Whats On

Blythswood Update – June 13th 2019

Talita Kum

Adrian Poppa, the Director of Talita Kum, has been doing a summer camp for HIV-affected young adults for several years now.   About 35 attend his Bible-based camps.

He also runs summer camps for the children who have attended Talita Kum 1 and 2 during the school year.

The Talita Kum children’s Bible-based play at the city fair on June 1st was a huge success with 500 in the audience, including half of the school children of Jimbolia.

Only 1/3 of the available EU funds for this area of Romania have so far been applied for, which raises the chances of Adrian’s own application being successful.

Approval of the application would allow them to pay their teachers a fairer wage.

 

Daniel Centre

Balazs was very encouraged by how his report to the Blythswood Trustees was received and affirmed in Evanton last month.    

The Centre has now located the Christianity Today course in the Romanian language and will start doing this at lunchtime on Sundays in September.

The Centre’s fire and safety licence is due for renewal in September 2020.  Corruption, which was declared a national emergency in Romania when it first joined the EU, can delay the granting or renewal of such licences, but Balazs has not been asked for a bribe since beginning with Blythswood in 2002.

The young man (Istvan) has not adapted well to life in the Centre and will now go to live with his aunt instead.

Whats On

Indian Christian freed on bail after 10 years – June 13th 2019

World Watch Monitor, May 22, 2019  

Nearly 100 Christians were killed, 300 churches and 6,000 Christian homes damaged in Odisha after the killing of a Hindu Swami on 23 August 2008.

By the end of that year, seven Christians were arrested and, in 2013, found guilty of the murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.  The convictions shocked India’s Christian community, still reeling after the deadly attacks.

Gornath Chalanseth, one of the seven, was freed on bail by India’s Supreme Court on May 21.

After greeting his family, Chalanseth was ushered into a nearby church and shouted his thanksgiving, tears of joy running down his cheeks.  “Gradually I found solace in prayer. Prayer gave me peace of mind and I always remained disciplined in the jail,” Gornath said.

Impressed by his conduct, jail officials made him ‘wall guard’ to watch over 40 prisoners in the jail that had over 400 prisoners.  As news of the bail came, the jail chief asked Gornath: “How will we find a replacement for you as wall guard?”

Whats On

Barnabas Update – June 13th 2019

Assyrian Church in Iran shut down

Barnabas Fund, 4 June 2019

Iranian security agents stormed into a 100-year-old Assyrian church and tore the cross from its tower in Tabriz in the north-west Syria on 9 May.

They changed the locks, installed monitoring equipment and “made it clear that no longer the Assyrian people are allowed to hold any worship service there.

The pastor has called on Christians worldwide to send letters to Iranian embassies in a “strong wave of protest”.

The church had been officially seized by a court order in 2011, but worshippers had been allowed to continue using the building.

The persecution began last Christmas when government agents prevented local pastors in nearby cities and Tehran from visiting Tabriz to hold worship services. 

Historic Assyrian and Armenian Christian minorities who have their own languages, not spoken by the Muslim majority, are usually allowed to worship freely in those languages.

Whats On

Violence in the Central African Republic – June 13th 2019

Christian Solidarity Worldwide, June 9, 2019

Between 15 November 2018 and 4 December, there were two unprecedented attacks on church-run Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps.

More than 40 people were killed in an attack on the Sacred Heart Catholic Cathedral in Alindao Town and 2 children at a similar cap in Ippy Town. 

The camps were open to all people, regardless of their ethnicity or religion.  Everything was burned, and there was a level of despair which was really heart-breaking.

On 6 February, seven armed groups signed a new peace agreement negotiated by the African Union.  It did not include amnesties for armed groups such as those targeting the IDP camps, and those can consequently be brought to justice.

Whats On

Jacksons Update – June 13th 2019

Pray that Sunday Agang from Nigeria, who heads the NetACT project to produce a textbook on African public theology, will be able to get visas for Angola and for Kenya to make valuable contributions to the meetings Fraser has organised for the end of June.

 Fraser now has visas for his trip to Angola and Kenya, but is still experiencing problems with his scheduled flights to Angola.  He is also concerned that he will pitch his training material at the right level and avoid cross-cultural confusion.  (He has to have his materials in Portuguese for Angola and in English for Kenya.)

 The men in Drakenstein Maximum who took part in the Restorative Justice process are having follow-up sessions and need greater understanding, honesty and courage to change.

 Ruth finishes exams on Friday. Pray that we’ll be able to clarify her next step before Dawn returns to South Africa. Pray for relationships and the partings that are so much a part of life overseas.

Whats On

Blythswood Update – May 30th 2019

Talita Kum

Adrian Poppa, the Director of Talita Kum, has been busy preparing a detailed application for EU funding which is critical to the ongoing development of Talita Kum from its present 2 houses to the projected 4. 

The 4 houses, when completed, will serve children all the way through primary and secondary school and begin to give the young people life skills as well as homework help with their formal education before they leave school.

Talita Kum is also dedicated to making sure that children who don’t make it to being part of the intellectual elite are also valued for who they are.

 

Daniel Centre

Balazs, the Director of the Daniel Centre, visited Evanton this week to submit and discuss his report for the Blythswood Trustees, hoping to demonstrate that the Daniel Centre is value for the money it receives.   

The Centre has just interviewed three new candidates for admission and two of the applicants look very positive.  The third young man has some attitude problems which could make him more of a disruptive presence, so decisions have to be made.

Another young man (Istvan) who has been in the Centre for 6 months is still jobless and was sent home from his latest job trial after 2 days for being too slow.

Whats On

Pastor Abraham Ben Moses Released – May 30th 2019

Voice of the Martyrs, 16 May 2019

Pastor Abraham Ben Moses has been released from prison this month after spending two years behind bars for blasphemy in Indonesia.

Pastor Abraham was first arrested in December 2017 after a YouTube video of him surfaced teaching about the differences between the Bible and the Koran. The video was seen as offensive.

As an ex-professor of Islamic studies, Pastor Abraham knows Islam better than most, but he found hope when he converted to Christianity in 2005 after he read the Bible.

Raised a Muslim, he studied religious comparison before teaching Islam at university and raised his family with a devout Muslim faith.

After he received Christ, Pastor Abraham was radically changed and began preaching and evangelising almost immediately.

While in prison, he continued to minister to prisoners, saw around 60 people come to Christ and trained some to be Christian teachers.

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Barnabas Update – May 30th 2019

Christians freed by court in Nepal

 

Barnabas Fund, 22 May 2019

 

Four Christians were released from custody on 29 April after a court hearing in Nepal, six days after they were accused of trying to “lure conversions” to Christianity.

 

The two Nepali men and one Indian national had been working with a US woman to train local pastors in the Dang district in midwestern Nepal.

 

 

The four faced charges under the new “anti-conversion” law, according to a Barnabas Fund source, but were released after the court hearing, in a case victory celebrated by local Christian leaders.

Whats On

Hope For Mexico’s Children – May 30th 2019

Christian Solidarity Worldwide, 7 May 2019

 

Last Tuesday was Children’s Day in Mexico. As part of our Faith and a Future campaign, we brought Alma to Mexico City to share her story.  Alma, like so many, has missed out on her education because of religious discrimination.

 

Alma met with government and embassy officials and even attended a special breakfast with the Mexican President, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. 

 

During a very emotional meeting, Tania Ramírez Hernández, of the National Council to Prevent Discrimination told Alma: “We owe you an apology, this country owes you an apology… We have certainly failed in the process, but we are here to protect you, so that your trajectory in life is what you want it to be.”

 

Please join us in praying that the meetings, which were the first of their kind to tackle this issue in Mexico, would be an important first step towards ensuring that no child misses out on a fair education because of their faith.

Whats On

Human Rights Abuse in Eritrea – May 30th 2019

Christian Solidarity Worldwide, May 25, 2019 

 

In October 2018, Eritrea was elected to serve on the UN Human Rights Council, despite having one of the worst human rights records in the world.  12% of the country’s population have fled.

 

Six prominent Christian leaders have been imprisoned incommunicado for over a decade and represent only a tiny proportion of Christians, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Muslims detained in the country.

 

The Christian leaders included the president of the 120 Full Gospel churches, a lecturer in Mathematics who is Chair of the Eritrean Evangelical Alliance, and the country’s only psychiatrist.

 

In July 2018, 48 people filmed listening to an Ethiopian evangelist were arrested although some of them were not believers but simply passers-by.

 

Etritrea is currently working hard to end the mandate of the UN’s Special Rapporteur who is responsible for recording human rights abuses in the country.