Last week, Emmanuel Nwachukwu showed how families stuck in Sudanese displacement camps are fighting for survival. Today, Nwachukwu describes how Christians press on after the war’s destruction of church communities in Omdurman.
When fighting between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) began in April 2023, Sefain Nagy took shelter at St. George Coptic Orthodox Church in the Masalma area of Omdurman, a city in east central Sudan.
At least 25 other Christians huddled there with Nagy, including 15 orphaned girls ages 10 to 25 already living at the church, several middle-aged women, and six elderly men. At night, the frightened group gathered in the church’s sanctuary to sing hymns and pray. They rarely had enough food to eat or access to drinking water, but a group of young Christian men arranged for low-cost meals from community kitchens, locally called takkiyas, to be delivered to them despite constant shelling.
Then a month later, at about 10:30 p.m., Nagy heard the roar of a car carrying five members of the paramilitary group RSF pulling up to the church. The militia shot at the church’s walls, smashed the front door, and forced their way into the building.
“They asked us, ‘What are you here for?’” Nagy recalled. “I told [them] we had prayer. We were praying.”
The RSF soldiers then beat the Christians, grabbed jewelry from the women, and attempted to take away the orphaned girls. When Nagy resisted them by trying to block them from entering the girls’ rooms and leaving the church, one of the soldiers hit his head from behind with a gun and shot him in the right leg. Then the RSF tried to drive off with the girls in one of the cars parked at the church, but the engine failed.
“Thank God the car wouldn’t start, and they couldn’t take the orphan girls,” Nagy said, adding that they did seize several items of church property including tables and chairs, bowls, light bulbs, and curtains. He said the attack lasted for an hour.
Though churches have served as makeshift shelters for many displaced residents since Sudan’s civil war began, Sudanese Christians don’t consider their sanctuaries safe as battling armies often bomb and occupy them. The fighting has shuttered at least 165 churches, and combatants have used others as military bases, forcing people sheltering there to flee.
Christians are a minority in Sudan—making up an estimated 5 percent of the country’s nearly 50 million people—and have little protection against abuses either by the government-backed SAF or RSF, as the members of both forces come from the majority Muslim population.
In December 2024, the SAF struck a church in the capital city of Khartoum. The strike killed 11 people, including eight children. Then in June 2025, the RSF unleashed a two-day bomb attack on three churches in El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur—the African Inland Church, Roman Catholic Church, and Sudanese Episcopal Church. One month later, a group of extremists, SAF members, and police officers destroyed a Pentecostal church complex in Khartoum.
On the night of the 2023 attack on Nagy’s church, Kirlos Samir, a member of a nearby church, remembers arriving at St. George at 1:00 a.m. He found that five of the elderly men had injuries, including gunshot wounds, and immediately transported them to the hospital.
A week later, RSF also attacked Samir’s church, Marmina Coptic Orthodox Church, about a five-minute drive from St. George, Samir said. The militia destroyed at least three graves in the church’s cemetery, searching for gold and other treasures. Finding none, they looted and destroyed the church. Now the congregation can’t hold services in the building—the RSF damaged everything from the church’s altar and wooden pews to the building’s walls, fences, and parking lot. The soldiers shot up walls, stomped on furniture, and smashed windows with tools.
Samir said that although the incident tested his faith, he felt the power of God: “The war has made my faith like steel—much stronger.”
Today, the cemetery at Marmina Coptic Orthodox Church holds at least two mass graves from the war, according to Samir. One belongs to a Christian family of six, including a three-year-old, who died when a bomb hit their apartment in Omdurman in January 2024. Samir said a church member discovered their bodies.
Samir said 23 Christians lie in the second mass grave, killed by gunshots, bombs, or starvation.
“We have several reasons to leave and run to a safer country,” Samir said. “But church is our home. We can’t leave our home.”
Before the war, more than 2,000 families—with an average of five people per family—worshiped at St. George and Marmina. Now, only 675 families attend a joint weekly service at St. George.
Samir said some congregants died, while others fled to internally displaced persons camps or neighboring countries such as Egypt.
As the war enters its fourth year, Sudanese Christians like Samir and Nagy struggle to piece their lives together. Though Omdurman is peaceful for now, they continue to fear for their safety should the ongoing fighting shift in their direction again. Many carry the trauma of losing Christian friends and neighbors to the conflict.
Still, Nagy said he remains committed to serving the church community in Omdurman by praying, providing counsel and community, and meeting practical needs for food and shelter. He credits local Christians’ survival so far to the strength and unity of the church community, their neighbors, and the power of God.
“We feel God is with us,” he said. “In every low point, when we’re in need, we find God is with us.”
Next week, Emmanuel Nwachukwu will provide the final part in this series showing how Christian families in Sudan are coping with long separations due to the conflict.
The ONE Campaign, a nonprofit group devoted to African development, paid for and organized CT’s trip to Sudan but did not have any control over CT’s coverage.
The post In Sudan’s Brutal War, Churches Can’t Provide Sanctuary appeared first on Christianity Today.
