Arif and Kathleen Khan's story

The Believers

Excerpts:

'They were sweethearts,” the Rev. Albert Martin said. “He led her, and she followed him willingly and cheerfully. That is all biblical, you see.”

Martin was remembering Arif and Kathleen Khan, a missionary couple whom Martin’s church, the Trinity Baptist Church of Montville, N.J., had sent to Pakistan eight years ago. There, this August, the couple were shot to death in their home by three suspected killers ....



Kathleen, the daughter of scarcely observant Christians, grew up enthralled by the stories of missionaries that filled the New Jersey church where her parents sent her for Sunday school. And Arif, born and raised in Pakistan, the son of a preacher in the country’s small Christian community, felt called to carry his faith into nations hostile to the message he brought. They met at a seminary in Massachusetts and married, and soon Arif, who had become an American citizen, led her and their two young children to live in Iran; the family quickly found themselves fleeing Ayatollah Khomeini’s fundamentalist revolution. Next the Khans made their home in another Islamic country, which Martin would not specify for fear of endangering the missionary that Trinity Church now sponsors there. Arif was banished. In 1999, with their children grown, he and Kathleen settled in Islamabad, their home until their murder. Arif knew the risks of proselytizing. He had, shortly before his marriage, been jailed for weeks in Pakistan for preaching Christ’s power in the streets with his father. “He was a marked man,” Martin said. “He talked of dying for Christ as though it was having a mole removed.”

Comment: For more see the sermons page of Trinity Baptist Church of Montville, NJ. Also: The Pakistani Christian Post