(Evangelical Focus) — New reports highlight continuing concern over Pakistan’s blasphemy laws, six months after Asia Bibi was finally allowed to leave the country. The reports come from sources as diverse as the US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCRIF) and Humanists International. … Release International says Zafar Bhatti was falsely accused of blasphemy […]
BATTICALOA, Sri Lanka — Girija used to read the Bible to her illiterate husband every evening, but following her death in April as the church she attended was attacked by an Islamic suicide bomber, her daughter Dukashini now reads the Scriptures aloud in her mother’s place. As previously reported, more than 300 people were killed earlier this […]
(Church in Chains) — Dec. 9 marked the first anniversary of the raid on Early Rain Covenant Church and the arrest of Pastor Wang Yi, who is in jail awaiting trial, and his wife Jiang Rong, who was released on bail in June and is under house arrest. In the week following the raid at […]
(International Christian Concern) – “All of the sudden, my life, family, and church were broken into pieces,” Pastor Tukaram Chavan, age 32, told International Christian Concern (ICC). “It was hard to take. I was not expecting that something of this sort would take place. However, I remember the commitment I made to God when I […]
(Evangelical Focus) — For more than 10 years, the Evangelical League of Cuba (LEC in Spanish) has organized a public reading of the Bible, which takes place in the “Malecón” in Havana on the first Sunday of December. Activist Elaine Salaregui attacked this initiative in her Facebook account, saying that Christianity “express itself again in public […]
HYDERABAD, India (Morning Star News) – In an area of central India where tribal animists enlist Maoist militants to kill Christians who refuse to recant, Sodi Joga took it seriously when relatives threatened to kill him, his wife and 5-year-old daughter. “The villagers demanded that Joga and his family must partake in the cleansing ritual, a puja, which […]
CHENGDU (Church in Chains) — On Nov. 29, elder Qin Derfu of Early Rain Covenant Church (ERCC) in Chengdu, Sichuan province was sentenced to four years in prison for “illegal business operations.” It emerged at the trial that the charge related to 20,000 Christian books used by the church. The authorities reneged on a promise […]
(Evangelical Focus) — At least 14 people were killed in an attack on a Protestant church in eastern Burkina Faso on Sunday morning, the government said. “In these painful circumstances, the government of the Eastern region presents its condolences to the bereaved families and the Protestant community,” Saidou Sanou, governor of the region, said in […]
(Evangelical Focus) — Authorities of Ethiopia’s northern region of Amhara showed up at a gathering of the Ethiopian Fellowship of Evangelical students (IFES) in Debark and arrested an undisclosed number of participants, according to local sources. The police pressured students arrested to sign an agreement to never meet again in Debark, and then released them. […]
(Bitter Winter) — On June 19, over a dozen members of Fule Church, a place of worship that is not part of the state-run Three-Self Church in Jiamusi city in the northeastern province of Heilongjiang, were listening to an audio sermon by a South Korean pastor, when officials from the local Religious Affairs Bureau and […]