Pastor Georgi Vyazovsky of Christ’s Covenant Reformed Baptist Church in Belarus was freed from a Minsk prison for Administrative Violations Code offenders shortly after midday local time today (13 March) on completion of a ten-day sentence for conducting religious worship in his own home.
The Washington, DC-based human rights group, International Christian Concern (ICC) www.persecution.org, has recently been informed that the government of Azerbaijan has destroyed an irreplaceable medieval Armenian Christian cemetery in the Djulfa region of Nakhichevan.
A so-called “documentary” televised regionally in Uzbekistan last summer has left entire communities convinced that a Protestant congregation is an “extremist” group worse than fundamentalist Islam.
Former Muslim residents in a remote village of the ex-Soviet union republic of Uzbekistan are being beaten, publicly humiliated and forced from their homes and jobs for converting to Christianity, a news agency investigation religious persecution said Friday, October 21.
Almost 600 Uzbek-language Christian leaflets for children distributed by Baptists have been destroyed in Uzbekistan after a court in Tashkent region ordered the destruction last month, BosNewsLife monitored Wednesday, September 7.
Baptists in Turkmenistan faced another difficult Sunday, July 31, after a private home where they gathered regularly was stormed by police who beat the handicapped host with her own Bible and threatened to hang her, human rights activists reported.
International concern was mounting Thursday, June 30, over the plight of Protestant Christians in Uzbekistan amid new reports of torture and apparent police reluctance to investigate the murder of an American Christian.
Christian Nail Kalinkin of Uzbekistan’s embattled Baptist leaning Bethany Church in the capital Tashkent was believed to be in jail Saturday, June 18, after he was sentenced to 15 days in prison last week for “illegally” teaching his faith, a human rights groups said, citing Protestant sources.
Now that the early May state holidays are over, the Minsk authorities are again pursuing measures against the charismatic New Life Church, ASSIST News Service has learned according to a report from Forum 18 News Service.
Dozens of opposition supporters were in jail Thursday, April 28, after a Belarusian court sentenced them for anti government protests, and Christians warned of more tensions in the troubled former Soviet republic.
Persecuted Evangelical Christians and missionary workers in Kyrgyzstan were awaiting a new dawn late Thursday, March 24, as lawmakers of this former Soviet republic appointed a new interim president, news reports suggested.
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.
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.
This week members of For Zion’s Sake, a ministry of Calvary Chapel Jerusalem, hoped to send another team from Jerusalem to the town of Beslan, North Ossetia, in southern Russia to comfort the survivors and families of victims of the terror attack on the school there.
Police in the Uzbek capital of Tashkent raided a Baptist church during Sunday worship on October 17, declaring the service an “illegal religious meeting” and demanding the pastor promise to stop all the church’s activities.
Pastor Bradley Antolovich, senior pastor of Calvary Chapel Jerusalem and father of five, watched helplessly as the horror at Beslan School #1 unfolded on television and various internet clips. The thought that these children could be his own welled up in him an unquenchable drive to reach out by going there.
Overwhelmed with messages of prayer and support, two pastors in Beslan, North Ossetia in southern Russia, have expressed their heartfelt thanks to all those who have written to them since the siege at the school in which hundreds, mostly children, were killed.
Jerusalem, Israel (Worthy News) — Pastor Bradley Antolovich, senior pastor of Calvary Chapel Jerusalem and father of five, watched helplessly as the horror at Beslan School #1 unfolded on television and various internet clips. The thought that these children could be his own welled up in him an unquenchable drive to reach out by going there. Simultaneously, two pastors in Moscow — Kostia Kretov and Kevin Macken — were also moved to go and comfort the survivors from the school and the minister to the families who lost loved ones in Beslan, North Ossetia, Russia.
Persecuted Christians in Turkmenistan began an uncertain week Monday, March 15, after autocratic President Saparmurat Niyazov announced he would allow all religious communities “to gain official registration” regardless of how many members they have.
It was back in 1999 that the Turkmenistan government declared its intention to “strangle minority faiths. All foreign Christians were expelled and the persecution of national believers, especially ethnic Turkmen, intensified intolerably.