"I Have Decided to Follow Jesus" was written by a martyr killed verse by verse in front of his family

The story goes like this: a convert in Assam, usually called Nokseng, is ordered by his village chief to renounce Christ. He answers by singing "I have decided to follow Jesus, no turning back." The chief has his children killed; he sings the next verse. His wife; he sings the next. Then they kill him too, and the chief converts on the spot. It's a genuinely moving story, and it gets preached constantly at missions conferences and altar calls.

The dramatized martyrdom account first appears in print in Dr. P. P. Job's 2000 book Why, God, Why?: the unnamed convert, the chief, the sequence of killings matched one to a verse, all of it enters the written record there. The hymn itself, though, is documented in hymnals from around 1960, with an author's name attached: Simon Kara Marak, a Garo believer from Northeast India. That's forty years before the martyrdom story existed in print. A second detail sometimes tacked on, that the evangelist Sadhu Sundar Singh wrote it, has no support either: a recognizable name borrowed for a story that already had none.

The reason the story spreads so easily is that the verses fit it almost too well: "though none go with me, still I will follow" lands perfectly on a man standing alone after his family is killed. But the hymn is about the cost of discipleship in general, which is exactly why it maps onto any costly scenario someone builds around it; the drama was very likely built backward to match the lyrics, not the other way around. That doesn't erase what's actually true here, and the truth doesn't need rescuing: a Garo Christian wrote a real hymn of committed discipleship, and the global church has sung it for over sixty years. Simon Kara Marak deserves his name back.