Nine people were travelling in the minibus. When armed men stopped it on the Barkin Ladi-Bokkos road in Nigeria’s Plateau State, the two passengers they took away were both Christian pastors.
Pastor Hills Emmanuel, a Ghanaian-Nigerian cleric and founder of the Wonderful Grace of God Evangelical Ministry in Bokkos, was travelling with Pastor Gabriel Joseph Dipak of Christ Apostolic Church when their vehicle was stopped on 28 August.
Emmanuel’s body was recovered the following morning.
Dipak remained missing in the latest reports.
Two pastors taken from nine passengers
Reports say nine people were travelling in the commercial minibus. The gunmen allegedly removed Emmanuel and Dipak from the vehicle while allowing the other passengers to leave after taking their phones and money.
Why were the two pastors taken?
We do not yet know.
Witnesses cited in Nigerian reporting identified the attackers as suspected Fulani militants. Some community sources have alleged that Christians were deliberately targeted.
Those claims have not been independently established.
That uncertainty matters.
Christian persecution should not become a label applied automatically whenever a Christian suffers violence. Truth matters too much for that.
But uncertainty should not become an excuse to look away from what actually happened.
A night of violence across Plateau State
Emmanuel’s killing came amid further violence reported across Plateau State that night.
Separate attacks were reported in communities across Riyom, Barkin Ladi and Mangu local government areas. At least four other people were reportedly killed in the wider violence.
Reports linking all of those incidents to the same attackers have not been independently confirmed.
The uncertainty surrounding individual attacks reflects a much larger problem.
Plateau State lies within Nigeria’s Middle Belt, where years of bloodshed have produced bitter arguments about what is happening and why.
Land disputes, competition between farming and herding communities, ethnic tensions, organised criminality, kidnapping and religious hostility can overlap.
Christian communities and organisations have repeatedly argued that the religious dimension is understated and that predominantly Christian communities have endured systematic attacks.
Others caution against reducing a complicated regional conflict to a single religious explanation.
Those arguments matter.
But sometimes the debate over terminology becomes so consuming that the human beings at the centre of it almost disappear.
His name was Hills Emmanuel
Hills Emmanuel was not a statistic in an argument about Nigeria.
He was a pastor.
He had previously served with Dunamis Church and founded the Wonderful Grace of God Evangelical Ministry in Bokkos.
On Friday he was travelling along a road.
By Saturday morning his body had been found.
And somewhere amid all the arguments over whether Nigeria’s violence is best described as religious persecution, farmer-herder conflict, terrorism, ethnic violence or criminal insecurity, another Christian congregation had lost its pastor.
Another family had lost someone they loved.
Another community had another body to bury.
And Pastor Gabriel Joseph Dipak’s family was still waiting for him to come home.
Christians should insist on both truth and attention
There is a temptation when confronted with atrocities to make the evidence say more than it does.
Christians should resist it.
We do not need to exaggerate suffering to make it matter.
If investigators establish that these pastors were selected because of their faith, that should be stated plainly.
If another motive is established, that should be stated just as plainly.
Truth does not become less important when the cause is righteous.
But neither should demands for perfect certainty become a convenient mechanism for ignoring Christians living amid extraordinary violence.
Jesus taught that our neighbour is the person whose suffering is placed before us.
The Good Samaritan did not begin by constructing the perfect geopolitical classification of the attack on the man lying beside the road.
He saw him.
He went to him.
He helped him.
That principle should shape the Christian response to Plateau State.
We should seek the truth about who is committing these attacks and why. We should demand competent policing and protection for vulnerable communities. We should refuse careless accusations against entire ethnic or religious populations.
And we should refuse to allow murdered Christians to become invisible simply because their deaths occur inside a conflict complicated enough for the rest of the world to avert its eyes.
Pastor Hills Emmanuel deserves better than that.
So does Pastor Gabriel Joseph Dipak.
Whatever investigators eventually establish about the men who stopped that minibus, one fact remains painfully simple.
Nine people were travelling in it.
The gunmen took the two pastors.
One of them never came home.