Nearly a month after three suspects were jailed for severely injuring a Turkish Christian distributing so-called “missionary propaganda,” a court in northwest Turkey has ordered one of the alleged attackers released.
“Numerous Christian individuals” in Egypt and their properties were attacked by nearby Muslims angry over plans to found a church, an organization representing Egyptian believers confirmed Tuesday Nov. 18.
Bishop Ding, the most influential leader of the state-controlled Chinese “Three Self” Protestant church, has significantly stepped up his anti-Christian “theological construction” campaign in recent months.
A Turkish convert to Christianity who was severely beaten for distributing New Testaments last week in his hometown of Orhangazi in northwestern Turkey has slipped into a coma in critical condition.
Police in the Eritrean capital of Asmara continued the country-wide crackdown against independent Protestant congregations this month, arresting another 12 evangelicals on September 7 while they were meeting in a private house for prayer and worship.
Fifty-seven teenage Eritrean Christians jailed last week under severe punishment for having Bibles at their military training camp remain locked in metal shipping containers, inside sources confirmed today.
In late April, Haiti’s President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a former Catholic priest, declared voodoo an officially recognized religion. The decision means, among other things, that marriage ceremonies conducted by voodoo priests now have equal standing with Catholic ones.
Two South Korean pastors and two laymen, imprisoned in China because of their pastoral and humanitarian work among North Korean refugees, await court decisions on their fate.
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
A total of 170 Protestant Christians have been jailed, beaten and threatened with death by Eritrean security forces in a harsh crackdown during February and March.
Turkmenistan’s most prominent religious prisoner, the Baptist Shageldy Atakov, has been freed before the end of his four-year sentence, Keston News Service has learnt. The US-based Russian Evangelistic Ministries and the German-based Friedensstimme Mission, which maintain close ties with Baptists in the former Soviet republics, have both confirmed that Atakov was released from prison in the Caspian port city of Turkmenbashi (formerly Krasnovodsk) early on 8 January and has now been reunited with his wife Artygul and five children in the town of Kaakhka close to Turkmenistan’s southern border with Iran. “Jesus has given me a Christmas gift,” Atakov was quoted as saying (many Christians in the region celebrate Christmas on 7 January).
Sary Mirzoyev, pastor of the Love Baptist Church in the Azerbaijani capital Baku, has told Keston News Service that he will fight attempts next week to liquidate his church as a legal entity. The hearing in the liquidation suit, brought by Rafik Aliev, chairman of the State Committee for Relations with Religious Organisations, begins on 23 January at the court of Baku’s Narimanov district. Aliev is alleging that Pastor Mirzoyev preached against Islam and that therefore the church has violated the country’s religion law and should be liquidated. “They have alleged that we are arousing religious hatred,” Pastor Mirzoyev told Keston from Baku on 18 January. “I said nothing against Islam or against Muslims.”
Amid growing pressure on Protestant congregations, two leaders of the unregistered Pentecostal church Living Stones have been arrested and given fifteen-day prison terms, Protestant sources in the Azerbaijani capital Baku have told Keston News Service. The two – Yusuf Farkhadov and Kasym Kasymov – were detained in Sumgait, a town close to Baku, when police and National Security Ministry officers raided a prayer meeting last Friday (18 January) held in a private flat in the town’s 9th micro-district. The two were given the two-week prison term under Article 310 of the Administrative Code, which punishes “petty hooliganism”. “All they were doing was praying,” one church member told Keston. They are serving their term in police detention cells in Sumgait.
Evangelical church leaders Kiros Meles and Abebayeh Desalegn walked free today after being jailed without charges for 10 months in the northern Ethiopian town of Maychew.
Evangelical Christians in northern Ethiopia confirmed yesterday that instead of being released as expected, two local church elders jailed without charges for 10 months were remanded back to prison two days ago by a local court judge.
Eritrean police arrested and jailed another Protestant evangelical pastor on Sunday, taking him and seven of his church members to prison.
Seven months after the newly constructed Diyarbakir Evangelical Church opened in southeast Turkey, a local council under the Ministry of Culture and Tourism has again protested against the building’s use as a place of worship.
Armed gunmen attacked a Pakistani Christian welfare organization in Karachi this morning, then escaped after killing seven Christians and leaving an eighth critically injured.
Part 1
by Berit Kjos
“I strongly urge the establishment of a Mission to Planet Earth, a worldwide monitoring system staffed by children…design to rescue the global environment.” -Al Gore
“…absolute behavior control is imminent…. The critical point of behavior control, in effect, is sneaking up on mankind without his self-conscious realization that a crisis is at hand. Man will… never self-consciously know that it has happened.” [1] Raymond Houghton, To Nurture Humaneness, ASCD (curriculum arm of the NEA), 1970
“The Protestant Ethic will atrophy as more and more enjoy varied leisure and guaranteed sustenance…. Most people will tend to be hedonistic…” [2] Feasibility Study, Behavioral Science Teacher Education Program (B-STEP), Department of Health, Education and Welfare, Bureau of Research, 1969
WASHINGTON (BP)–The considerable influence of American Christians can make a difference in the lives of persecuted believers in North Korea and Sudan, participants at a May 1 summit on the issue were told.