Page 117 - Then Came the Glory

Sidamo
not pay stayed in prison. Some leaders taunted the young men with, "Why don't you pay with the American dollars
they send you and get out of this place?"
A SIM member who got converted in the Apostolic
church gave this testimony:
We set out to eliminate Brother Dawit. We had 738
churches with pastors, and we thought it would be easy to
destroy Dawit and close the Soddo Apostolic church But the stick we used against Dawit struck us. It happened like thus:
We had a course in 1983 called Yeaching ofDivinity' which recommended a division between the state and the church Several phrases denounced the leaders of the country, and one sentence read, ^The church is recufy to be slaughtered' This course was duplicated and widely (Ustributed in the whole province. When members of the Derg read this, in
spite of our men with political power from local authorities to provincial offices, they struck immediately and closed all
our churches. We ourselves destroyed our churches; it is the
judffnent of God who revealed our sins.
The Derg only closed the Apostolic churches; they
totally destroyed the SIM church buildings and either used the roofing for political offices or divided them among the
wrecking crews. It is a small thing that the SIM exposed our saints to prison and suffering—they coimted it all joy.
Besides, we baptized 120 of their preachers and all the members they pastored in the name of Jesus. Those who did not come to us have split into two or three divisions most of whom labor under various delusions.
In every case, those who oppose us have received Satan as an angel of light. One group taught they would never die; consequently, when the son of a member died, they buried him secretly in their house. The authorities heard
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