Six weeks after a Sudanese court jailed an Episcopal priest for refusing to tear down his own church, the Rev. Samuel Dobai Amum has been set free, with the legal process set in motion for his Khartoum North parish to obtain official ownership of its land.
Twenty-five armed men entered a rural church in northern Colombia Tuesday night, May 6, and murdered its 80-year-old evangelical pastor and three other believers, confirmed the head of the nations evangelical alliance.
A heated debate over freedom of religion in Brazil has gone to court. Legal representatives of Umbanda and Candomble spiritist groups are pressing a lawsuit against Baptist pastor Joaquim de Andrade, 41, and Aldo dos Santos Menezes, 33, a deacon of the Anglican Church, in connection with an annual evangelistic outreach on the beaches of Sao Paulo state.
(Probably 80 percent of the house church leaders in China know or have heard the name of this house church leader, but he asked that his name not be used. Possibly as many as 2 million Christians are involved in his house church network. He has been arrested several times and imprisoned a total of 10 years for his faith in Jesus Christ. He spoke recently with an Open Doors team. The following is his testimony.)
A 9-year-old Pakistani Christian girl has been severely beaten — the result of a religious hate crime inflicted upon her because of the war in Iraq.
Asmara Police Jail, Punish 56 Prisoners Special to Compass Direct LOS ANGELES, May 8 (Compass) — Eritrean security police arrested two full-time evangelists and another 54 members of the Rema Church last night in Asmara, hauling them off to a local police station for holding illegal prayer meetings in two homes of their members. The prayer meetings were in progress in the capital’s Kahawta district when security forces raided the homes about 6 p.m., forcing the Protestant believers to stop their worship. The jailed Christians, 21 women and 35 men, remained under detention today at the No. 7 Police Station … Read more
An Arab convert to Christianity was killed in a bomb blast last night outside his Tripoli apartment, adjacent to the home of a European missionary family thought to have been targeted in the attack.
Communist regimes like Vietnam have never been known for their tolerance of religion but recently in 2003 Hanoi has escalated the persecution of its “hill tribe” Christians to an unprecedented level. In the Central Highlands of Vietnam the indigenous Montagnards or Degar Peoples are facing arrest, beatings, torture and even murder at the hands of Vietnamese security forces. This persecution did not go unnoticed this month in a damming report released by the US International Commission For Religious Freedom that stated, “the increased repression of religious freedom has been reportedly sanctioned at the highest levels of the Vietnamese government.”
A zealous Christian preacher in the northern Nigeria city of Kano and six members of his family died in a house fire on April 22. Christian leaders in the city believe Muslim militants deliberately set the fatal blaze.