Three leaders of a controversial religious group were awaiting their execution Friday, July 7, and one house church pastor continued serving a seven and a half years prison term for his Christian activities, co-workers and a religious rights group said.
Chinese officials have expressed “strong dissatisfaction” with a resolution passed by the U.S. House of Representatives on June 12 condemning rising persecution of religious believers in China.
Chinese Security forces arrested at least almost 2000 Chinese Christians, including house church pastors, within a period of one year, and many were tortured, a report released Monday, June 26, shows.
A well-known disabled Chinese ‘house church’ leader has been detained on charges of “illegally printing and distributing Bibles and other Christian literature,” church sources confirmed Thursday, June 15.
A convert Christian jailed six weeks ago in northern Iran was released last night and reunited with his family.
When Chinese house church historian Zhang Yinan applied for a passport in order to attend a prayer breakfast in Washington this month, police immediately surrounded his house and even followed his wife to the hospital where she works as a nurse.
A prominent Christian rights activist who was recently released last month after spending two years in jail, was under strict secret service surveillance Tuesday, February 14, as part of efforts by the authorities to monitor his activities, a watchdog said.
Prosecuted Chinese house churches on Saturday, January 21, were expecting more legal support after a group of top Chinese lawyers and legal scholars announced the establishment of an association dedicated to defending Chinese Christians.
Local government officials in Bandung, West Java, have ordered eight house churches in the Rancaekek Kencana housing complex to cease meeting in private homes starting last Sunday (January 15).
A so-called “documentary” televised regionally in Uzbekistan last summer has left entire communities convinced that a Protestant congregation is an “extremist” group worse than fundamentalist Islam.
Cuba’s influential blind Christian dissident, Juan Carlos Gonzalez Leiva, was facing another tense night Monday, January 16, after government backed crowds, armed with loudspeakers, reportedly threatened to storm his house and kill everyone inside.
In a shocking display of brutality, Aroun Voraphorn, an itinerant evangelist, pastor and father of four children, was murdered in southern Laos the week before Christmas.
As Christmas approaches, Chinese security forces have reportedly arrested dozens of leaders of the rapidly growing house churches, BosNewsLife learned Tuesday, December 13.
Iranian Christians are mourning the death of Ghorban Dordi Tourani, an Iranian believer assassinated two weeks ago by an unnamed group of fanatical Muslims and the first Turkmen in Iran known to have been martyred for his Christian faith.
An influential house church leader who was reportedly kidnapped along with his son by Chinese security forces was released Monday, November 21, just hours after American President George W. Bush left China, a religious rights group said.
Denied permits and ordered not to worship in public or at home, churches in East Bekasi, West Java, have taken temporary refuge in a Social Affairs Agency office.
Beijing authorities on November 4 ordered a Chinese legal firm to suspend activities for a year, hours after top lawyer Gao Zhisheng filed court documents in defense of Pastor Cai Zhuohua.
Pastor Cai was abducted from a bus stop and dragged into a van by three plain-clothed State Security officers on September 11 2004. According to a former fellow inmate, Pastor Cai was repeatedly tortured with electric shocks and forced to give false confessions to serious charges.
China’s government has ordered a top law firm in Beijing to close for one year because of its involvement in defending Christians, including house church leaders, and other religious minorities, a religious rights watchdog said.
The leader of six house churches in China’s capital Beijing, who was detained by security officers last year, is held at a detention facility where he is forced to carry out hard labor, human rights investigators said Friday, October 28.