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He Baptized 175 People. The Next Day, He Was Shot Dead.

A Catholic priest in the Central African Republic spent his final morning walking new converts to the river. In Nigeria, a pastor's wife and children were pulled off a bus for the same reason he died for: being Christian.

July 31, 2026 · 4 min read · Kingdom Kutz Media Newsroom

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Fr. Crepin Martial Monga spent the morning of June 30 doing what he loved most: walking a line of new believers down to the Mbomou River. The day before, he had baptized 175 people at St. John the Baptist Parish in Zemio, in the southeast corner of the Central African Republic. Most of them, 160 of the 175, were displaced people who had lost their homes to years of local violence. He wanted them to see the water for themselves before they scattered back to camps and villages.

That evening, driving from a checkpoint back to his parish residence, gunmen shot him in the head. He died instantly. A woman riding with him was hit in the neck and remains in intensive care. No group has claimed responsibility, and CSW's reporting notes that authorities still have not identified who pulled the trigger.

A Peacemaker in a War Zone

Fr. Monga was not an easy target by accident. For years he led Zemio's Local Committee for Peace and Reconciliation, sitting down with rival ethnic groups and pushing for reconciliation in a region that had already buried too many of its own. Aid to the Church in Need's coverage quotes his bishop calling him a tireless peacemaker, the kind of man whose death leaves a hole a diocese cannot easily fill. A local militia blamed for recent unrest in the area has attacked government officials, UN peacekeepers, and civilians from rival ethnic communities. A priest who kept baptizing displaced families and kept showing up to broker peace was, in that light, exactly the kind of man such violence tries to silence.

An Ocean Away, the Same Story

Nine days earlier and roughly 2,700 miles northwest, gunmen stopped a commercial vehicle on the Maiduguri-Damasak highway in Nigeria's Borno state. Suspected Boko Haram or ISWAP fighters ordered the wife and three children of Pastor Moses Guguma, who leads a Church of Christ in Nations congregation in Damasak, off the vehicle. Everyone else was allowed to keep traveling. Vanguard News reported that the gunmen let the remaining passengers go because, as one witness on the scene put it, they were all Muslims. The pastor's family was taken into the bush. As of this writing they have not been released.

The pastor's wife had just been discharged from a hospital in Maiduguri after a long illness. She was heading home to recover. Instead her family became two more names on a list that keeps getting longer.

Why Nigeria Keeps Showing Up in This Story

It is not a coincidence that Borno state produces headlines like this one every few weeks. Open Doors' latest World Watch List counted 4,849 Christians killed worldwide for their faith in the last reporting year, and 3,490 of them, roughly seven out of ten, were Nigerian. International Christian Concern, which has tracked the Guguma family's case since the abduction, calls northern Nigeria one of the most dangerous places on earth to simply be a Christian in the wrong vehicle at the wrong checkpoint.

Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake. Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you.Matthew 5:10-12 (KJV)

Fr. Monga and the Guguma family never met and never will, this side of eternity. But they share the same wound. One was killed for building peace in Jesus' name. The others were taken for belonging to Him. Both are part of a body that, according to every reliable count, is absorbing more of this kind of violence than it has in years, and both stories broke in the same handful of days, half a world apart from each other and from the churches reading about them over coffee.

If you have ever wondered why God allows this kind of suffering to fall on people who are simply trying to follow Him, our video The Real Reason Why God Allows Suffering walks through what Scripture actually says about it.

Key Takeaways

• Fr. Crepin Martial Monga was shot dead in Zemio, Central African Republic, the day after baptizing 175 people, 160 of them displaced Christians.
• He led a local peace and reconciliation committee in a region scarred by militia violence; no group has claimed his killing and no arrests have been made.
• In Nigeria's Borno state, suspected Boko Haram/ISWAP gunmen abducted the wife and three children of Pastor Moses Guguma and released the rest of the bus's Muslim passengers.
• Open Doors reports 4,849 Christians killed for their faith worldwide in the last year, with roughly 7 in 10 of those deaths happening in Nigeria alone.
• Neither case is resolved. The Guguma family remains missing as of this writing.

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