Esther John

Life and Ministry

Esther John was born Qamar Zia at Madras in AD 1929 to a Sunni Muslim family of the Indian Subcontinent, raised in the household of a respectable Muslim merchant, and educated at a Christian Inland Mission high school after partition relocated her family to Karachi in AD 1947. Through reading Isaiah 53 at the prompting of her American Presbyterian schoolteacher Mrs. White, she came to believe the gospel in AD 1949 but did not openly profess Christianity while she remained at home. When her family pressed her to marry a Muslim of their choice in AD 1955, she fled Karachi by train to Sahiwal in the Punjab, where she presented herself at the American United Presbyterian mission, was baptized under the name Esther John, and entered the Christian women's training school at Gujranwala in AD 1956 to qualify as a Bible-woman.

Circumstances of Death

After her training Esther John was appointed in AD 1959 to the village evangelism circuit at Chichawatni in the Punjab cotton-growing district, working under the supervision of the American Presbyterian missionary Marion Laugesen. She itinerated among the cotton villages giving Bible lessons to women, was eloquent in Urdu, and was a familiar evangelist in the bazaars of the district. On the morning of 2 February AD 1960 she was found murdered in her bed at the Chichawatni mission compound, killed by a single blow with an axe to the head. The Pakistani police investigation arrested a local Muslim man but the charge was dropped for lack of corroborating evidence; the Christian community of the Punjab attributed her death to her family's pursuit of her conversion, and her brother is the most commonly identified suspect in the later mission literature.

Legacy

Esther John was buried at the Christian cemetery at Sahiwal, the city of her baptism. A memorial chapel was built at the Chichawatni mission station at the site of her killing. She is one of the ten twentieth-century Christian martyrs whose statues stand over the west door of Westminster Abbey, unveiled in AD 1998 — the only South Asian convert among the ten. Her witness is that the woman who has heard Isaiah 53 cannot un-hear it: she fled Karachi for the gospel and died for the gospel in the Punjab. The Pakistani Christian community now numbers its women evangelists in the thousands, and her line of work continues in the same villages.