Before I (Mark) tell the story about this incredible miracle, first I need to set the stage by describing what had been taking place in Ethiopia prior to 1991.  The following information was taken from the Wikipedia article, Derg, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derg and the book, The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat, by Rwszard Kapuscinski:

In September of 1974, Ethiopian Emperor, Haile Selassie, was removed from office in a Coup d’etat. The monarchy was formally abolished in May 1975 and Marxism-Leninism was proclaimed the ideology of the state. Emperor Haile Selassie died on August 22, 1975 and it is commonly believed that Mengistu Haile Mariam, the leader in the Derg, killed him, either ordering it done or by his own hand.

At the time of the Coup, the Coordinating Committee of the Armed Forces, Police, and Territorial Army began to rule Ethiopia from 1974 to 1987. The term Derg was given to this committee. It took power following the ousting of Emperor Haile Selassie I. Soon after it was established, the committee was formally renamed the Provisional Military Administrative Council, but continued to be known popularly as “the Derg”. In 1975, it embraced communism as an ideology; it remained in power until 1987. Between 1975 and 1987, the Derg executed and imprisoned tens of thousands of its opponents without trial.

In 1987 Mengistu Haile Mariam abolished the Derg; however, he established the People’s Democratic Republic of Ethiopia. After years of warfare by a coalition of ethnic-based resistance, Mengistu was overthrown in 1991.

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In December 1991, East Africa Area Director Mike McClaflin invited me to join him on a fact-finding trip to Ethiopia. I had just taken over as the principal of EAST, our Bible school there in Nairobi, and Mike wanted us to check out the possibility of assisting the evangelical churches in establishing a Bible school in Addis Ababa.  Ten leaders from the evangelical churches of the country requested the Assemblies of God mission to come and help them and we were not sure what we would find.

During the seventeen year Derg rule, the evangelical churches were forced from their places of worship and forbidden to meet together. The believers had no other recourse but to take the Church underground. Anyone caught witnessing for Christ was arrested immediately and imprisoned. Believers would meet secretly in homes under the cloak of night. Those seventeen years were a time of severe persecution and oppression for the Church, especially for the Pentecostal believers who were called, Penties for short. In fact, they are still called Penties today.  There were many questions to be asked and answered but the primary one was: What happened to the Church during this time period?

When we arrived in Addis Abba, we met with the leaders of the Evangelical Union. These men represented the evangelical churches of Ethiopia consisting of Baptists, Mennonites, Full Gospel, Lutheran, Finnish, Swedish, and Pentecostals, etc. My initial thought was: What am I doing here? What can I do to assist them? I felt like a young Timothy in the presence of a group of modern day Pauls. Each of these men had been imprisoned for their faith. Some had been imprisoned and tortured more than once. They told about believers who had been put to death because they would not renounce their faith in Jesus.  As I sat there and listened to their stories I was overwhelmed. During this time of horrific persecution, the Church had grown exponentially. Literally hundreds of thousands had become followers of Christ. This was all done through secret house churches, one-on-one witnessing and what could best be described as prison evangelism.

It was hard to take it all in, but two things really stood out to me. The first was listening to how the communist government aggressively attempted to eradicate the Church but how God turned it around and used their evil plots to spread the Gospel. One of their insidious practices was every time they arrested someone, he or she would be placed in a prison located far from their homes. The reason for this was that prisoners were to be fed by their families, but if they were too far away from home, they would eventually starve to death. At least that was their evil plot.

However, the Lord intervened and this wicked plan backfired. Whenever new prisoners arrived at the prison, the Christians in that area would go to the prison and provide food for the ones who did not have family living close enough to feed them.  The believers fed anyone in need whether they were a Christian or not. If the new prisoners happened to be believers, they would encourage them not to give up hope. The new prisoner would become an evangelist at the prison and witness to his fellow prisoners resulting in many coming to faith in Christ.

This happened on a continuous basis throughout the seventeen years. The communist government, which had desperately tried to suppress and oppress the Church, had in reality promoted the spread of the Gospel through the underground Church. Instead of breaking the will of the people, they actually ignited a fire of revival throughout the country.

The second amazing thing was a supernatural move of God that took place all across the country. The various evangelical leaders began to share testimonies of how small groups meeting together during their worship suddenly experienced a supernatural outpouring of the Holy Spirit as on the Day of Pentecost recorded in Acts 2:1-4. One of the leaders from the group made the statement that they were still officially Baptists, Lutherans and Episcopalians, etc., but they were Pentecostal in practice.

There had been no one coaching them, no one telling them what they should or should not do; there were no missionaries, no teachers, no Bible schools—just a sovereign, supernatural move of God that took place across the country. The believers witnessed miracles of healing and deliverance from demons and addictions and the empowerment of the Spirit of God to continue to share the Gospel in house churches, prisons, one-on-one in the streets—taking no thought for their lives, but proclaiming Christ as Lord. It was the Book of Acts being lived out through the Ethiopian believers.

On Sunday we were invited to worship with one of the Ethiopian congregations. With the overthrow of the communist regime, the church properties that had been confiscated during the Derg were returned to their rightful owners. This particular congregation met in a small stone church which seated approximately two hundred people. The military rulers had used the church for an ammunitions depot. When we arrived, we saw firsthand the result of those seventeen years of oppression on just one of the congregations. There were approximately 1500 people there to worship and we had to hold the service outside because the building couldn’t contain all the believers. As you can only imagine, there was incredible joy and outpouring of praise and thankfulness for what God had done. This was an experience I will never forget.

We did eventually start Addis Abba Bible College (ABC) where young men and women study theology to serve the Church as pastors, evangelists, missionaries and teachers. The scripture that comes to my mind when I think of that time is found in Matthew chapter 16 when Jesus said: “…I will build my church and the gates of hell will not overcome it.”

We all know that ultimately, the enemy of the Church is Satan himself and since the day of the Church’s inception, he has used ungodly people and governments to try and wipe out every semblance of Christianity.  He attempted to use the communist regime in Ethiopia to destroy the Church, but God’s plan and purpose would not be thwarted and never will. History proves that persecution actually empowers the Church and spreads the Gospel further and faster than times of peace and prosperity. The Ethiopia miracle is a powerful testimony of how believers “… overcame him [the great dragon—the serpent of old who is called the Devil and Satan] because of the word of their testimony, and they did not love their life even to death” (Revelation 12:9,11).