-heart and the three months after changed his life.
‘Unstoppable Church’ is a good book for leaders as much as those starting out on the Christian life. It teaches principles for walking with God and being in a right relationship with others in the Church. At the end of the book Hugh writes:
“Jesus has been building his Church through the centuries. We see his handiwork throughout the book of Acts… We see it in history… What of today?
“All the ingredients are there. The resurrection life of Jesus is still the same. Let’s make this happen so that today’s world can experience the irresistible momentum of God’s ‘Unstoppable Church’.
A classic biography of the revered Narnia author
C S Lewis – A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet
By Alister McGrath
Hodder & Stoughton, 2013, 431 pp
I am sure (almost) every reader of this review will have read at least one of CS Lewis’s books.
He wrote such classics as ‘Mere Christianity’, ‘The Screwtape letters’, and the children’s classic series, the Narnia chronicles, of which ‘The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’ is probably best known. His books have sold millions of copies and are still popular today.
But how many of us really know the man who wrote the books, Clive Staples Lewis, or CS Lewis as he is usually known?
I came across Alister McGrath’s biography on CS Lewis while browsing in a charity shop. It was first published in 2013 and is still available from good bookshops and online stores, as well as charity shops!
Before McGrath started to write CS Lewis’s story, he read every single book CS Lewis ever wrote. He also read all Lewis’s preserved letters, which are 3,000 pages long!
Finally, McGrath read all the other biographies about CS Lewis, which took 18 months. Only then did he start to write. Thus this is the most thorough biography possible and, I suspect, the most accurate of the many biographies on CS Lewis.
Born in Belfast on 29 November 1898 to a solicitor and a clergyman’s daughter, Lewis was brought up to attend church and say his prayers. All that changed when his mother died of cancer in 1908. His father didn’t cope well with her death and arranged for Clive and his brother to go to boarding school in England. The school had an abusive headmaster, whose harsh regime Lewis described as a “concentration camp”. Aspects of CS Lewis’s early life make for uncomfortable reading. The events of this time convinced Lewis that there was no God and he declared himself an atheist.
As school finished, he passed the entrance exams to Oxford, but World War 1 broke out and he ended up in the trenches in France. In April 1918 he was wounded and brought to hospital, so while recuperating he passed the time by reading, including books by Christians such as GK Chesterton.
Gradually, despite himself, he was drawn in. Lewis would say of this time that it was not so much “him finding Christ”, as “God finding him”. Alister McGrath devotes several chapters to describing how Lewis used all his intellectual powers to try to disprove God.
Immense grief and a period of questioning God
Back at Oxford Lewis completed his degree, joined the university staff and gathered around him a group of friends, some of whom were strong Christians, including JRR Tolkien, who went on to achieve fame through writing the children’s book ‘The Hobbit’ and ‘Lord of the Rings’.
One day in 1931, Lewis and Tolkien drove to Whipsnade Zoo in Bedfordshire. “When we set out”, says Lewis, “I did not believe that Jesus Christ was the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo, I did.”
– how CS Lewis described a trip to Whipsnade with JRR Tolkien
Lewis went on to become a distinguished professor and lecturer at both Oxford and Cambridge universities, but it is his writings which have made him famous and been used to help so many grow in faith.
Those who have seen the poignant film or play, ‘Shadowlands’ know how Lewis met and influenced the work of a Jewish American divorcee, Joy Davidman. He also helped her become a believer in Jesus and they married in 1956. She died from bone cancer in 1960 and a year later Lewis published ‘A Grief Observed’ under a pseudonym. He had drawn on notebooks he kept after his wife’s death that revealed his immense grief and a period of questioning God.
Alister McGrath devotes entire chapters to describing how and why Lewis wrote some of his best known books. The idea for ‘The Screwtape Letters’ came to CS Lewis during a dull sermon at his local Oxford church – Holy Trinity, Headington Quarry.
The idea was born for a senior devil, called Screwtape, to give advice to a junior devil, called Wormwood, on how to be a good tempter.
Lewis described it in a letter to a friend:
“Before the service was over… I was struck by an idea for a book which I think might be both useful and entertaining. It would be called ‘As one Devil to Another’ and would consist of letters from an elderly retired devil to a young devil who has just started work on his first ‘patient’.”
Lewis’s imaginary 31 ‘Screwtape Letters’ became a sensational bestseller. His reputation as a skilled and popular Christian theologian and writer was confirmed and remains to this day.
by Gordon Pettie
Gordon, along with his wife Lorna, is part of the leadership team of Revelation TV, a 24/7 Christian television station that broadcasts in the UK on Sky 581 and Freesat TV 692, and throughout the world via the Roku Box and Apple TV. Gordon’s passion is writing and he is the author of eight books.
One man’s search for truth in a world gone mad
Now Everything Changes
By Steve Maltz
SP Publishing
When a Palestinian flag is discovered flying on top of a remote hill in England’s beautiful Lake District, something is surely amiss.
And it proves the trigger for one man’s search for truth in a world that has seemingly gone mad.
This new book by prolific author Steve Maltz – his 35th – is perhaps his most important yet. He challenges us all, in a most engaging way, to face up to the realities and consequences of the 7 October massacre in Israel.
It’s short and sharp, but not so sweet. For it may offend. The author uses fictional characters Derek and Dawn Courtney, who have little knowledge of the Middle East conflict and certainly no axe to grind, to wake up a sleepy world (and church) to the monster of antisemitism that has stalked the globe for so long and which no-one seems to understand.
Too many have bought into this lie
Steve uses the well-known story of the Christian doctor who was asked by King Frederick the Great of Prussia for irrefutable proof of God’s existence. “The Jews, your Majesty!” was the doctor’s reply. No other nation has been hated so much and yet survived millennia of pogroms and attempted genocide while mighty empires have come and gone.
He deals well with the land, and why it legitimately belongs to the Jews, and to the controversial issue of Palestinian refugees, used as political pawns to justify continued vilification of Israel as a supposed uncaring oppressor instead of being absorbed by their neighbours as Israel has done for Jews expelled from Arab lands. And he outlines how ‘Two-state solutions’ have already been offered on several occasions but rejected by Arabs each time.
The bald truth is that the likes of Hamas have absolutely no intention of peaceful co-existence with the Jews. Their clearly stated goal is to exterminate them. And yet, in our upside-down world, it is Israel, not Hamas, that is accused of genocide.
Too many have bought into this lie which, in the end, has them siding, not just against Israel, but against God himself. It is this aspect that greatly concerns the author, a Messianic Jew (ie follower of Jesus), since much of the Christian Church (at least in the UK) is either ambivalent on the subject or downright antisemitic in practice.
No other nation has been hated so much and yet survived millennia of pogroms and attempted genocide while mighty empires have come and gone
Tragically, the Church has a long history of antisemitism, especially as perpetrators of much Jewish persecution during the Middle Ages. Even the great reformer Martin Luther stained the Gospel message in this way.
As the author concludes: “The fence is creaking. Too many are sitting on it. It’s either one side or the other. You choose.”
By Charles Gardner