Nigerian church destroyed by Fulani rebuilt with help of American pastor: It brings ‘healing and hope’ By Emily Wood for Christian Post
Five years after Fulani herdsmen destroyed a Nigerian church in a raid that killed hundreds, an American pastor and attorney helped rebuild the church in time for Easter Sunday, which brought “hope and healing in the midst of a very murderous regime.”
New York City Pastor William “P.B.” Devlin, CEO of the nongovernmental organization REDEEM!; and Emmanuel Ogebe, an international human rights lawyer from the U.S.-based Nigeria Law Group, partnered together to help mend the hurting Agatu community in the Benue state of Nigeria.
The two men helped raise funds to rebuild the community’s destroyed Methodist church after a tragedy struck five years ago.
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“Healing and hope: those are two great words that we’ve seen in a very practical way,”
Devlin, the missions pastor at Infinity Bible Church in the Bronx, told The Christian Post in an interview.
Fulani attackers destroyed and burned the Agatu Methodist Church in February 2016. They killed five church members, hundreds of Agatu community members and destroyed over 70 homes.
In October 2020, Devlin visited Agatu and promised the church members that “by faith and by God’s grace and with hope in the Lord Jesus, the church will be completely finished by March 25, and then we will be in the finished church by Resurrection Day Sunday services [on April 4].”
“And we’re going to have a great celebration,” Devlin recalled telling the Agatu community at the time.
When he visited in October, Devlin said there were goats eating grass in the ruins of the church building where worshipers still met under a canopy of grass to protect them from the sun.
“I looked in [the church] and I saw the goats eating the grass, and I was like, ‘what is this?’ And it just touched my heart. …,” he said. “For the past five years, the church has just struggled along.”
