PU’ER, Yunnan (ChinaAid) — A court in China’s southern Yunnan province sentenced a North Carolina pastor to seven years in prison Friday and heavily fined him on a trumped up charge of “organizing illegal border crossing.” His colleague also received a one-year jail sentence and a fine. John Cao, a North Carolina pastor well-respected for […]
(World Watch Monitor) — The father of a Nigerian Christian girl kidnapped from her school in February says he is torn between concern for his daughter and encouragement that she refuses her abductors’ demands that she abandon her Christian faith. The girl, identified as Leah Sharibu, 15, by International Christian Concern, is one of 110 […]
(World Watch Monitor) — An Ethiopian court has turned down the appeal of an evangelical Christian sentenced to seven months in prison for “causing outrage to religious peace and feeling.” In its verdict, published on March 19, the court upheld an earlier sentence given by a judge in the southern city of Arba Minch on […]
A string of vandalism cases have been reported by churches nationwide this month, from Georgia and North Carolina to Texas and California. “Why?” asked William Yeoman, a trustee at Providence Missionary Baptist Church in Belville, North Carolina. “Did God do anything to you? Did we do anything to you?” Windows were smashed at both Yeoman’s church, and […]
LAHORE, Pakistan (Morning Star News) – At least seven Christian worshippers were injured in an armed attack by local Muslims on a church service on Sunday (March 18) in southern Punjab Province, Pakistan, the pastor told Morning Star News. Pastor Haleem Feroze Masih of the King Jesus Church in Burewala, 155 miles (251 kilometers) southwest […]
MIANGO, Nigeria (Morning Star News) – Crestfallen, the 48-year-old Christian, sat in his house in Miango, central Nigeria, where three of his children were killed a week before. “These series of attacks have been carried out against us Christians in this area for some time now by these armed herdsmen, and we don’t know precisely why they […]
(Open Doors USA) — Nineteen-year-old Reena has never known anything else other than that persecution was part of being a Christian in India. Her parents came to faith when she was very young. “Nobody wanted to play with me because they were Hindus and I wasn’t,” she says, remembering how it was growing up as […]
SHYMKENT, Kazakhstan (Radio Free Europe) — A court in Kazakhstan has acquitted a woman who was charged with illegal missionary activity after she showed another person how to download the Bible on a smartphone. The South Kazakhstan Regional Court, in the city of Shymkent, found Dilobarkhon Sultanova not guilty on March 13. Continue reading this story […]
(World Watch Monitor) — Chandan Devi lay on the floor, her shoulder bruised from the blow she had just received. The last thing she remembers about that terrible day in her village in India was the loud bang of the door shutting behind her. The 35-year-old and mother of four—and now the widow of Aadarsh—wipes […]
GENEVA (World Watch Monitor) — The daughter of jailed US pastor Andrew Brunson appealed to the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in Geneva last week to help secure her father’s release from prison in Turkey, where he has been jailed for the past 17 months. Declaring that her father had been “falsely imprisoned for far […]