Some 2,000 survivors of an attack last week on a Christian village on Indonesia’s eastern island of Ambon are hiding under life-threatening conditions in a nearby jungle, according to the Missionary Service News Agency (MISNA).
Twenty-three Christians were massacred in Indonesia as they fled from their village in late July and early August, The Hindustan Times of India has reported. The report from Indonesia was relayed to U.S. media via Crosswalk.com, an Internet news and information site.
Reports of an “ethnic-cleaning” style religious war by Muslims against Christians on the Indonesian island of Ambon continue to be received from eyewitnesses on site.
China’s most famous house church prisoner, Mr. Xu Yongze, is free. The 58-year-old founder of the Born Again movement was released on May 16, after serving a three-year “re-education through labor” sentence for establishing an illegal organization in China.
Christians in Indonesia’s Maluku islands say their community remains under threat of extermination by thousands of trained Jihad troops that have entered the region since May.
A London-based pastor who has churches in Sri Lanka has issued an urgent prayer plea for Sri Lanka’s embattled evangelical Christian community.
(AgapePress) – Three conservative bishops in the Episcopal Church have been given an ultimatum. They have been ordered to start ordaining women into the priesthood or face disciplinary action.
Leaders of Christian communities who report they are under attack by jihad warriors in Indonesia’s Maluku islands are seeking emergency help from Europe.
Bomb blasts damaged two churches in India’s southern Karnataka state over the weekend as Christians across the nation staged marches and rallies to protest sectarian violence.
More than a year after Australian missionary Graham Staines and his two sons, Timothy and Phillip, were brutally murdered in Orissa state, Christians in India continue to be harassed and persecuted. And according to church leaders, the Sangh Parivar (family of Hindu fundamentalist groups) sponsors much of it in Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat. These states have become the laboratory of “Hindutva” (cultural nationalism).
Christians in Laos continue to suffer persecution from a government crackdown on believers, and they cannot visit friends or travel freely because the secret police follow them every everywhere. Some have been forced to recant their faith.
Two Chinese Protestant pastors accused of organizing an unauthorized Christian meeting are being held in labor camps near Beijing, a London-based religious rights group reported Thursday. Wang Li Gong, 34, and Yang Jing Fu, 36, are in two separate camps in Tianjing serving administrative sentences of one year, and one and one-half years, respectively, Christian Solidarity Worldwide said.
Reports from Laos say the number of Christians held by the government has dropped in recent months. Although the Lao Constitution provides for freedom of religion, the government continues to restrict the right to practice religion.
Two colleagues of prominent Chinese evangelist Li Dexian have been sentenced to 15 days in prison, an Australian-based monitoring group reported. Ah Yung and Ah Kong are among 13 Protestant house church members who have been arrested in the southern province of Guangdong since the weekend, according to the Sydney office of Voice of the Martyrs (VOM).
More than 60 Christians attending a two-day religious convention were beaten by a mob of suspected Hindu nationalists in a village about 100 miles northeast of Bombay. None of the injured were hospitalized.
by Alex Buchan LONDON (Compass) — Credible reports of seven Christians executed for their faith inside North Korea have reached reliable sources in China. The seven, all men ranging in age from 15 to 58 years of age, were executed in April. The circumstances surrounding their deaths cannot be revealed. North Korea, a fanatically communist state, continues to hound all religious believers. The U.S. Department of State’s 2000 Annual Report on International Religious Freedom said there were unconfirmed reports of 23 Christians executed between October 1999 and April 2000. Some say that a number of Christians were rounded up and … Read more
Christian communities in Indonesia’s Moluccas fear the onslaught of “religious cleansing” as some 3,000 extremist Muslim fighters prepare to converge on the archipelago, according to a British-based group that recently returned from a fact-finding mission. Many families already have fled to other islands as predominantly Christian villages have been razed, Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW) said.
Chinese police have detained 47 members of a Protestant group in central Anhui province, according to the state press. The Jianghui Morning Daily said last week that six of the main leaders of the Quanfanwei (Holistic) Church face criminal charges for organizing an illegal sect and illegal gatherings.
Since October 1999 some 23 Christians have been killed in public by firing squads on falsified criminal charges in North Korea reports Open Doors, the ministry begun 45 years ago by Brother Andrew, the Dutch-born author of “God’s Smuggler.”
Five house church leaders from the “Born Again” movement of Xu Yongze were arrested at their homes in China’s southern Henan province on December 27, 1999. Each was sentenced in February to two years hard labor, according to reliable sources inside the province. Another full-time evangelist — not with the same movement — was arrested in Guiyang and also given two years hard labor. Relatives asked that the names of those sentenced be withheld.