When people in other countries hear the word church, they picture a building, a physical place with a structure and a sign and specific hours when it is open and all of that.

When I say church, I need you to remove that image from your mind completely and replace it with something much smaller and much more fragile and in its own way much more alive.

Our church was a group of people.

That is all it was.

People who believed the same thing, who met when they could, where they could, as quietly as they could, and who prayed together and read whatever scripture they had access to, and tried to take care of each other.

There was no building, there was no sign, there was no address.

If you asked me where my church was located, I would have told you it was located in the living room of whoever was hosting that week.

And the week after that, it was somewhere else.

This is what Christianity looks like in Afghanistan.

And it has looked this way for a long time.

Long before the Taliban returned, even under the republic, even during the years of relative openness, there was no legal space for an Afghan to be a Christian.

Apostasy, leaving Islam, carried no formal codified state punishment under the republic’s constitution, but it carried enormous social and community consequences that could easily become physical one.

You did not leave Islam publicly in Afghanistan.

You simply did not.

Whatever you wore inside, whatever you believed in the privacy of your own heart and your own home, the outside world saw a Muslim.

So, and you kept it that way.

So the community of Afghan Christians was and remains entirely underground, invisible to most of the country.

And within that invisibility, trying to do the same things any church anywhere does, gather, worship, grow, support each other, while carrying the constant awareness that discovery could end everything.

I need to explain how I found other believers because people always ask this and the answer is never satisfying to people who want a dramatic story.

The truth is that it happened slowly and almost accidentally over a period of about 2 years after I came to faith myself.

The first person I found was a man I will call Hakim.

He was someone I had known slightly through work.

We had over overlapped on a few translation assignments.

For one afternoon, we happened to be waiting together for a meeting that had been delayed and we were talking about something related to the organization.

We were both working with some discussion about resources or logistics.

I don’t even remember exactly.

And somewhere in the conversation, there was a moment, one of those moments that you recognize only afterward, where something he said was slightly off for a Muslim, just slightly, a small thing, a reference he made and then quickly recovered from.

And I felt it the way you feel a particular kind of vibration when you are already tuned to that frequency.

I did nothing with it for several weeks.

Then very carefully in a subsequent conversation.

I said something similarly small, something that was not quite what a Muslim would say, and I washed his face.

What I saw on his face was the same thing I imagine was on mine.

Recognition and behind the recognition, fear.

And behind the fear, relief.

We did not talk openly for weeks after that.

It was a long careful dance, saying a little more each time, watching and listening, making sure we were not misreading each other, making sure this was not a trap.

This is the reality of underground faith.

The people you most want to talk to are also the people you most need to be cautious about because you cannot always tell the difference between a genuine brother and someone who is testing you.

This is not paranoia.

This is the reasonable response to an environment where the wrong conversation can get you killed.

Eventually, over the course of perhaps two months of careful exchanges, Hakeim and I were able to speak plainly with each other.

Or he had come the faith before me through a combination of a Christian radio program that could be received on shortwave and an experience he described briefly and without much detail.

He was a private man.

He had been a believer for about three years by then.

He had never met another Afghan Christian in person.

When we finally sat together and prayed together for the first time in his car, parked in a quiet part of the city, speaking very quietly.

I think both of us were surprised by how much emotion came with it.

Not because anything spectacular happened, just because of what it meant to not be completely alone in this thing.

Over the next year and a half, through equally slow and careful processes, we found others.

one woman who worked in a medical clinic and had come to faith through a Christian international worker while one young man who had grown up in a refugee camp in Pakistan and encountered the faith there a husband and wife separately neither knowing the other had come to faith and the discovering of that fact between them was something the husband Fared described to us later as one of the most extraordinary moments of his life.

Others gradually at our largest, which was sometime in 2019, we were 14 people.

We never all met together at once.

That would have been too obvious.

A gathering of that size in a residential home, even disguised as a social event, carries risk.

We typically met in smaller groups, three, four, five people at a time.

We rotated locations.

We never use phones for yours to communicate details about meetings.

Always in person, always in coded terms, not sophisticated spy codes, just practical things.

want a phrase that meant there would be a gathering this week.

A direction that told you which neighborhood.

The specific address communicated only at the last moment and only directly face to face.

This sounds exhausting and it was.

But after a while it became the rhythm of life.

The way any habit becomes a rhythm.

You stop noticing how much energy the caution costs because it has become simply part of how you move through the world.

The meetings themselves, I want to describe what they were like because I think people on the outside imagine them as either very sad and desperate things or very dramat dramatic and electric things and the reality was something different from both.

They were quiet.

That is the main thing I want to say.

The worship, if we sang at all, was done in very low voices.

Sometimes we only hummed as sometimes we only read the words of the songs to ourselves while someone led in a whisper.

Sound travels in Afghan houses and the walls between apartments are not always thick and the neighbors are close.

Quiet was not a choice we made for spiritual reasons.

It was a survival requirement that over time became its own kind of spiritual discipline.

The prayers were the heart of it.

We would sit sometimes on the floor, sometimes on whatever seating was available and we would pray.

And I will tell you what I noticed about the prayers of people who pray.

Knowing it could cost them everything.

There is no filler in those prayers.

There is no performance.

When you cannot afford to be in that room when every minute of being there is a calculated risk, you do not spend the prayer time saying words that do not mean anything.

You go directly to what matters.

You say the things that are real.

You ask for the things you actually need.

And there is a weight to that, a seriousness to it that I have not always experienced in prayer that costs nothing.

We read scripture together.

We shared whatever we had a cru at times a single printed portion of a gospel photocopied and worn soft from handling passed among us.

At times sections memorized and recited.

We talked about what we read, what it meant for us.

for our lives for the specific and impossible situation of being followers of Christ in this place and this time.

There was no trained theologian among us.

There was no seminary graduate.

There were just ordinary people trying to understand what they believed and why it was worth the cost.

There was also food.

This is something I want to mention because it sounds mundane, but it wasn’t.

Whoever was hosting always made food.

Always.

Even if it was simple.

Even if resources were tight, there was always tea.

And there was always something to eat.

And we always ate together.

And that eating together was its own kind of communion in the oldest and most straightforward sense of that word.

the sharing of a table, the breaking of bread in the most literal possible way with people who had chosen the same costly thing you had chosen and who you therefore trusted with your life.

And there was laughter.

I want to make sure I say this too.

There was real laughter in those meetings.

Not the loud kind, always kept low, but genuine.

Hakeim was Fenny.

One of the women in our group, a woman named Nasarin, had a dry, a fast humor that could catch you off guard at the most serious moments.

We were not only a community of fear and solemnity.

We were also genuinely fond of each other.

We looked forward to each other.

When someone had been unable to come for several weeks, they were missed in a specific and personal way.

This is what people in the comfortable world of visible Christianity sometimes miss when they think about the underground church.

It is not only suffering.

It is also underneath the suffering a particular kind of joy that has been stripped of everything decorative and is left with something surprisingly pure.

Now I need to tell you about telling Mariam.

This was the thing I had been most afraid of for almost 3 years.

In that time I had found a small community of believers.

I had begun reading, learning, praying.

had growing into whatever kind of pastor God was making me into.

Not because I saw that role, but because someone had to lead and somehow I had become the one.

And in all of that time, the person I shared my bed with, the mother of my children, the woman who knew every other part of me, she did not know this.

I am not proud of the years of hiding.

I understand why I did it.

If Mariam had reacted badly, if she had told her family, if she had felt compelled by her conscience or her fear to report what I was, the consequences would have been total and immediate.

I was protecting myself and in my own way protecting her from having to make a terrible choice.

But there was also a part of it that was simply cowardice.

And I will not dress it up into something more honorable than it was.

I told her in the spring of 2018.

We had been married for 11 years.

Our daughters were 9 and six.

I told her one night after the girls were in bed and I had thought about how to do it for weeks and in the end there was no good way to do it.

So I just told her plainly what had happened.

Daud’s death, Daniel, the book, the prayer in the cold bedroom, the years of secret faith, the community I had found.

She was quiet for a long time after I finished.

A long time I could not read her face.

Then she started crying.

Not the anger I had braced for, not the fear, just tears, quiet ones, running down her face while she looked at me.

She told me she had known something was different.

She had not known what it was, but she had felt for years that something in me had changed around the time of Dwood’s death and that I was carrying it alone.

And it had made her sad and sometimes angry.

And now she knew what it was.

We talked for hours that night.

I told her everything.

She asked many questions.

Some of them were confrontational.

How could I know this was true? Was I not afraid? Had I thought about what this meant for the girls? Some of them were genuine curiosity.

What was it like in the meetings? What did we read? Did people like us find this? She did not become a believer that night.

That would be too simple a story.

What happened that night was that the wall between us came down and she agreed to read the New Testament herself, which she did over the following months.

And what happened in her after that was her story to tell, not mine.

But she did come to faith quietly in her own way, in her own time.

And when she did, f something between us deepened in a way that I had not expected was possible.

After 11 years of marriage, we were in it together after that.

All of it.

Then August 2021 came.

I will not spend a long time on the chaos of those weeks because most of the world watched it from the outside and knows the broad shape of it.

The American withdrawal, the Afghan armies collapsed.

Neil, the Taliban sweeping into city after city, the fall of Kabul.

I will just tell you what it was like from the inside.

It was unlike anything I had lived through before and I had lived through a great deal.

There was a particular quality of fear in those days that was different from the ordinary.

Long-term fear we had been managing for years.

That old fear was like a low noise you had learned to live with.

This was something much louder, much faster.

That the sense that everything was changing at a speed you could not keep up with and that the world you had carefully built your hidden life inside was dissolving faster than you could figure out what to do next.

For the underground church, the Taliban’s return meant something very specific.

Everything that had been dangerous under the republic became existential under the new regime.

Apostasy which had been a social and community risk before now carried Taliban law which in practice meant death.

The risk calculation that we had all been living with changed overnight and not in survivable direction.

Members of our small community began making decisions.

One family managed to get to Kabul airport in those first desperate days and eventually got out.

Others went to family members in other provinces lying low going dark cutting all contact for their own protection.

One of our members a young man named Tatarik.

I will tell you about Tariq later because his story is part of mine in in in in a way I cannot avoid.

He went completely silent in the first week of the Taliban’s takeover and we did not hear from him for a long time.

We had a meeting uh the last one where several of us were together.

I’m about 2 weeks after Kabul fell in a house in a neighborhood where we had met several times before.

We sat and we prayed and we talked about what to do.

Some members said we had to stop meeting entirely, perhaps indefinitely.

It was no longer a risk we could calculate in the old way.

The environment had changed too fundamentally.

I listened to all of it and I understood all of it and I could not argue with any of it and at the end of it I said what I said.

How which was that I understood if people needed to step back, that no one should do anything that put their family at risk beyond what they could bear, and that whatever anyone decided, I would not judge them for it.

But for myself, I said I was going to keep meeting with whoever was willing.

Not out of bravado, not out of any particular sense of spiritual heroism, but because I had come too far and paid too much to let fear be the last word.

And because the people in that room, the ones who stayed, the small handful who were still there and still willing, needed somewhere to bring the thing they believed.

and I was not able to take that away from them.

Three people besides Mariam and me continued to meet with me in those final months before my arrest.

The risk was known.

We all knew it.

We met anyway.

In those months, poor meetings were stripped even further down to the essentials.

No food, too much movement in and out of home drew attention.

Very short, very quiet, almost entirely prayer.

We prayed for the people who had left for their safety.

We prayed for Afghanistan.

We prayed for each other.

We prayed for whatever came next.

I do not know how we were found.

I have thought about it many times, turning it over, and I still do not know.

It could have been a neighbor who noticed a pattern over time.

It could have been someone who saw or heard something.

It is also possible that someone in or near our network under pressure or fear said something they did not intend to be harmful or did not fully understand the consequences of.

I do not say this with anger.

Fear does things to people.

I know this better than almost anyone now.

Wait, what I know is that they came on a cold night in December 2021.

Mariam and I had put the girls to bed.

We were sitting together in the main room, not doing anything particular, just sitting.

And the knock on the door came, the knock on the door of an Afghan home late at night in that period.

You knew what that knock was.

It was not a visitor.

It was not your neighbor needing something.

It had a particular quality to it.

A loudness, an assuress that told you everything before you even stood up.

I looked at Mariam.

She looked at me.

There was a lot in that look.

Everything that we had been to each other.

Everything we had walked through together.

everything we both knew about what came next.

It was all in that look and none of it could be said in words.

I stood up and I went to the door.

I already knew the men who took me that night were not dramatic about it.

That is one of the first thing I noticed in the strange calm that comes over you when the thing you have feared for years finally happens.

They were businesslike, efficient.

There were four of them.

Two stayed outside.

Two came in.

They told me to come with them.

They told Mariam to sit down and not make noise.

And they searched the apartment briefly.

quickly going through the shelves and the cupboards, finding nothing because over the years I had learned how and where to keep the few physical things I had connected to my faith.

They took me down the stairs and into a vehicle.

I had time in those few seconds between the moment they told me to come and the moment I walked out the door to look back at Mariam.

She was sitting where they had told her to sit very still with her hands in her lap.

She looked at me.

I looked at her and then I went out the door and the door closed behind me.

And that was the last time I would see her for 54 days.

The drive was not long.

I have tried to trace it in my memory many times and I cannot map it accurately because I was not in a condition to track directions.

It was dark and cold and I was trying to control my breathing and my fear and focusing on streets was not something I had the capacity for.

What I know is that we arrived somewhere in the city, that it was a compound of some kind, that there were lights on the outside and more men inside, and that this was clearly a place being used by Taliban security authorities as a holding and interrogation facility.

It was not a formal government prison.

I want to be precise about this because it matters for understanding the conditions.

Official Taliban detention facilities, as bad as they are, have at least some structure, some chain of command that connects to something larger.

This place was more informal, the kind of facility that the Taliban’s intelligence apparatus operated in those early months in parallel with the official system where the rules were whatever the people running it decided they were and accountability to anything above them was limited.

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