Luis Alberto Vera was released last month from Bellavista National Jail, a maximum security prison in Medellín, Colombia, in time to spend Christmas with his young family. Vera, however, remains under house arrest at the Biblical Seminary of Medellín.
Authorities in Minsk are close to obtaining sufficient grounds under Belarusian law to close down the charismatic New Life Church, after issuing it an official warning on 30 December against using a cowshed the church owns for worship.
Christian leaders in northern Nigeria say a report released in December by the government of Kano state grossly underreports the number of Christians killed by Muslim militants in violent attacks last year. Estimates of the value of churches and homes destroyed in the clashes are also much too low, leaders claim.
Fresh violence broke out in the central Nigerian state of Plateau when Muslim militants attacked the village of Gana-Ropp in the Barakin Ladi local government area, killing Christian community leader Davou Bulle and injuring his wife and son, who remain in critical condition at the Plateau state Specialist Hospital in Jos.
Anwer Masih was acquitted in Lahore last month by a Judicial Magistrate’s Court, making him the first Pakistani Christian ever acquitted of blasphemy in Pakistan’s lower courts.
China has announced a new law, which comes into effect on March 1, governing the freedom of religion.
The Egyptian Christian director of a home for troubled Coptic girls goes on trial January 16 on criminal charges before Cairo’s Abbassiya Criminal Court No. 15.
Sources in Vietnam have informed Compass that the People’s Supreme Court in Ho Chi Minh City will hear the appeals of the Rev. Nguyen Hong Quang and evangelist Pham Ngoc Thach on February 2. This represents the final appeal option available to the defendants; however, the high court has virtually never reversed a lower court decision.
Representatives of the Paris Elim Church will be going to court in order to continue worshipping in their current location. Paris Elim church representatives are going to be in court on Wednesday, January 19 and Friday, January 28, 2005.
Stories are coming in to Christian Aid from missionaries in South Asia of how believers have been affected by-and in some cases miraculously spared from-the tsunami tragedy.
Sixty members of the Rema Charismatic Church in the Eritrean capital of Asmara have been arrested and jailed for holding a New Year’s Eve celebration in the home of one of their church leaders.
Gospel for Asia workers are rushing food, clothing, medical supplies-and the love of God-to millions of Asians still in deep shock from a disaster spawned by the most powerful earthquake in 40 years.
Police in Indonesia pledged today to provide tighter security for churches during Christmas and New Year celebrations, after one of their own was arrested in connection with the murder of a Christian village chief on the island of Sulawesi.
A Hindu fundamentalist group has accused a Christian school in Sukma district, Chhattisgarh, of forcibly distributing copies of the New Testament to students with intent to convert them.
Opposition to Christian evangelism on the campuses of two Nigerian institutions of higher learning has resulted in the murder of Sunday Nache Achi, a fourth-year architectural student at Abubakar Tafawa Balewa University in the northern city of Bauchi.
Assailants simultaneously attacked two churches in the town of Palu, Central Sulawesi, during church services on Sunday night, injuring at least three people.
Hindu villagers have constructed a temple on the grounds of St. John’s Church of England in Jatni in the eastern state of Orissa, India, triggering a knotty battle over the rights of minority Christians.
Villagers on a small Indonesian island who recently joined a search for their missing pastor found only a red T-shirt with three bullet holes in it, lying on the beach near his home.
Buddhist monks in Sri Lanka have declared a “fast unto death” beginning December 12 if the government does not concede to a proposed constitutional amendment and the adoption of anti-conversion laws.
A brutal attack on a Christian book publisher in Ukraine has underscored the high stakes struggle over human rights and religious liberty in the former Soviet republic preparing for a re-run of a sharply contested presidential election.