Between Sept. 20 and Sept. 25, gunmen whom residents identified as Fulani militants struck villages across Barkin Ladi County — Chit, Gassa, Bet, Rakwok, Razat, and Rakung — killing at least 15 people. Among them was Henry Elisha, 22, shot dead near Rakwok village on Monday, Sept. 21, and buried the following day. Five more were killed when gunmen ambushed a vehicle near Rakwok; three died in an attack on Gassa; two were killed in Barkin Ladi town itself; and one more fell near Bethany Christian Academy, an evangelical school on the town's outskirts.
"The continued attacks are causing pain and fear among residents and should not be allowed to continue," said Bulus Dabit, national president of the Mwaghavul Development Association, which represents one of the ethnic communities under assault. Solomon Mwantiri, a lawyer and community leader in Barkin Ladi, confirmed the death tolls village by village as word reached him through the week.
Nigeria recorded 3,490 of the 4,849 Christians killed for their faith worldwide between October 2024 and September 2025, a toll that puts the country seventh on Open Doors' World Watch List of the most dangerous places to live as a Christian. Plateau State, wedged between Nigeria's largely Muslim north and its Christian south, has absorbed a disproportionate share of that violence for years, as herdsmen militias raid farming communities in attacks survivors increasingly describe not as land disputes but as the targeted killing of Christians.
A Road Worth Dying On
Read that list of villages again — Chit, Gassa, Bet, Rakwok, Razat, Rakung — and you are reading a map of ordinary places where ordinary people rose on an ordinary morning to go to church, or tend a field, or drive a road they had driven a hundred times. That a man can be shot dead walking to worship God is the kind of fact that ought to stop a reader cold. It says something about what this present age is willing to do to a life it does not value. And it says something about the courage it takes, still, to walk that road to church anyway.
The gospel never promised the Christian a life free of the grave. It promised something harder to accept and far more sure: that the men with guns can end a life, but they cannot touch the soul inside it.
"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)
Christ did not speak that word to comfortable people. He spoke it to His own disciples as He sent them out to be hated, hunted, and killed for His name, so that they would never trade eternity for safety. The pastor who died on the road to Dorowa Babuje was not defeated when the bullets found him. He was doing exactly what his Lord called him to do, and he arrived exactly where his Lord promised he would arrive.
Most of us reading this will never face a gunman on the road to church. But every one of us faces the same question those Nigerian believers answered again on a Sunday morning: whether the body's safety or the soul's eternity is the thing worth guarding above all else. Scripture is not vague about which one lasts. "Precious in the sight of the LORD is the death of his saints" (Psalm 116:15) — not cheap, not wasted, not forgotten by a God who counts every sparrow that falls.
The church in Plateau State does not need the world's pity nearly so much as it needs the world's prayers. A voice crying from the wilderness has always been easiest to hear where the wilderness is loudest, and few places on earth are crying louder tonight than the villages of Barkin Ladi. Whatever waits on the road ahead for the believers still walking it, the God who numbers the hairs of every head has not lost count of Plateau State.