Uzbek Police Jail Another Christian
A Christian leader in western Uzbekistan’s autonomous Karakalpakstan region has been jailed since July 25, accused by local police of illegal drug possession.
A Christian leader in western Uzbekistan’s autonomous Karakalpakstan region has been jailed since July 25, accused by local police of illegal drug possession.
(AgapePress) – A minister has been barred from visiting Oregon students at their school during lunch breaks.
Jason Rhoads is a Nazarene pastor from Portland. Rhoads had been meeting with students in the Molalla River School District for more than a year, until he was asked to stop when a parent complained.
Chinese police detained 130 members of a Protestant house church movement in central Henan province on Wednesday, according to a Hong Kong-based human rights group. Among the arrested were three American citizens, the Information Centre for Human Rights and the Democratic Movement in China said.
The outbreak of religious conflicts between Muslims and Christians in Nigeria over the adoption of sharia (Islamic legal system) in some states has spread to the nation’s military ranks. Killings of Christian soldiers and non-military personnel have been reported in Lagos and Kaduna.
“The most severe persecution happened to us on Sunday, October 17, 1999. They detained 150 Christians and prepared to send some of them to ‘reform through education’ camps for three years. They fined some of us 2,000 RMB. They didn’t even give me a receipt. (Society here is now so corrupt!) But we did not cease to meet.”
In Anhui province in eastern China — a center of Christian house church activity — the provincial government is enforcing a repressive religious policy that has continued for many years and shows no sign of abatement. And reliable house church sources say control is being further tightened.
Zhang Rongliang, also known as David Zhang, is at large in China despite receiving a three-years’ hard labor sentence in December 1999. Reliable reports from central China say he was able to buy himself out of jail. But Born Again movement leader Xu Yongze remains incarcerated, despite having completed his three-year sentence on March 15, and 10 more house church leaders were arrested in southeast China in May.
Another day, another bombing. That’s the impression being created, at least, by a mounting wave of attacks on Christians and churches in India.
China’s most famous house church prisoner, Mr. Xu Yongze, is free. The 58-year-old founder of the Born Again movement was released on May 16, after serving a three-year “re-education through labor” sentence for establishing an illegal organization in China.
A London-based pastor who has churches in Sri Lanka has issued an urgent prayer plea for Sri Lanka’s embattled evangelical Christian community.
Leaders of Christian communities who report they are under attack by jihad warriors in Indonesia’s Maluku islands are seeking emergency help from Europe.
Bomb blasts damaged two churches in India’s southern Karnataka state over the weekend as Christians across the nation staged marches and rallies to protest sectarian violence.
Hindu militants in Orissa have announced that the man accused of masterminding the brutal killings last year of Australian missionary Graham Staines and his two sons will be the chief minister candidate of their newly formed political party in the eastern state.
Christians in Laos continue to suffer persecution from a government crackdown on believers, and they cannot visit friends or travel freely because the secret police follow them every everywhere. Some have been forced to recant their faith.
Two Chinese Protestant pastors accused of organizing an unauthorized Christian meeting are being held in labor camps near Beijing, a London-based religious rights group reported Thursday. Wang Li Gong, 34, and Yang Jing Fu, 36, are in two separate camps in Tianjing serving administrative sentences of one year, and one and one-half years, respectively, Christian Solidarity Worldwide said.
Two colleagues of prominent Chinese evangelist Li Dexian have been sentenced to 15 days in prison, an Australian-based monitoring group reported. Ah Yung and Ah Kong are among 13 Protestant house church members who have been arrested in the southern province of Guangdong since the weekend, according to the Sydney office of Voice of the Martyrs (VOM).
Six Christian missionaries participating in a gospel campaign called “Love Ahmedabad” were beaten so savagely in the state of Gujarat last week that one of the men may lose his arms and legs.
More than 60 Christians attending a two-day religious convention were beaten by a mob of suspected Hindu nationalists in a village about 100 miles northeast of Bombay. None of the injured were hospitalized.
Chinese police have detained 47 members of a Protestant group in central Anhui province, according to the state press. The Jianghui Morning Daily said last week that six of the main leaders of the Quanfanwei (Holistic) Church face criminal charges for organizing an illegal sect and illegal gatherings.
Since October 1999 some 23 Christians have been killed in public by firing squads on falsified criminal charges in North Korea reports Open Doors, the ministry begun 45 years ago by Brother Andrew, the Dutch-born author of “God’s Smuggler.”