By Anto Akkara in Kathmandu, Nepal / Morgan Lee, Christianity Today.
Catholic leader Paul Simick surveys wreckage of Pentecostal church in Kathmandu. (Image: Anto Akkara)
Maili Tamang clapped and sang along as the remnants of her husband’s Kathmandu church gathered for a noon prayer one week after a massive earthquake collapsed the “roof of the world.”
“In God’s time, anything can happen,” the 55-year-old Nepalese mother told CT. Tamang lost her husband Maila, her sister, and three other family members when Vision of Salvation church, which rented rooms in a four-story commercial building in the Swayambu area of the nation’s capital, collapsed. Seventeen members of the Pentecostal church, where Tamang’s husband served as an elder, died, including senior pastor Elia Ghale.
“We cannot decide our future or what happens to us,” she said. “Even after the world, we will be with God.”
Tamang was worshiping a nearby Pentecostal church when the quake struck.
“I was standing in a row near to the wall and praying when the trembling started. The pastor continued the prayer and suddenly, everything collapsed,” she told CT. “I was half conscious and could heard people screaming. After one hour I was pulled out. While lying there, I knew God would save me.”
Meanwhile, pledging to spread God’s love “even though earthquakes come,” a small evangelical church in Nepal completed on Saturday its worship song interrupted by last week’s natural disaster.
The first-hand account from the International Mission Board is one of many reports surfacing of how Nepal’s Christian minority is regrouping after a 7.8-magnitude earthquake collapsed many churches during their main weekly worship services.
Reporting by CT in Kathmandu reveals that an accurate tally of churches destroyed and Christians killed remains hard to come by, since anecdotal reports can be duplicated or exaggerated. But it is clear that many Christians died in their churches.