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"I lost everything except some books and a few clothes I carried away in a sack. Lots of my friends and my neighbors were killed." Ivor Poobalan, principal of Sri Lanka's Colombo Theological College, is speaking of 1983 riots that kicked a simmering ethnic rivalry between the Buddhist Sinhalese people and mostly Hindu Tamils into full-scale civil war.

"It was my first experience in how insane people can get in a mob. People were pulled out of cars and killed. Buses were burned. A guy in our church saw his mother raped in front of his own eyes. The fact that people maintain any humanness is the grace of God. There was no milk of human kindness at all."

Poobalan is a man with a gentle, seamless face and a melancholy smile. "The church is the only community that holds the various ethnic communities together," he says. During the riots, "Christians were wonderful. They opened their homes to one another. There was no ethnic divide at all." He sighs. "That was very great."

Sri Lanka, a green, tropical island about the size of Ireland located off the southern tip of India, knows ethnic and religious strife like few other places. At independence in 1948, Sri Lanka was an Asian leader, admired for its democratic habits. Today it lags far behind the Asian tigers, despite a high rate of literacy and good health care. Twenty years of civil war have included terrorist bombings, high-level political assassinations, and bloody street massacres.

I arrived in Sri Lanka on the one-year anniversary of the ceasefire. I came halfway around the world in hopes of learning how Christians live in a place with such raw ethnic and religious tensions. For Americans, that reality became pressing on September 11, 2001. In much of the world, such terror is old news. In Indonesia or the Congo warring tribes kill each other for no apparent reason beyond the triumph of one people or religion over another. The old liberal dream that cultural exchange will lead to understanding and then peace seems downright romantic. Sri Lankan Christians know that as well as anyone, since they are the object of continual suspicion and derision. But these very conditions have helped them learn some things that North American believers only haltingly strive to understand.

My first evening I worshiped in a Methodist church, colonial in its solid stone structure, Western in its order of service, but with a congregation whose skin tones range from deep brown to a Caucasian tan. Men at the service wore shirts and trousers (few ties, and few sarongs); the women divided between dresses and saris. An organ accompanied Wesleyan hymns before Poobalan preached a sermon in English. (The church holds other services in Sinhala and Tamil languages.)

Afterwards I chatted with Duleep Fernando, who heads the Sinhala Methodist Evangelistic Training College. It and its sister Tamil school have helped revive Methodist growth, sending evangelists into villages to plant churches. Duleep spoke charmingly about the challenges evangelists face from militant opponents. I sized him up as a savvy organizer.

Later Poobalan told me that a monument should be erected to Duleep, because of the many people he snatched from murderous mobs in 1983. He also explained that the staid, colonial church I visited served as a kind of ark for the persecuted during those terrible days when Sinhalese mobs rampaged through Colombo, burning Tamil homes and businesses while slaughtering Tamils by the thousand.

"Duleep [who is Sinhalese] was all over Colombo, bundling families into his car with no mind to his own safety," Poobalan said. "When his house was too full to take any more, he asked the church to open as a refuge. There were families in every pew. I slept in the balcony for two weeks."

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October 2003, Vol. 47, No. 10