The junta accused both men of supporting the Hakha Chinland Defense Force, a local militia formed by ethnic Chin civilians to resist the military government that seized power in a February 2021 coup. Rights monitors have described the killings as extrajudicial. Rev. William is survived by his wife and five children.
This was not the first time the junta had come for Chungcung Baptist Church. Soldiers destroyed and looted the church building in October 2021, months after the coup, and the village has been struck by military raids repeatedly in the years since. Chin State sits along Myanmar's mountainous border with India and is home to one of the most heavily Christian populations in the country, a legacy of nineteenth-century missionary work among the Chin hill peoples. That has made its towns and villages a target twice over in the junta's five-year war against the resistance — for their ethnic identity, and for the churches that anchor them.
A pastor buried under a mountain of paperwork and committee minutes can start to feel like his calling is administrative. Rev. William's death is a hard corrective to that. For twenty-five years he stood in one pulpit, in one hard little village that soldiers kept coming back to burn, and he did not leave. When they finally took him, he did not have the option of pretending it was someone else's fight. He had already spent a quarter century making it plain whose side he was on.
What a shepherd owes his sheep
There is an old, unfashionable word for what happened to Rev. William: martyrdom. The word has gone soft in most American mouths, used for anyone who suffers any inconvenience for any belief. It was not soft for him. He was arrested, held, and put to death by men with guns because he would not stop being a Christian pastor to a Christian village. Scripture does not flinch from naming what that costs, or what it is worth.
"Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." (John 15:13)
Jesus said that the night before He did exactly that. He did not say it as a slogan for other men to live up to. He said it as a description of what He Himself was about to do, and then He did it, on a cross, for people who did not deserve it and could not repay it. Every pastor who has ever stood between his flock and danger — in Chin State, in the first century, in any century — is only walking a road that was cut for him by Someone greater.
My friend, you may never face a soldier at your door. But you will face the same question Rev. William answered every day of those twenty-five years: whether Christ is worth more to you than your own safety, your own comfort, your own plans for how your life was supposed to go. Most of us are never asked to answer it with our lives. We are asked to answer it in smaller ways — a conversation we avoid, a compromise we make because it is easier, a silence we keep because speaking costs something. The pattern is the same pattern, just smaller stakes.
Paul told Timothy that all who live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution, and he was not exaggerating for effect. It has been true in every generation since, and it was true again this June in a Chin village most of the world will never hear of by any other means than a small notice from a research institute. But the same Book that promises the suffering promises the crown at the end of it, and promises that the One who counts it is not fooled by soldiers or paperwork or silence. He knows exactly who stood, and when, and what it cost them.