Last week we told you about Pastor Salah’s church in Algeria. During a Tuesday night worship service, Pastor Salah was telling his congregation the authorities were going to close the church the next day—they were targeted for being “unauthorized.” He expected the police to come the next day to oversee the closure. But instead, at the end of the service, Algerian police burst in, forcibly removing people and beating others before finally sealing up the church.
“[The police] were supposed to come the day after so it was a huge surprise for us to see them coming at that time on that day,” Pastor Salah says. “They asked us to go out from the church building, but we refused to do this. [Because] we refused, they closed and sealed all the doors to the other rooms of the church and then came to us, asking us to go out of the church building. [Again,] we refused.”
Their refusal led to serious consequences. “After we refused to go out of the worship room, they started beating us,” Pastor Salah says. “[When] we saw them using violence against brothers and sisters here at the church, we didn’t want to go forward with our resistance so we [agreed] to go outside the worship room. In the end they sealed the main door that gets to the worship room.”