A $300,000 ransom payment has failed to free American missionaries Martin and Gracia Burnham from a militant Muslim group in the Philippines linked to Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network.
An uncertain number of leaders of a major house church movement in China have disappeared in what at first was thought to be a massive government raid. Now cult activity is suspected.
The Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Organization, VHP) is secretly conducting large-scale conversion drives in India’s Marxist-ruled state of West Bengal. More than 16 tribal Christians were forced to re-convert to Hinduism on April 22 at a purification ceremony in Chopra village in the Malda district about 300 kilometers from Calcutta, NGO sources said. Ten other animist tribals were also converted to Hinduism in the village.
A blind Christian human rights activist has been beaten and imprisoned in Cuba following a crackdown on pro-democracy and human rights workers.
A Presbyterian church close to the Kashmir border was attacked by a group of Islamic extremists on Sunday April 7.
A three-day Baptist convention for 100,000 people, which was due to be held in Burma, has been cancelled on the orders of the junta.
Two Filipino Christians were quietly whisked away from their homes near Jeddah early Wednesday morning, April 10, according to the Washington, DC based human rights organization, International Christian Concern (ICC).
Just two days after a court in the capital Baku liquidated a Baptist congregation, a local policeman in the small town of Chukhuryurd near Shemakha in central Azerbaijan tried to ban a small Baptist church from meeting, Baptist sources told Keston News Service. “He had heard the news of the Baku church’s liquidation on ANS television and came to the local elder last Friday [5 April] and told him the church could not meet on Sunday for worship,”
A Presbyterian church close to the Kashmir border was attacked by a group of Islamic extremists on Sunday April 7.
Two well-known Baptist ministers from Dagon North Township were arrested by the military junta on 5th April. They are currently detained in Burma’s notorious Insein prison.
When fleeing Palestinian fighters forced their way into Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity April 2, Israeli soldiers found themselves laying siege to one of Christianity’s holiest sites.
Some time ago I was invited to present a two-day seminar in a church about the Middle East conflict. During the course of those sessions, we used an abundance of scriptures, carefully presented in their context, to clearly explain why the land is God’s, that He entrusted it to Israel as a permanent possession, and what are the challenges of Islam. At the end of the two days, the senior Pastor told a couple in his church: “Well, I’d like to hear the Palestinian side…”
An Ethiopian and Filipino Christian jailed since last summer in the Saudi Arabian port city of Jeddah were released and deported to their home countries over Easter weekend.
On the day Baku’s Protestant Greater Grace church was celebrating Easter, police in the city’s central Sabail district tried to forcibly deport a church member, alleging that she had been conducting religious “propaganda”. One of the church’s pastors, Musfig Bayram, told Keston News Service from Baku that police took Nina Koptseva, a Russian citizen who has a residence permit to live in Baku, to the city’s railway station on Sunday morning (31 March), bought her a ticket to the Russian border and tried to place her on the train without any court decision.
New Tribes Mission has issued a news release denying “any participation in attempts to pay ransom or raise money for ransom” for the release of missionaries Martin and Gracia Burnham who were kidnapped in the Philippines on May 27 of last year.
Attorneys for a Chinese Christian leader who barely escaped execution in January want his retrial to be conducted in public this time, according to sources close to the case.
In a rare criticism of the kingdom’s powerful religious police, Saudi media have accused the force of hampering efforts to rescue 15 girls who died inside a blazing school, Reuters news service reports.
RIYADH, SAUDI ARABIA (ANS) — In a rare criticism of the kingdom’s powerful religious police, Saudi media have accused the force of hampering efforts to rescue 15 girls who died inside a blazing school, Reuters news service reports.
As believers who claim their rights have been violated by the state authorities debate and argue over the best way to resolve such violations, Keston News Service has discovered that Rafik Aliev, chairman of the State Committee for Relations with Religious Organisations, has repeatedly warned believers not to take their complaints to foreigners.
Unidentified terrorists hurled grenades into a Protestant worship service in the diplomatic quarter of Pakistan’s capital city yesterday, killing five worshippers and wounding another 40 members of the congregation.