On a Monday night in a jail cell, Augustine Kiawu lay on his bed wondering if Jesus was real. He had been raised Muslim. He was 24, charged with a murder he didn’t commit and facing 40 years.
Then his cell filled with a light so bright he couldn’t look into it. The door seemed to stretch back like a rubber band, he remembers, and the figure of a man covered in light walked slowly toward his bed.
Augustine turned his back, sure he was going to hell. Then the voice from the light spoke peace over him and said, “Son, I have loved you from the beginning.”
In this interview, Augustine tells Justin Gilpin how a young Muslim man facing 40 years came to follow Jesus. What follows is his account.
Liberia, the streets and a birthday party
Augustine was born and raised in Liberia, in West Africa, in a Muslim family on both his mother’s and his father’s side. He came to America at 16 and, after about a year in another state, moved to Pennsylvania. He got into the street life, the parties and the gang friends, and he started rapping.
On his birthday, January 15, around 2010, he was home making beats and didn’t feel like going out. But his friends wouldn’t let him stay home. They stopped at a house party to welcome back a friend from high school, a Marine just home from Iraq.
On the way out, a fight broke out over a stolen phone, and Augustine and his friends were part of it. A gun went off twice. The Marine was shot.
Kids who knew Augustine from high school told the police they didn’t know the shooter, but they knew the young man standing next to him. Soon his face was on the news as a wanted man. About a week after his birthday, a SWAT team broke down his apartment door. He was charged with 45 years, and the next day five were dropped.
A praying mother and a guard with a Bible
His mother went from church to church asking for prayer and became the first person in their family to follow Jesus. She fasted until she lost weight. When she visited, Augustine couldn’t look at her face, and back in his cell he cried over the pain he had put her through.
Then she told him, “Son, I know we Muslim, but we need Jesus on this.” A prophet at a church had told her God would show Himself to her son in jail that week. She asked Augustine to request a Bible. He wanted to know about a lawyer.
That same week, a guard assigned to his door came by with a newspaper story about his case. He told Augustine he would never see daylight, then asked if he believed in Jesus. Augustine said no, he was Muslim. The guard told him he would need Jesus and brought him a Bible.
Augustine calls him a guardian angel. That guard also protected him from people who planned to hurt him.
A vision, then proof
That Friday, while he read Genesis, a heavy sleep and a hard headache came over him. He marked his place with his pen and lay down, and a vision opened. God showed him his life from childhood, how He had protected him all the way to that cell. Then a quiet voice told him to accept His Son Jesus as his personal Lord and Savior, and said He would fight for him.
He woke soaked in sweat. The guard told him he had been chosen and sent him back to get on his knees. Augustine knelt, but first he asked God for proof. He was a young Muslim trying to find the truth.
He asked to see a memory only he knew the details of, a moment with his first cousin on a trip back to Liberia, and he saw it. Then he asked for one more, a moment with his mother at home, and that came too. Then he gave it all to the Lord.
The night Jesus came
Three days later, on Monday night, the light filled his cell. With his back turned, he says, every sin he had ever committed was laid open. Then the voice said shalom, peace, and touched him. He couldn’t see His face because the light grew brighter whenever he tried. But he saw holes in His palms and marks on His feet, though he didn’t know yet what they meant.
When the voice told him He had loved him from the beginning, all his fear left him. Augustine says no words can describe the peace that came over him. The voice told him He had chosen him from his mother’s womb and was sending him to the young generation. He told him to ask his mother about her pregnancy. When Augustine asked who He was, the answer was Jesus.
His mother told him that while she was pregnant with him, she heard her name called three times, and the third time the voice said it was God. He told her the son in her womb was His own.
Taught in a cell, then set free
Before Jesus left, He said He would send His Spirit to teach Augustine the Bible. Two days later the Holy Spirit came and taught him for the rest of his three months in jail. “I didn’t go to school for the Bible,” he says.
On March 17, immigration officers came to pick him up for deportation and told him his name wasn’t on their list. Then he was told to get out. He was out on bail. Nobody had called his family, and when he phoned his mom, she asked who it was and hung up.
On June 25, 2010, the day before he was due in court, his mother told him the lawyer had called. The case was dropped. He fell to his knees to thank God. He says the same quiet voice told him God had kept His part of their agreement, and it was time for Augustine to keep his.
His mother, then Augustine, then his sister, brother and father all came to Jesus.
What he does now
In 2019, after about ten years of training, he says Jesus appeared to him again and told him it was time to start a youth ministry. On the sixth day of a seven-day fast with no food or water, the Lord gave him the blueprint: reach the young generation, heal the sick and cast out devils. That became House of Prayer Kingdom Ministry. He has ordained about 12 ministers, trains ministers twice a month and was consecrated as an apostle on October 4. He has been married 16 years and has four kids.
His father died in March 2020. That Sunday, before Augustine preached, his father called and asked him to pray that Jesus would forgive his sin, and then he watched the whole service. He died early the next morning. The last thing he told his son was, “Son, no matter what you do, do not ever stop serving Jesus.”
With Muslims, he doesn’t open with Scripture. He tells his story with love, without condemning anyone. He used to mock the Jehovah’s Witnesses who came to his door. Now he is the one telling people Jesus is God.
Augustine’s word to you
Justin asked what he would say to a Muslim watching. His first answer: don’t just go by what you were taught. “Take your time to inquire of Jesus,” he says. He points to Jeremiah 29:13, the promise that if you seek Him with all your heart, you will find Him.
Second, Christianity is not a religion to him but a relationship, and nothing you have done can stop Jesus from loving you. “I guarantee you He will manifest Himself to you,” he says.
“It is grace that visited me in jail,” he says. He believes that grace can visit you too, and that the same Jesus who set him free from 40 years in jail can do the same for you.
To anyone watching, he says, “Your story might be different from mine, but Christ never changed.”
Watch the full interview
Hear it in Augustine’s own words. Press play at the top of this page to watch the whole conversation.