Christian Persecution with Judd Saul

And get started here. And then, okay. So, I'm Terry Camersell here on behalf of Creation Fellowship Santee. We're a group of friends bound by our common agreement that the creation account, as told in Genesis, is a true depiction of how God created the world and all life in just six days, several thousand years ago.

We've been meeting on this online platform since May of 2020, and we've been blessed by a wide variety of speakers who have covered topics such as creation science, which is our founding topic that we love, but also other theology topics and current events.

You can find links to most of our past presentations by going to tinyurl .com forward slash CFS archives. That's C like creation, F like fellowship, S like Santee. And while you're there, you can also click on a link to see our upcoming speakers.

You can also email us at creationfellowshipsantee at gmail .com so that you get on our email list. We don't spam, but we do use that email to send you invitations to our upcoming speakers, so that way you won't miss them.

Introducing the Guest and His Work in Nigeria

Tonight, we are on basically an other theology kind of topic. If you have been following us for a while, last year we promoted a documentary called Enemies Within the Church, and Jed Saul is with us tonight.

He was a director of that film, and so that's how we've met him, and we really appreciate the work that he did with that because he helped to communicate to people the consequences of Darwinian evolution thinking and how that has crept into our churches and the ramifications of that.

Tonight, we have him speaking on a different topic. This is about his work with persecuted Christians. He is not just a filmmaker and an entrepreneur, but he's also a missionary. He embarked on a call to action in Nigeria in 2011.

He and his wife, Sherry, have five children, all of whom witnessed the vision unfold when Grandfather Duane Wessels invited Jed to join him on a mission trip. The trip changed Jed's life forever. He realized the stark reality of the risk and sacrifice facing these people, and a burden was placed on his heart for the lost and persecuted Christians in Nigeria.

So, we're excited to hear.

More about that. Jed? Wow, thank you for having me on. It's an honor to be here, and I'll just go ahead and start off with just saying, you know, thank you all for what you do, and this is a very important ministry you guys have going on.

Testimony of Faith, Drift, and Return to God

Let me share a little bit about myself. She said a lot in the bio there, but I'll start off with, I grew up in a Christian home, you know, through my elementary and my younger years and through my teens, and my parents grew up in a Baptist church, and I'd say I was pretty well rooted in the faith, in memorizing scripture, and just kind of had a really good foundation, but some church drama things got in the way.

The pastor had an affair with a college student at the church, and the church blew up and separated, and then we went to another church, and a bunch more drama happened at that church, and by the time I hit my late teens and into my 20s, I pretty much said, you know, I'm done with church for a while, and I went to film school, and for most of my 20s, I'm age 44, I'm 44 years old, and most of my 20s, I just lived a very secular lifestyle, did a lot of, jumped into a lot of different industries with film video production.

I had a stint in the secular music world in the rap industry for about two years, and I was married at the time, got married in 2004, and I was not living my life for the Lord, and the Lord kind of spoke to me and slapped me upside the head, and he said, Judd, I did not put you on this earth to promote sinful activities, sinful lifestyles.

I put you on this earth to glorify me. I put you on this earth to serve me and to do my mission, and so I had a path to choose. It was either go the sinful route, or it was either go to where God called me, and the choice was very clear, and I got on my knees, I repented, I came back to God, got back in the Word, and miraculously, when you get back into the Word, you repent, you start waking up and behaving yourself and obeying God's Word.

All of a sudden, your marriage and life, everything around you gets a lot better, and the Lord just really woke me up to what was going on around me, and when I got out of that sinful lifestyle and that living the worldly mindset, I became aware of what was going on around me politically, and I also became aware of what was going on around me spiritually, and it was just a couple years later where I was building my faith and kind of getting my life back on track.

A missionary came to town. My grandfather, who's an evangelist, was on the board of this particular mission, who had a mission in Nigeria, and the old school missionary, I don't know if some of you are familiar with this kind of thing, but this guy came in with a slide projector.

I'm not talking about a laptop projector and a PowerPoint. I'm talking about the slide projector with photos inside this cartridge, and you click it, and then the pictures show up, and I was just like, okay, he's telling a great story about what's going on in Nigeria, but this is not doing it justice, and so I spoke with my grandfather, and the Lord just kind of said, Judd, you need to go help these guys out.

Go help this mission out. Go help, and so I spoke with my grandfather and said, I need to go help this missionary out. I need to go help you guys out, and so I went to end up going to Nigeria, and my grandfather, knowing how I lived my life in my 20s, was very skeptical of how I would handle Nigeria and handle the stress and the situations of what's going on in Nigeria, and he was pleasantly surprised after the end of the trip, but I put together a mini documentary for that mission, and they doubled their fundraising.

Their donors and donations doubled for that mission, and when I was in Nigeria, I just fell in love with the people. I fell in love with the country, and I just felt the Lord call me to go back to Nigeria, continue helping where I could, but as the years went on, we saw a massive amount of persecution increase.

We saw the brutality of the attacks increase, and I looked around, and I noticed that there were not very many people and or missions responding to this crisis. They weren't really helping persecuted Christians, and the mission I was working with really didn't have an interest in getting involved in helping the persecuted Christians and helping out in this crisis because it was too political.

It might jeopardize what they have going on, all these excuses, and I just couldn't sit back and watch what was happening. Now, I'll try to paint a clear picture of what Christian persecution in Nigeria looks like and what it is.

Radical Islam, Village Attacks, and Internally Displaced People

Radical Islam is coming in from the north, and they are systematically taking over Nigeria, a death by a thousand cuts, little bit by little bit, little village after little village over a course of time, and it has been really been going on very strong for the last 10 years.

They've been at it for a long time with what I would call a cultural jihad, meaning they've moved in, they blend in the community, they have lots of children, they start getting in commerce, but then they start taking over politically, and the areas that they've taken over politically, all of a sudden, they start becoming violent against the Christians, and what I mean violent, I'm talking about your next door neighbor who happened to be Muslim, your neighbors, maybe some of your friends, your children play together.

One night, they are all gone. They've disappeared that evening, and then that evening, they come in along with a whole bunch of others. They come into the village, they burn all the Christian houses down, and they kill anybody that doesn't run fast enough, and that's usually the little children and the elderly are the ones who get killed the most, and they also kill the men who try to stand up and defend their families, but they destroy everything that they owned, including their farms, their crops, anything they had in their houses is all burned to the ground, and then this creates what we call IDP camps, which stands for internally displaced person, and essentially, all the survivors from the area, if you're Christian, you are now forced to move to another location within the country, so you're a refugee within your own country, and if you try going back to your land, try going back to where your home was, there's a high chance that you're going to get killed, because that is now no longer your property, and I just started seeing more and more of this, hearing testimony, meeting survivors of these attacks, and I just simply started asking the questions, what are we doing to help?

Has anybody taught Nigerians basic security awareness training? Has anybody taught them medical response training? Who's responding and helping these people after attacks? And I started asking my fellow brothers in Nigeria, I said, who's teaching you these things?

Has anybody done any of this? And they said, no, no one is helping us, no one is doing this, and I said, well, what if we had an organization that did these things? What would you say to this? And they said, we need it now, we need it yesterday, when can we start?

Equipping the Persecuted: Rapid Response, Security Training, and Truth Nigeria

So that's why a little over three years ago, I started equipping the persecuted, and we are a mission that is dedicated to eliminating the attacks against Christians by radical Muslim jihadis, and also mitigating the damage that is done by these attacks.

And to explain what we do is, I have, we have nine different teams and departments, I'd say nine different ministries underneath our ministry that do various things. One of them is, we have a medical, I'm sorry, we have a response team that responds to these attacks within 48 hours.

So we show up with food, medicine, aid, we assess the situation to find out, okay, what do people need right now? What's needed the most? And if we have the resources, we help where we can, whether it's food, sleeping mats, sending in doctors and medicine.

And many times, what ends up happening is, is we end up paying for the surgeries of the survivors and the wounded. And there was recent attacks that just happened about a month ago, and we paid for the surgeries of 20 survivors to help them recover.

One of which was an eight-month-old girl, Manny, who was strapped to her mother's back, and her mother was running away from the attacks. The mother didn't survive. Manny was shot in the process and managed to survive.

And we got word about the situation right away and said, okay, let's do everything we can to help this kid live. And miraculously, she survived the bullet wound, but she is the only survivor of her family of six from that attack.

And we've been able to help her get placed with a relative, and we are overseeing, making sure that all of her school fees, any kind of needs in her life are being taken care of through the ministry. But that's just one of many examples of how we respond and help with these attacks.

Now, one of the other things is, these are Muslim jihadis. They hate Christians. They really hate Christians, and they're killing them. But one of the first targets is pastors. If you're a pastor in an area that's going to be under attack, you're the first one to get killed, and they're going to make sure your church is destroyed.

We currently support monthly over 200 widows whose husbands were pastors that were killed. And we added 50 to that list just in the last three and a half months because of the attacks that just happened.

Over a thousand have been killed in the last three months in Nigeria. Can I jump in and ask a question?

Sure. I didn't mean, I know, but you didn't seem to mind if I did. No, go ahead. Go ahead. Okay. These attacks, is there like no village board or anything that, you know, you know how we have the National Guard or we have, you know, the Civil Air Patrol?

They have nothing like that?

They have nobody that can fight these people? The government is turning a blind eye and rarely, rarely engages in fighting off the enemy. And what is left is men that have homemade shotguns that try to stand guard, but you're talking about guys with homemade shotguns facing a group of terrorists with AK -47s.

And the police and military essentially are doing nothing to stop these attacks. So on the preventative end, I was going to go into another team that we have. We have a security training team where we are training village security teams.

So it's just local men, local men in the village that want to protect their area. We train them on defense tactics. We train them on how to come up with an evacuation plan, how to save as many lives as possible.

And we also help them with teaching them intelligence gathering, how to know if an attack's coming soon, try to build and tap into intelligence networks to get warning in advance of attacks. And we supply them with radios, bulletproof vests.

We can't get in the weapons part of it. If we do, I get arrested and they shut down our entire mission in Nigeria. But we are doing everything we can legally to help them out. And then that leads us to another ministry, which we have just recently created.

And I'll do a share screen of this. So most people don't know what's going on in Nigeria. And the Nigerian media and press is not documenting 90 of these attacks that occur. And if they do document the attacks, they water down how many are dead.

They don't really tell the truth about what is happening. In fact, I just ran across an article from the Guardian recently that said that attacks are happening in Nigeria because of global warming or climate change, which is a total farce.

But I'm going to share this screen right now. This is a collaboration that we are doing with Nigerian journalists. This is called Truth Nigeria, truthnigeria .com, where we're working with journalists, local Nigerian journalists, and a couple U .S. journalists to document and put out articles on what is happening in Nigeria.

And we started this about three months ago. And we've also been able to broadcast terror alerts. And so far, we are six for six on terror alerts, meaning we put out terror alerts, attacks did occur, when and where we said the terror alerts were going to happen.

And just because of this, we have saved thousands and thousands of lives. And it's an effort that we're continuing to do, but the Lord laid it on our hearts to tell the world about what's happening in Nigeria.

So we did create this journalism side of our ministry, and it has been very, very, very effective. So that's one of the things, other ministries we've done. As far as the IDP camps are concerned, one of the problems is Nigeria, the government doesn't recognize about 70 of the camps that exist, because it's bad.

It's a bad look for them on the international stage. But when a government doesn't recognize an IDP camp, that means the Red Cross, none of the international organizations will help, unless it's a government-recognized entity, or a government-recognized camp.

What is an IDP camp? Internally displaced person. Okay. It's a refugee camp within their own country. So it's just a plot of land, the government said, okay, you've been killed, your village has been taken over, you have nothing left.

Here's a plot of land, here you go, have fun, restart your lives, try to figure out what you're going to do. And these people are literally left with nothing. They don't have any money, they only have the clothes they had on their backs, and that's all they own.

And that's the situation they're put into. Sometimes it's an old school building, and I mean not like the U .S. kind of school building I'm talking about. It has a roof, it has a wall, and it has a dirt floor.

And a place that might be comfortable to sleep six people, there's 30 people sleeping in a room. And the sanitation is just awful. So we have a team that goes into these camps regularly, bringing in doctors and medicine to help treat diseases.

There's typhoid outbreaks, there's tuberculosis, just a lot of sanitation issues. And then if we find out that they're going to be staying in this area for a period of time, that we go in, we drill a well in those areas, so at least they have clean water and it helps with the sanitation.

Another one of our ministries is, there have been camps that have essentially kind of created again like little towns, and they've been there for a while. One of these places, we've built a school for these children, for the children, because they had no education.

They had no teaching, they've had nothing. They had no education for two years until we showed up. But we built a school outside the IDP camp that now serves 300 kids, and our mission pays for everything.

We pay for the books, the clothing, the materials, everything for these 300 kids. And then last year, was it last October, we opened up an orphanage. The Lord laid it on our heart to build an orphanage for kids whose parents have been killed by terrorism.

And we currently have 23 kids in our orphanage. And there's more coming in because of the recent attacks. And we bring in kids a few at a time, over a period of time, so we don't overwhelm the kids that are already there.

So we're taking care of widows and orphans. We are doing everything we can to help the persecuted Christians on the ground. And it's been a blessing to be able to help, because the thing that keeps me coming back to all this is that every time we go into a place, we help people out, they always say the same thing to us.

They say, we thought the world forgot about us. We didn't think anybody cared. You have brought us hope. And then that gives me the opportunity to tell them, this isn't me. This is Jesus Christ. Jesus loves you.

Jesus cares about you. And God sent me to here for you. And we've seen many people come to know Christ because we are simply practicing what we call Gospel 101, which is you see the needs of the people, you help fulfill those needs, and then you bring the gospel along with those needs.

And people are very, very receptive to it. And we've even seen Muslims come to know Christ because of the love that we have demonstrated on the ground there in Nigeria. And we can get caught up in a lot of theological discussions and a lot of crazy things.

We have first world problems here in the US. But one of the things I notice in Nigeria is that Boko Haram and the terrorists do not discriminate on your denomination, what version of the Bible you read, if they find out your Bible believing Christian, or if you just even claim to be Christian, they don't hesitate to kill you and ruin your life.

And it's a real authentic Christianity on the ground in Nigeria. And it has strengthened me in my faith. It puts my faith to shame. Because these guys get up every day, relying on the Lord for their food and how they're going to live.

And they still praise and worship and glorify him. And they have none of the luxuries we have here in the US. So the Lord led me to go there, spoke to me, and I just went, and I haven't looked back since.

And, you know, I'm known for...

How often do you go?

I go three to four times a year.

And then how long do you stay?

Between two and four weeks each time.

Thank you.

And we have a staff of 40 on the ground out there.

And are there full time?

They're there full time. You know, infrastructure, doing our emergency response, our education. And we also have a pastor's network that we've developed. We call it the Cornerstone Pastors Network. And we work with pastors specifically in these hard hit regions and areas and have a network.

So if they need some support, if their church has been destroyed and they need Bibles, they need some supplies or rebuilding materials, any of that kind of stuff, we are there to support them. And we hold a pastor's conference every month in Nigeria.

I'm not every month, every year in Nigeria around March. And we have about 500 that show up and we bless them. We teach them, encourage them. And that has really helped the pastors out. But it's also helped our response ability, our response timeout, because now we're working with pastors all over these areas.

So when there's a need, when there's an attack, we find out very quickly and we're able to respond quickly. That's the thing I really like about our mission and how we're doing things is because when an emergency occurs, we don't wait a month to try to fix it.

We try to get there and get it done as quick as possible, as long as we have our resources. And my website, I'll put that up and I'll just do a share screen here for that. It's equippingthepersecuted .org.

Let me get it up here.

Hold on, let's see if...

Yeah, it helps if we can see it.

Yeah, I'm getting there.

No, no, I'm just saying, and I was going to type it. Terry, can you type it into the chat? I have a bunch of questions I want to ask in my chat box, so I don't want to hit enter and put anything else in there.

So this is our website. You can check out all the stuff we're doing. And then you can look us up on social media on Facebook, facebook .com slash equippingthepersecuted. And see, we update more on social media than we do the website with videos of what's going on and all that happening.

And you can look up more information about us on equippingthepersecuted. And I asked...

And if we want to donate, show us where you donate and what kind of funding do you take?

You can go right here to donate. Join the cause, click and then click the donate after donate. And I just want to show some pictures here.

Okay.

See this picture right here to the left?

Yes.

This is a picture of an IDP camp. They have makeshift tents made out of garbage bags and broken mosquito nets. And there are currently 5 ,500 people in this camp. It's one of the worst camps that I've witnessed or never seen.

And we are currently putting in money to build permanent structures and get them out of these tents in this area. So slowly but surely, we're going through and trying to get them into permanent structures and get them a better sanitary conditions.

I'm looking a little... Do you have any other pictures? I mean, this is hard enough to see, but look, they're smiling.

Yeah, down here. These are doctors and our medical team doing an intervention out there. So they're saying, just kind of smiling, saying hi with all their medicine. And then over here is one of our security awareness trainings with some of the folks.

And we do trainings every month with people and get them radios and supplies and things like that. Here's...

But you can't provide them any kind of weapon.

No, I can't provide them weapons. And so I'll show you here. So protective vests, we have locally sourced bulletproof vests that are tested out. And so we provide several of our guys with bulletproof vests.

That we can provide them with as long as they're locally sourced. I can't import them in, but we can get them there. And here's a picture of me down here. So these are village security guys. And if you can see what they're holding, they're holding homemade shotguns.

Yeah, I was looking at that. That's ingenious that they can come up with that. I own a lot of firearms.

Yeah, I do as well. But I'll tell you this. I would not want to pull the trigger on one of those because I'd be afraid it'd blow up in my hand.

Right.

I mean, it is very homemade and rudimentary. Like straight out of homemade 1700s looking kind of gun. But they function, they do work. But that's what they arm themselves with. So you can check out more of our stuff.

And like I said, go to our Facebook page and see videos and pictures and things like that we post up. But this is our mission and this is what we do. And I did this because there's a lot of people and a lot of ministries that talk about the problem.

And they raise money only to talk about the problem. They're not actually on the ground doing anything to help persecuted Christians. And so I looked around, I looked at other ministries. And before I started this, I go, what are people actually doing?

And we came up empty. So that's why I started this.

Funding the Orphanage and the Call to Obedience

So can I go ahead with some of my questions?

Yeah, go ahead. Ask away.

OK.

I had some of them. I was formulating some questions. But then you were talking and I was listening and I forgot some of them. But OK, so with what funds did you build the orphanage?

I'm glad you asked that question. So we came across the land and the Lord laid it on our heart. He said, I want you to build an orphanage. And I'm like, God, I don't have the money to build an orphanage.

I do not have the resources to do this. But we bought the land. We had enough to buy the land and kind of put in a skeleton of a structure, just I mean, just kind of like drawing it out in the dirt. And a few, no, it was about a month later.

And I've been praying, praying a lot about it. I get a call from a guy who I've never met before that heard about our mission and heard through an email or somebody else that we are looking to build an orphanage.

And he goes, I have just sold my business for a lot of money. I'm doing very well, but the Lord told me I need to put aside funds for his kingdom. And I heard about what you're doing. And he asked me what I needed for the orphanage, how much I needed.

And I didn't know. I was just like, OK, well, he goes, well, I'm sending you a check in the mail. And I said. For the whole thing, he goes, yeah, it's in the mail. I'm like, you got to be kidding me.

Did it really come?

Yep, the check came, came in the mail, and that's what funded our entire orphanage building.

Well, praise God, that's amazing.

It was a pure God thing.

I have done missions in Mexico, and I don't mean along the coast like Rosarito. I'm talking way down at the border of Guatemala, where we stayed and nailed together shacks. And people were just happy to have Bibles.

And so I think that's wonderful that there are people willing to cover those costs.

He was being obedient and I was being obedient. I didn't have the funds to build an orphanage, and we barely had the funds to buy the land, but we bought the land. And it came together. It's the Lord working.

But that's how the Lord works. If you're obedient, you're listening. He'll lead you to do things you never dreamed possible, which is how I ended up in Nigeria. Because I never thought 15 years ago I would be in Nigeria, that I would be doing a mission in Nigeria.

But here I am.

Christian Faith Under Threat and the Demographic Shift in Nigeria

We have some more questions coming in.

Yes.

I'll get to yours, Bill, in just a minute. I had quite a few. What do the Nigerian Christians say about their faith? Do they say why they reject Islam? Do they, I mean, obviously they could live better lives if they would submit to Allah or whatever his name is, Muhammad.

Do they say that they know the Lord? Or I guess I'm just trying to get an idea of, because here it's easy for us to say we're Christian, and it's not a problem.

Many, many, many Christians, some in some areas have gone to Islam because it's either that or be killed. Some have. But many of them, many Christians refuse, refuse to bow to Islam. And they're willing to die for their faith.

That is what I was wondering.

They know the attacks are coming. They know just by being a Christian or showing up to church one day can get them killed, but they still do it.

And I had heard that. And but I also heard that, you know, that's how Islam grows is because they do it, you know, by intimidation. Nobody becomes, you know, an Islamist because it's such a wonderful faith.

Correct.

Yeah, it's bad. I mean, it's really bad. But the Christians there have resolved. And like I said, they really are true Christians.

Yeah, you'd have to be. Definitely.

They depend on their faith for where their next meal is going to come from. They rely on God for everything. And they do it with a joyful heart.

Amazing.

Is one of the questions in, sorry, I'm not done yet. But on the same topic, before we move on to another question with the Islam, how is all of Nigeria Islamic or is it certain parts?

Nigeria was majority Christian up until about 30, 40 years ago. And then what you saw happen is the Muslims came in from the north, started having lots and lots and lots of kids and coming in over the border, very porous border and moving in, moving in, moving in, and then slowly, systematically taking it over.

And now that they've reached threshold political with 50 population and political power, now they're going violent. Because they have the numbers and the politics.

Well, and that's their MO. That's their modus operandi. OK, so thank you, Terry. Sorry about that. And then my other last question here is kind of a combined question. The staff of 40 on the ground. So this is a couple parts here.

Are they paid? Are their lives in danger? How do they eat or survive?

Yes, yes, and yes, they are. They are paid. They are in danger. They risk their lives to do the work out there. And we get we we we pay them, but we also have a have a policy that they also need to have some sort of side business and side income.

So they're not solely just reliant on what we provide and support. OK, plus it also plus it also emboldens them, you know, economically and gives them a little more ingenuity. But we but because of that policy, I mean, they're very, very hardworking, very loyal, but they're also not solely dependent on us.

So if something happens, our mission and we go to the wayside, they have something fall back on.

Do they raise raise support like from their home churches or anything like full time missionaries?

No, they they try. They don't get paid by their churches to do what they do. They do try to raise support locally for what we're doing. But it's not very much. It's really not very much that comes from the Nigerian community.

I mean, we're talking about an impoverished nation where the average Nigerian makes less than one hundred dollars a month.

Oh, so these are Nigerians that are on your stuff like I was.

Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no. These are Nigerians, Nigerians, Nigerians that are on staff. The only non-Nigerian staff is myself and a couple of assistants.

That's it.

Oh, well, that's kind of cool because you're raising them up. I mean, you're empowering them to work and stuff. So that is that is cool. And and so I think maybe my my computer crashed in the middle of this.

So I might have missed a couple of things. And I know Robin was asking a little bit, too. But but what what is it about the camps that what that did you call them?

I .D .D. is that I .D .P. internally I internally displaced person.

So what is it about the I .D .P. camps versus the original villages that's safer? Like like will they come in? And even with the schools, like you said, 300 kids in the schools like like are these more protected because of the work that you're doing with your preventive work or what?

So for all of our operations, we have paid security. So we contract with secure. We contract with security forces. We're able to hire out like actual people with guns, people with guns, people with with AK -47s that guard our orphanage and guard our schools.

And by having that presence there that keeps that that keeps people away from what we're doing. And if and if if they do attack one of our institutions and facilities, that is going to create a major stir internationally for coming after what we're doing.

So our where we're at in our instance, like our like our our school and our orphanage in our compound area is fairly protected because it's kind of like, OK, don't mess with them because that'll cause more trouble for us later.

Interesting.

Especially with the local politicians and the governors in the area that in the areas that we're in, we've had these conversations.

So, yeah, because you guys are providing relief aid. So it's a little more protected.

Right, right.

We're a little more protected because we're actually making the local politicians look good because somebody is doing something to help the people that are getting, you know, that are getting attacked.

And so they can essentially they look the other way on the attacks, but they get less pressure and everything because they will sometimes take credit for what we're doing, which we don't like. But as long as they keep people out of our hair, that's better.

Oh, I'm going to show. I'm going to show a couple of pictures here on the screen. Keep asking questions.