Myanmar Junta Turns Churches Into Military Bases as Christians Flee

The church Father Donald built with his own hands is now a military headquarters.

Father Donald Hkawng Lum raised St. Joseph's Catholic Church in Nantmun, in Myanmar's Kachin state, in 1983. It was dedicated in 1985 under Mogaung Parish and later moved under Mohnyin Parish in the Myitkyina Diocese — four decades of baptisms, weddings and funerals under one roof.

Today, a junta tactical commander uses it as his headquarters.

The pews are gone. The altar is a desk.

It is not the only one. The Kachin Baptist Church in the same town has been occupied by the Shanni Nationalities Army — a Buddhist militia founded in 1989, reactivated in 2016, and allied with the military junta since the 2021 coup.

In late September, the SNA graduated its sixth batch of 400 recruits — from Shan, Kachin and upper Sagaing — inside the Baptist church. Recruits drilling where a congregation once sang.

"The junta let them expand brigades, collect taxes, and control Hkamti and Mohnyin. Now our churches are their barracks." — Kachin Christian activist (name withheld for safety)

Four Hundred Families Gone

Late 2024 advances into Nantmun displaced more than 400 of the town's 500 Christian Kachin households. Barely 80 households remain, blockaded and scattered — surviving, according to local accounts, on wild roots, plants, fish and frogs.

A newer church, completed in 2022 and overseen by catechist Zau Ra, was looted. Zau Ra himself is displaced, unable to return to the congregation he shepherded.

Think about that number for a moment: 400 of 500. Four out of every five families. The church in Nantmun was not a building with a congregation; it was a people with a building.

Now the people are in the hills and the building belongs to soldiers. This is what the erasure of a christain community looks like in 2026 — not a single dramatic massacre but a slow administrative suffocation, one occupied pew at a time.

Activists, including a Kachin Christian woman who has documented the occupation, say it violates both international and constitutional law. SNA Colonel Sai Aung Mein and junta minister U Kyaw Min Khine did not respond to requests for comment.

The silence, residents say, is the point. In Syria, gunmen at least bother with pretexts; in Myanmar, the army simply moves in and dares the world to notice. Our persecution coverage tracks both.

Faith Under the Boots

There is a particular cruelty in turning a church into a barracks. It is not only the theft of a building — it is the conscription of the sacred into the machinery of the violence oppressing its own people.

Every order issued from Father Donald's former sanctuary is a small desecration. Every recruit graduated in the Baptist church is a reminder to the displaced that their God has been evicted.

And yet the testimoni of Myanmar's Christians keeps surfacing. Displaced catechists still gather the scattered in jungle clearings. Prayers continue where microphones cannot reach.

The junta can occupy the buildings; it has not, after five years of trying, occupied the faith. Nigeria's believers and Pakistan's would recognise the pattern — the church under pressure does not disappear; it goes underground and multiplies. See related coverage and our ongoing reporting.

"Zau Ra and residents remain scattered, unable to return. The new church, completed in 2022, was looted." — UCA News, October 9, 2026

What Happens Next

The 80 households still hiding in the hills around Nantmun cannot farm, cannot trade, cannot gather openly. The blockade tightens with every month. Winter is coming to Kachin state, and wild roots are not a harvest.

And the question no one in Naypyidaw will answer is the simplest one: when does a church stop being a church — and who decides? If the answer is "whoever has the guns," then Father Donald's forty years of ministry were a lease, not a legacy. But the displaced of Nantmun tell a different story, in whispers, in the hills, where no commander can hear: the Church is not the building.

It never was. For background reading, our archive and related reports, see all our Christian news — or the wider persecution picture from our homepage.

But the most surprising part of this story is yet to come — keep reading.