The violence did not end there. On September 3, gunmen struck the neighboring villages of Kinat and Kop-Naanle. Kwopnaan Lot Yunana, 33, was killed in Kinat. Bulus Danladi, 78, was killed in Kop-Naanle. Two days later, on September 5, attackers returned to Mangu County, killing one Christian in the community of Fungtim and two more in Kinat.
Plateau State Governor Caleb Mutfwang visited several of the stricken villages after the killings and called the attacks "barbaric and unacceptable." His words echo a grief that has become familiar across Nigeria's Middle Belt. Of the 4,849 Christians killed worldwide for their faith between October 2024 and September 2025, 3,490 of them - about seventy-two percent - were Nigerian, and Plateau State sits near the center of that toll.
The pattern in these attacks has held for years. Armed men come before daylight, when a farming village is asleep and least able to answer force with force, and they are gone again before soldiers can arrive. Bin-Per, Kinat, Kop-Naanle, and Fungtim are not large places. They are the kind of villages where a man's neighbors can call the dead by name - a farmer, a grandfather, a young husband.
Thirty names in less than a month is not a number a heart can carry lightly, and it should not be dismissed as "unrest" in some far country. Set the arithmetic down for a moment, my friend, and ask a plainer question. What does a man do when he lies down at night in a land where no fence, no government, and no promise of daylight can guarantee that he will see morning?
The Fear That Cannot Touch the Soul
The Lord Jesus Christ answered that question long before Mangu County had a name on any map. He did not promise His followers that harm would never come. He told them plainly that it would - that they would be hated, hunted, and delivered up to death for His name's sake. And in the same breath He told them exactly what a machete or a bullet can and cannot do.
"And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell." (Matthew 10:28)
That is not a comfortable verse, and it was never meant to be comfortable in the way the world means comfort - a warm feeling standing in for a real answer. It is a plain statement of fact from the only Man who ever conquered the grave and came back to tell of it. A body can be cut down in a village in Plateau State. A soul that has been washed in the blood of Jesus Christ cannot be touched by any weapon forged on this earth.
That is why the psalmist could write, centuries before Bin-Per or Kinat ever existed, that "precious in the sight of the LORD is the death of his saints" (Psalm 116:15). Precious - not wasted, not forgotten, not swallowed up in silence. Every believer struck down for the name of Christ falls into hands that were already counting the cost, and had already paid the greater price at Calvary.
None of this excuses the men who ride into a sleeping village with weapons drawn, and it does not lessen the grief of a widow in Kop-Naanle or a mother in Fungtim tonight. Governments carry a God-given duty to restrain evil and protect the defenseless, and Nigeria's leaders bear real responsibility to do exactly that. But the gospel does not wait on governments to make its promise true. It was true the night Bin-Per burned, and it is true tonight, wherever a Christian lies down not knowing if he will rise before the sun does. The body can be taken from a man. The soul, hidden in Christ, cannot.