MY ACCOUNT
At A Glance:
Ibrahim* and his wife were forced to divorce after turning to faith in Christ and away from their faith as Muslims in North Africa.
- Ibrahim had searched secretly to know the one true God and heard the Gospel on a late-night Christian program on a satellite channel.
- After his wife joined him in his new-found faith and they were baptized, they were forcibly divorced by family and state authorities.
- For 15 hours they interrogated Ibrahim, and he was convicted of blasphemy. He lost marriage and custody rights.
- This assault on Ibrahim’s life and family has not caused him to stay silent about his faith. He shares the Gospel faithfully and has since been helping to start house churches in regions of North Africa where the Gospel has never been heard.
For years, Ibrahim* had been searching for God in the dark.
He returned home one day more exhausted than he’d ever been. He picked up the remote, gripping it so hard that the buttons jammed. The TV channels started flipping, finally landing on a program he’d never seen.
Ibrahim left it tuned there – it was a Christian satellite channel. For the first time in his life, he heard the Gospel preached and he listened. Back then, he didn’t know what it was called, only that he was finally hearing the truth that he’d been searching for, for a very long time.
"In my previous life as a Muslim there was no peace in my heart at all,” Ibrahim says. “My life had no point or purpose. It was a vague life. There was always anxiety, always tension. But the moment I saw that channel, I felt peace. I was in darkness. Then I felt myself in the light. I said to myself: These are the people I was searching for.”
He wrote down a phone number from the screen and called.
"God is the one who placed doubts about Islam in my heart. I was asking myself: How can God legislate these things? But God Himself is the one who guided me to Him."
The Cost of Following Jesus
One of the brothers from the church answered Ibrahim’s call. From then on, he stayed connected with his new friends and grew in his faith.
When his wife began to notice the change come over her husband, she accused him of watching the wrong people. He told her plainly, after weeks of watching, “I am a Christian. Islam is not a divine religion.”
He handed her his Bible.
She didn’t refuse it. Then she started watching the same satellite channels. She turned to Christ as well. Together they were baptized in the sea.
“I was searching for the truth, and on this channel I found the Way, the Truth, and the Life,” Ibrahim said. “I’m not telling you that my life changed suddenly from glory to glory, but every day God was removing something from me and giving me something new.”
The couple’s home became a meeting place. Believers from a neighboring region would come to hear the Word of God and to worship God together. Ibrahim began to post about his faith on Facebook without masking his identity.
That is how his own family discovered he was a Christian. Their rejection and persecution drove him to leave his job and home. Ibrahim and his wife moved to another province where he eked out a living with odd jobs – when he could find them.
Then his wife’s family discovered what had happened and they forced their daughter to choose between keeping her daughters or leaving her husband and their Christian faith. For the good of their daughters, she chose to be with them.
Then Ibrahim was detained. From late night until morning, for 15 hours, he was interrogated. Then he was tried and convicted of blasphemy. His family denounced him. His marriage ended in a court-ordered divorce. His daughters were taken.
‘In persecution there is a blessing’
The Lord did not abandon Ibrahim in any of it. “He put strength in my heart, he put peace in my heart, so that I could face those problems,” he says. “In persecution there is a blessing.”
He calls those hours an opportunity. He was able to testify for Jesus Christ before the officers questioning him. He also shared about his Lord when speaking with family. He became a witness for Jesus Christ to the entire community.
The court’s ruling stripped Ibrahim of marital and custodial rights. His extended family offered him a way back. He’d be reunited with his wife and children – if only he would renounce Christ and return to Islam.
Ibrahim refused.
“It is impossible for a believer who has experienced the Lord in his life to leave, no matter what happens,” he says.
God gave Ibrahim the strength to remain steadfast in the face of such loss, grief, and isolation from all he’d ever known. Now the Lord has used Ibrahim’s faithful life to make Jesus Christ known among many communities in his North African country. He’s helped start numerous house churches in areas where there was no Christian presence at all.
In recent years, through in-person and social media-based evangelism efforts, many young people have come to faith. Ibrahim and his team disciple them online, region by region, training them not just to believe, but to teach others.
He has been allowed to see his daughters again – not in secret anymore, but legally. He and his former wife have not been together since the court severed their marriage, but they still find ways to meet. He has not remarried. He prays for the day his family will return to him.
“We all go through fire. We all go through trials,” Ibrahim says. “But the Lord is always with us – always faithful – the Lord gives us consolation and strength and victory. We come out of those trials in peace.”
Pray for Ibrahim and the secret believers like him across North Africa. Ask God to protect the house churches he is planting in places where the Gospel has never been heard, to give courage to the young people coming to faith through social media, and to one day fully restore Ibrahim’s wife and daughters to him.
*Name changed for security reasons.
Secret Believers When Faith Must Stay Hidden, Hope Must Not
Across the Muslim world, men and women are encountering Jesus in hidden places – through a dream, a late-night search, or a quiet conversation with a local believer. But when someone chooses to follow Christ in secret, the cost of their decision can be immediate: family rejection, social isolation, and real danger.
Learn more about how you can support secret believers and help ensure no follower of Jesus ever stands alone.
