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.
BAGHDAD, IRAQ (ANS) — Iraqi Christians who have become targets of attacks by Muslim extremists and bandits are risking their lives to attend church services, ASSIST News Service (ANS) has established.
ACKSON, Miss. (BP)–Where there’s a will, there’s a way.
At least, that’s what the Mississippi Baptist Convention’s youth ministry team believes when it comes to getting the Ten Commandments into schools across the state.
After 20 weeks in a Saudi jail for participating in prohibited Christian activities, Eritrean Christian Girmaye Ambaye was deported from Jeddah by plane back to his home country on Saturday, August 9.
Two and one-half weeks after an Ethiopian Christian was deported from Saudi Arabia for alleged “Christian activities,” a fellow Christian prisoner of Eritrean citizenship remains jailed in Jeddah.
Six weeks after a Sudanese court jailed an Episcopal priest for refusing to tear down his own church, the Rev. Samuel Dobai Amum has been set free, with the legal process set in motion for his Khartoum North parish to obtain official ownership of its land.
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 zealous Christian preacher in the northern Nigeria city of Kano and six members of his family died in a house fire on April 22. Christian leaders in the city believe Muslim militants deliberately set the fatal blaze.
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.
More than 100 persons died when a Muslim mob attacked a Christian community in western Nigeria’s Adamawa state apparently in retaliation for the deaths of 16 Muslims three months ago.
Kurdish Christian Ziwar Mohammed Ismaeel was shot dead in front of his taxi stand last month in Zakho, the northern-most city in the Kurdish safe-haven of Northern Iraq.
WACO, Texas (Compass) — Imprisoned Christian aid workers Heather Mercer and Dayna Curry were freed from Afghanistan’s Taliban as the country fell, city by city, to opposition forces. But a homecoming worship service showed they haven’t forgotten believers still in captivity.
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.”
The hearing in the case to liquidate the Love Baptist Church in the Azerbaijani capital Baku was postponed yesterday (23 January), the church’s pastor Sary Mirzoyev told Keston News Service from Baku. The Narimanov district court had been due to hear the suit, brought by Rafik Aliev, chairman of the State Committee for Relations with Religious Organisations, in the afternoon of 23 January (see KNS 18 January 2002) but the court agreed to the defendant’s request to postpone the hearing because of ill health. Yahya Mamedov, the church’s deacon and administrator, suffers from diabetes. No date has yet been set for a new hearing, but it is likely to be in about ten days’ time.
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.
At about 8:00 p.m. on Sunday, January 5, 2003, approximately 10 unidentified men burst into the home of Brother Hua Huiqi and his wife, Ju Mei in Beijing. Forcing all of the members of the household, including Hua’s elderly parents, to lay on the floor, the attackers savagely beat the family, breaking one of the legs of Hua’s 80-year-old father. They then confiscated all of the home’s portable heaters, leaving the family to suffer from the cold of winter. It is believed that the intruders were either sent by the police or could even have been plain-clothes policemen.