Pastor Tia was not taken alone. Two of his sons, ages 17 and 20, his 15-year-old nephew, and Daniel Ibrahim Tia, brother of a local Catholic priest, were seized alongside him and released together five days later. Those responsible for both kidnappings are identified as members of a breakaway faction of the Sudan People's Liberation Army-North, an armed group fractured by infighting amid the larger war between Sudan's army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces. No motive or terms for either release have been made public.
The abductions came against a backdrop of deepening danger for the Nuba Mountains' Christian community, which has already buried one of its own this summer at the hands of the same breakaway faction, and which has watched hundreds of families driven from their homes by fighting between rival armed groups in the region.
Speaking to fellow church leaders after his release, Pastor Tia did not dwell on his own ordeal. "The conflict that is taking place in our area is something that does not benefit everybody," he said. The Sudanese Church of Christ has kept holding services in Heiban through it all, one congregation among many in the Nuba Mountains that has worshipped under the gun for more than a decade of on-and-off war between Khartoum and rebel forces based in these hills.
Five Days That Do Not Show Up on a Calendar
A father does not measure the length of five days by the sun. He measures it by the silence in the house, by a boy's empty chair at supper, by every hour stretched out into something closer to a year. That is what sat behind those dates in South Kordofan, and it is exactly the kind of darkness the Bible was written into. The Book is full of captives and full of a God who goes looking for them.
Pastor Tia and Pastor Jana came home. Praise God for that. But you ought to notice something in the way Sudan's Christians keep gathering to worship in a town where armed men can walk in and take a preacher out of his own house. They are not naive about the danger. They simply believe something stronger than the men holding the guns — that the chains this world fastens on a body are not the last word on a man's freedom.
Scripture never pretends earthly captivity is a small thing. It weeps over it. But Scripture also insists there is a bondage deeper than any prison, older than any war — the bondage of sin, which every man and woman carries from birth, whether they feel the weight of it or not. No ransom of money or diplomacy breaks those bands. Only one Deliverer has ever managed it.
"He brought them out of darkness and the shadow of death, and brake their bands in sunder." (Psalm 107:14)
That is not a verse about Sudan. It is older than Sudan, older than any nation on the map today, and it names the business the Lord has always been in — reaching down into the pit and pulling His people out of it. Jesus said the same thing plainer still: "If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed" (John 8:36). Not free for five days. Free indeed — a freedom no rebel faction, no prison door, no dying breath can take back.
You may never see the inside of a cell in Heiban. But you are not free until the Son has made you free, and that offer stands open right now, wherever you are reading this. The men who took Pastor Tia let him go without explanation. The Lord who offers to loose your bands has already explained Himself in full — at a cross, with His own body broken so yours would not have to be.