Reader’s discretion advised: this article includes some disturbing descriptions of war conflict and violence.
WAR AND SUFFERING IN THE CONGO
In 1964, when I was about 8 years old, the “Simba” rebellion erupted in the eastern part of Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Like many other people in some parts of the world, I experienced the turmoil of hearing the thunder of bombs and gunfire. Whenever the sounds of gunfire rang in the air, everybody ran to the river. We were told that any bomb would lose its killing power when it touched the surface of the river. For this reason, whenever people ran away from their villages into the jungle, shelters were always built alongside rivers. I witnessed the horrible death of people around me. The rebels would round up people to witness the cruel and brutal killing of anybody accused of working with the expatriates in any sector of society. They would make people sing, wave palm tree branches, and chant some slogans before they gunned down the victim.
At the sound of gunshots in the proximity of our village, I ran away to the jungle with my elder brother without our parents. This happened when a few rebels unexpectedly launched an attack on the mission station. This prompted everybody to run for their lives. Astonishingly, after a few days, my elder brother and I reunited with our parents in the jungle.
During that moment of trembling, I experienced what it is like to lose all of your belongings during a violent crisis. The attack was unexpected, and there was no time to grab anything. Since we faced death daily from many angles, I got confused about what was going on. I got scared to death when we had to hide under the trees all night, hearing the strange sounds of nocturnal birds and animals—including lions. The thick equatorial forest is full of all kinds of snakes and wild animals. Snakes doze on branches of the trees and under the dried multicolor leaves on the forest floor. With all this running through our minds, it was depressing and impossible to close our eyes even for a moment’s rest.
It was an unforgettable experience to be in the jungle without shelter during rainfall. I recall a time when our whole family ran away from rebels on Christmas Day. In general, it is unusual to have precipitation in December, which is a dry season in the country. Surprisingly, on that Christmas Day, there was rain before we were able to make a quick shelter. Like birds or animals, we stood under a tree without umbrellas, waiting for the rain to stop. I was sad seeing the little ones or babies crying without help. I don’t even know how we managed to use the same clothing every day and sleep overnight without blankets. Mosquito bites became a part of life. Their noisy buzzing in our ears at night stopped short any opportunity to sleep. Leaves of any trees served as beds and clothing.
One day, on the approach of the rebels to where we were hiding, we started running without my elder brother. My father left the rest of the large family to look for my elder brother who was left behind by himself. We stayed under a baobab tree weeping and praying. My father accomplished his rescue mission and brought my elder brother without being caught in the gunfire. The endless marching throughout the jungle and hiding from the rebels worsened from day to day. We did not know where we were going. But the most important thing was to keep moving as far away as possible from the killers.
Despite the suffering, we learned to overcome many challenges. We made clothes and soap from specific woods. The soap allowed us to take baths in the river and wash clothing. Boys had to choose a part of the river to wash clothes because we had to stay naked for a few hours while waiting for the clothes to dry. Hunger became the routine survival pattern in the dense tropical forest of the northeastern part of the Congo. We fished, hunted animals, collected edible fruits, and dug some roots for food. We caught birds and made traps to catch small animals to ensure we had something to eat by the end of the day. We learned to make fire without matches. This was critical because fire was used to make food using traditional clay pots. We drank clean water from specific tree branches and also from any river.
After one year of wandering through the jungle, we started seeing numerous war planes fly over areas where we were hiding. Being cut off from the rest of the world, we did not fully understand the reason for this. However, that pointed to hope for help from an external source. It also indicated the possibility of having other forces deployed to end the rebellion. After a period, people on those planes started throwing down messages calling the civilians to return home.
This unrest in the rainforest lasted two years during the deadly conflicts of the “Simba” rebellion in the Democratic Republic of Congo, from 1964–1966. By God’s grace, nobody died from malaria or other deadly infections during that unforgettable, agonizing, and tragic time. Nobody was attacked by a wild beast or bitten by vipers or other deadly poisonous serpents.
Throughout that time, we did not have access to counseling, not to mention biblical counseling. Providentially, our parents grabbed only two important books when we fled our village, the Bible and a hymnal. Those two books, already translated and printed in our native language, were the only books in our home library. These two books became sources of counseling and comfort. Our parents used to lead the devotionals with a time of prayer and singing. We sang with tears in our eyes, and then prayed. The time of devotion became the best time for me in the jungle.
Reading the Bible and worshiping God brought comfort and built hope for life in this world, or at least after death. The Bible provided assurance about God’s protection and life after death. I would recite in my mind without ceasing some Bible verses memorized during our devotional times. My favorites verses were, “Cast all your anxiety on Him, because He cares for you” (1 Pet. 5:7 NIV), and “The angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear him, and he delivers them” (Ps. 34:7 NIV). These verses did not need to be interpreted; no, they were clear in themselves Encouraged by those Bible verses, I believed and trusted in the Lord for protection and deliverance.
All of this is part of my story, but there is more to say. However, I cannot tell my story without readers grasping what it means to live in a “zone of conflict.” Once we explore this, it will be clear why biblical counseling is such a precious resource for people in these situations.
DEFINING ZONES OF CONFLICT
Geographic zones of conflict can be described in many ways. I think the regions where a battle between local or foreign groups is occurring is deemed a zone of conflict. Occasionally, a zone of conflict is just an area where a tribal confrontation with malicious groups is active. A country where the rule of law is weak, absent, or wrongly enforced can trigger conflicts between the law enforcement groups and the general population. This often paves the way to chaos and conflict. Frequently, fierce and deadly conflicts happen where poverty, political oppression, autocracy, social injustice, and economic gaps between people are evident.
In general, a zone of conflict is characterized by violence, animosity, rape, abduction, sex slavery, forced labor, child soldiers, human trafficking, internally displaced people (IDP), and the cracking down on the voiceless. These types of heinous crimes result in the mass movement of people fleeing as refugees to neighboring countries or beyond. Revolts arise against the reckless administration and the social anti-values or social norms in the country.
Frequently, peace is absent in the zone of conflict. People lose hope for a better life. They get frustrated and confused about everything. They worry and wonder about the future of the little ones who sometimes do not have access to education and freedom, and who are robbed of the opportunity and right to just be a child. People live in anger, and despair, finger-pointing at others with endless laments. They lose their appetite for life, developing suicidal thinking as the solution to physical and other aspects of suffering.
In addition, the victims are puzzled about their identity and dignity as human beings. They question and rethink where they come from, why they continue to live, where they will be going, what will happen next, and why the conflicts never end. With deep frustration, people question even the presence of God and his love for them during the turmoil. Most of the time, many of their questions remain unanswered. Being unwilling or unable to overcome the conflict, victims cope by abusing alcohol or getting addicted to drugs; developing withdrawal behavior, anxiety disorders, eating disorders, anger disorders, or dementia; or becoming excessively violent.
We can look briefly at a recent example, and then spend the rest of our time on the need for biblical counseling.
JOSEPH KONY AND THE LRA
The Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) is a northern Ugandan rebel group that formed in 1986 against the government of Uganda led by President Yoweri Museveni. The LRA is led by Joseph Kony, a self-proclaimed “spokesperson” of God and a spirit medium. Being from the Acholi tribe of Uganda, Kony and his group believed they were fighting to establish a theocratic state of Uganda based on the Ten Commandments and the Acholi tradition. Referring to some biblical references, Kony killed his own people who failed to support his cause; he claims to have done this to cleanse his people.
Kony’s strategy was to abduct children and force them to kill their parents and other people in the village. The soldiers captured young girls and forced them to become sex and labor slaves. When the LRA entered a village, they would rape women in front of their husbands and children. Many of the children kidnapped were trained to become child soldiers. Murders took many forms: by gun, machete, slow torture by cutting off parts of the body one by one, burning alive, or gang/ mass rape.
In 2006, Kony and his group crossed the border into the DRC and established a base in Garamba, one of the large national parks in Dungu territory, my hometown. From there, Kony launched brutal attacks against civilians—abducting boys for his army and girls as labor and sex slaves. Acts of sexual violence committed against women in this region were so extreme that such forms of atrocities were never experienced in the world before.
In the territories of Dungu and Faradje, there were massacres of Christians that took place in about five churches in December 2008, affecting the communities for a long time. Many members were burned alive. The rebels crushed the skulls of many with heavy stones. Women and girls were raped before they were killed. During the same period, one of my cousins and other friends were cruelly killed; their heads were cut off from their bodies to be publicly exposed to everybody in the community. This vast region, as big as half of the State of California, was left to be home to hundreds of thousands of traumatized people, who exhibit mental, psychological, spiritual, moral, and physical problems.
What, in God’s name, could be done to even begin to address the violence and abusive horrors these people experienced? How could there possibly be hope? How could these people trust anyone after this terror? The answer came in the biblical counseling movement.
A CALL FOR BIBLICAL COUNSELING
In December 2008, I received a call from my father, who ran into the jungle to escape a ruthless attack by the LRA. The attack was too brutal to describe. My father’s phone call from the jungle of Dungu prompted the need to fundraise for the rescue mission of my aging parents and other family members in the war zone. At the time, my direct supervisor at the American Bible Society was Mr. Robert L. Briggs. In addition to the PCA churches in Eastern PA, Mr. Briggs and his family mobilized some people from Cornerstone Church and other friends to contribute towards the urgent need for a rescue mission. In less than seven days, an amount of about $18,000 was collected to ensure the rescue mission of twenty-four family members from Dungu. With the help of Mission Aviation Fellowship (MAF), which is based in Bunia, a town that is about 460 miles away from Dungu, the rescue mission was successful. My aging parents and twenty-two other relatives were rescued from the war zone and resettled in Ariwara, a town bordering Uganda in eastern DRC.
That rescue mission opened the door for the American Bible Society (ABS) to develop awareness of the suffering, voiceless, oppressed, marginalized, lowly, and dying people in eastern DRC. After fervent prayers and careful discernment, ABS undertook several ministry assessment trips to eastern DRC, including Dungu, my hometown, and the Great Lakes Region in 2010. These trips helped ABS to fully comprehend the situation and develop a ministry strategy to help address the root causes of suffering for the people in eastern DRC.
The Bible provided assurance about God’s protection and life after death.
During the ABS trips, pastors and community leaders in the Congo expressed the desire to be equipped with a Bible-based trauma healing ministry that would help reach thousands of traumatized rape survivors, abandoned children, orphans, widows, and displaced people—all with wounded hearts, souls, minds, attitudes, and spirits. In addition, the leaders asked ABS to replace the Bibles they had lost during the war. We heard a testimony about a single Bible being shared between two pastors living far apart from each other, so they could prepare their sermons for Sunday services. To solve the issue of distance, they ended up dividing the Bible into two to accommodate the times of worship and preaching for each congregation. After a certain period, the pastors would exchange portions of the Bible for preaching and teaching ministries.
To address the overwhelming needs, ABS established the “She’s My Sister” (SMS) initiative to reach out to traumatized people in conflict zones and areas devastated by natural disasters, providing them with a Bible-based trauma healing program. Not only did members from Cornerstone Church initiate bike tour riding events to support SMS trauma healing, but they also quickly joined ABS in funding the pilot trauma healing projects. As a result of the success of these pilot programs, the Bible-based trauma healing programs quickly began to extend beyond the initial reach of the seven countries in the Great Lakes Region (The Great Lakes Region of Africa includes Burundi, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Rwanda, Sudan, Tanzania, and Uganda), to all of Africa, North and Latin America, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia.
Initially inspired by a phone call and being involved in a rescue mission, Cornerstone Church has taken the initiative to build awareness and organize fundraising events through bike riding and has partnered with ABS to fund Bible-based trauma healing projects in eastern DRC. Over the years, they have continued their efforts through a nonprofit, “Restoring Hope Ministries,” and have taken further steps to establish a partner relationship with the Evangelical Church in Central Africa (CECA-20) in Dungu. This partnership focuses on efforts to restore, train, and establish sustainable activities to help people in Dungu recover from the war and rebuild their broken communities, using the Bible for counseling and to make disciples.
THE IMPACT OF BIBLICAL COUNSELING
Throughout periods of turmoil in DRC, many counseling groups have descended upon the people in dire need of help to cope with the deep trauma caused by multiple wars and conflicts. However, many of these nonprofit organizations and other international groups did not address the wounds of the people’s hearts. These organizations would spend the majority of their time conducting research to diagnose and describe the nature and magnitude of civilians suffering, rather than focusing on the development of strategic approaches that would trace the cause and effects of existing trauma. Healing sessions for individuals or for groups of victims were absent.
Church leaders declared that the pastoral counseling learned in seminaries or Bible schools did not equip them for the sort of trauma people were facing. They despaired in seeking a better way to help wounded hearts. Questioning why other counseling services did not help, they all stated that the missing piece in counseling was the Bible. Church leaders longed for training that would equip them to deliver Bible-based counseling that would ignite changes from within.
The message from the Bible helps disclose our state of deprivation and need for redemption. It leads to repentance and teaches about God’s love, mercy, compassion, and empathy. The message of the Bible teaches about sorrow, mourning, loss, love for enemies, vengeance, anger release, and all types of trauma human beings undergo. Only God the Father, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and the Bible can address the torments of life and heal the heart. Hence, when the counsel of God—which is the inspired and revealed word of God—is central in counseling, the counseling ministers to the whole person and leads to a lasting impact.
The American Bible Society (ABS) places the Bible as the central strategy for addressing the wounds of people’s hearts. This is what makes Bible-based healing sessions effective. Life changes start to happen when the Bible becomes a part of the counseling. Some scholars have named it pastoral dialogue, biblical counseling, or biblical trauma healing. How this type of counseling is referred to does not matter, but relying on the Bible and using it in counseling does.
By creating a safe group that upholds a careful listening method, opportunities are offered to people to spell out their suffering and share the narration of what happened with others. In doing so, healing groups encourage trust in others for storytelling. By using numerous examples of people who experienced rape, fugitivity, loss of loved ones, sorrow, forgiveness, humiliation, hunger, oppression, etc. from the Bible, many people begin recovering from past trauma. As the Bible became the focal point of reference in addressing trauma, the outcomes became obvious; what once was deemed impossible became possible.
Many participants in the healing groups began the process of healing. Victims of rape would be in tears after participating in healing group sessions where the Bible was at the center of forgiving the perpetrators of rape. Women with children resulting from unwanted or forced pregnancies were able to forgive the ill-doings of rapists. People who had amputated hands or lips cut off found peace by forgiving their attackers. Some young people who were forced to kill others experienced the power of the high deeds of Jesus Christ on the cross, confessing their wrongdoings and believing in Jesus as their Savior. To our astonishment, the participants in biblical healing group sessions formed groups of Bible studies and prayer. Those Bible study groups in Dungu were transformed into church planting projects.
In total, twelve new churches were established in Dungu, eastern DRC. Some of those churches are still growing today. The stigma towards victims of rape has decreased. Some aggressors have come forth and asked for forgiveness. The chaplain for the soldiers took the Bible-based trauma healing to the soldiers. Some participants who got help through the Bible-based trauma healing programs were trained to help other victims in the region. Those who lost siblings and relatives offered forgiveness to the killers. Pastors stated that their counseling offices were looking like hospitals with people lining up to undergo the process of healing with pastoral prayers and additional counseling. The Archbishop in Uganda also appreciated the program and inserted Bible-based trauma healing into the seminary’s curriculum as a class to be taken by all students before graduation. Victims of the atrocities of wars who had gone through the Bible-based healing groups decided to move on with life.
Revival, transformation, and resiliency happened because the Bible was central to the counseling ministry. Despite ongoing deadly conflicts in the country and although Congolese have been experiencing turmoil for centuries, due to the impact of the Bible in counseling, churches in the DRC are being planted everywhere. Those churches are the ones growing the most. Young people love the Word of God and cherish prayers. They express joy and hope in vibrant praises and adorations.
The Congolese recognize that when the Bible is central to everything, they get the message which refreshes the mind, soul, and heart. The Bible helps them reset their spiritual life, kindle faith, experience peace in the heart, and feel encouraged and comforted. That remains the only way for them to become transformed from within, which extends to their conduct or behavior, as they deepen their relationship with God.
The impact of the Bible in the process of healing can be attested to by strong testimonies of church leaders and the victims who participated in the Bible-based trauma healing groups:
Trauma Healing ministry has helped us a lot. We are seen more as a hospital because we are treating cases that have challenged psychologists because the Bible is the true Word of God that restores and helps people to become resilient. From the time we started this program, my office and that of other pastors in Kisangani Diocese is more than a market. ... Unlike in the past, people who never talked for years now talk openly; those who thought that they will never forgive others are now willing to forgive, read the Bible and attend church regularly. As a church, I feel that God is hearing our prayers.” The Rt. Rev. Lambert Funga, Bishop, Anglican Diocese of Kisangani
Trauma is a symptom and addressing it does not in itself help a person. But Scripture-based Trauma Healing offers hope and builds resiliency in individuals.” Frederick Barasa, Program Manager, American Bible Society
In addition to these testimonies, Saint Augustine, Martin Luther, John Calvin, and many other Bible scholars have recognized the transformative power of the Bible. When the Bible is central to counseling, the divine message addresses the wounds of the heart, removes the bitterness of the past, and makes all things new for a brighter future. When the Bible remains the main tool in counseling, it reveals Jesus Christ as the healer par excellence who takes away all kinds of guilty feelings, worries, and afflictions of the heart. As an agent of change, the Holy Spirit uses the inspired Word of God to bring lasting transformation, to renew trust in the Lord, to embrace the path of forgiveness, to reconciliation, and to hope for peace of mind and heart. When the Bible is central to counseling, healing may take time, but the recovery process can be catalyzed, leading to a new perspective and relationship with God, neighbors, enemies, family members, and the entire community.