Bible Sunday on 25 October highlights Bible Society’s ministry to migrants. This year alone, Bible Society has given more than a thousand to migrants who have fled persecution, famine and war. Currently a dozen church projects and eight immigration removal centres are involved.

Eritrean refugee Abraham Musa is playing his part in this. Six years ago, Abraham fled severe persecution in Eritrea because of his hunger to follow his new-found Christian faith. Today he is helping Bible Society distribute Bibles to fellow refugees across South Wales and the south-west.

Abraham came to Christ while serving as a soldier on the border with Ethiopia in 2003. ‘It was the message of the Gospel that changed me,’ he says.

Later that year, Abraham and two friends were meeting secretly for fellowship in a cave. The friend who had led him to faith was imprisoned. Eritrean authorities threatened the other two were threatened with the same fate if they met together again or were caught with a Bible.

Abraham says he was eager to ‘go to a country where [he] would be safe to worship and live freely’. After risking being shot on sight for crossing the border to Sudan, Abraham was smuggled into Europe and finally arrived in Hastings in 2004. Now living in Cardiff, he has found a spiritual home at a church linked to the South Wales Church Refugee Network that receives Tigrinyan and other Bibles from Bible Society.

Today, Abraham offers Bibles to recent Eritrean and Ethiopian arrivals in the city as the Border Agency moves them across the south-west.  

Mark Seymour, a refugee coordinator at Bethel Community Church, Newport, says he has been ‘humbled enormously’ by the zeal for the Bible he sees in Abraham and other Eritrean believers.

‘The church leadership in their homeland has been wiped out,’ he says, ‘but I believe one day many will go back and be the next generation of leaders, taking a Bible Society Bible in their hands.’

Photo: Ian Homer/Bible Society