Talita Kum

3 more teachers are required to cope with the needs of Talita Kum.  Most of the teachers have already taught in a government school from 08.00 to 12.00 before helping the children in TK from 13.00 to 17.00 – a spiritual vocation.

Once TK3 and TK4 are built, and a direct link between them and TK 1 & 2 demonstrated, EU funding is promised for full operational costs of the 4 houses for 3 years.

The fund application forms require hours of work, and the lady consultant for the building of TK3 and TK4 has now gone missing (possibly because of work overload).  Pray for her and for a new consultant.

Daniel Centre

There is a regular Monday House Meeting to resolve any conflicts and work on personality development, a Sunday lunch with a Christianity Explored course beginning on April 28, and a Friday evening After Care meeting for former residents, which some current residents now like to attend.

André is a new resident and the Centre hopes that he will quickly become a real group member.  Floreen hopes to join the centre when he turns 18 in June.  80-90% of the residents are from the Roma community.

Morning Star News April 9, 2019 

Sheikh Hassan Podo, a 28-year-old imam in a village in eastern Uganda, missed mosque prayers for 3 consecutive weeks.

He had kept his faith in Christ a secret, but a young Muslim who saw Podo enter a church building reported him to his family.

When Podo arrived home, his family interrogated him and began shouting, beating and insulting him as an ‘infidel’ and enemy of the Islamic religion.”

“Neighbours arrived at the scene of attack and helped Podo to escape,” a source said. “He bled as he fled for his life. Later he was found in a pool of blood, unconscious.”

Rushed to a clinic, he was discharged after 2 days and taken to a pastor.  His wife and two children later joined him at an undisclosed location.

Before his conversion, Podo was part of a Muslim extremist group that had attacked a Ugandan church congregation.

Christian girl sold to Muslim to return home

Barnabas Fund, 12 April 2019

A 14-year-old Christian girl, kidnapped, sold to a Muslim and forced to marry him is to be returned to her parents in Pakistan.  She had to endure a forced conversion to Islam before the illegal marriage to Zafar Iqbal in February.

Police brought the girl into Lahore High Court on 10 April and Justice Tariq Saleem Shaikh ordered she be reunited with her parents.

She was snatched in nearby Faisalabad and having purchased her, Iqbal renamed her “Ayesha”, and married her despite the girl being two years under the legal age, which is 16 for women in Pakistan.

Non-Muslim girls and young women in Pakistan are very vulnerable to kidnap, forced conversion and marriage to Muslims, and authorities rarely intervene.

A report compiled by a Pakistani NGO in 2014 estimated that every year about 700 Christian and 300 Hindu girls and young women in Pakistan suffer similar abuse.

OMF Scottish Prayer Diary, April 2019

We give thanks to God that on Saturday, 23^rd February, 3000 Christians gathered in the Cambodian capital of Pnomh Penh with no problems from the police.

This was a pre-rally for the visit of evangelist Franklin Graham (son of the late Billy Graham) which is scheduled for November 2019.

Please pray that this visit would be embraced and properly prepared for by the Cambodian churches to maximise its impact.

Pray for many to attend the planned meetings, hear the good news of Jesus for the first time, and be followed up well by local churches.

Christian Institute, March 15, 2019

Chinese officials have accused the West of trying to use Christianity to influence China’s culture and “subvert” the Government.

They warn that Christians must now follow ‘a Chinese model’ of the religion which includes a state-approved translation of the Bible.

Since President Xi Jinping took office in 2013, the Government has significantly tightened restrictions on religion.

China aims to eradicate all foreign influences from Chinese culture and has said that churches must teach the core values of socialism and base their worship practices on Chinese culture.

Earlier this year it was reported that Chinese officials censored the first commandment – “You shall have no other gods before me” – claiming that it contradicted the policy of President Xi Jinping.

Pray for Fraser’s as he builds the library portal, and for training sessions in different nations, when government elections can lead to participants being unwilling to travel as the prospect of violence is very real. 

Pray for the safety of warders after a warder was killed and another hospitalised in an Eastern Cape prison.  This is having a ripple effect throughout prisons in South Africa.   

Give thanks for the Christian prison workers, one of whom was recently attacked (not for the first time).  Pray that his attacker will come to real repentance and restoration.

Remember Andile Mafanga who is sure he has been made a scapegoat for being the wrong colour and being in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Pray that he will continue to cling to God for himself and his family.

Also Jan Booysen who became a Christian in 2013 and is now a humble and sensitive leader as he reaches out to others (even warders call him in if someone seems suicidal). Pray that he will be allowed to train others as his assistants.

Another Restorative Justice Course will run in Drakenstein May 6-11.  We need people and churches to provide lunches during the course, important for breaking down barriers in love.   £55-£82 provides a non-prison issue lunch for 24-28 inmates, 15 ministry personnel and 5 prison officers.

Talita Kum

Each Talita Kum house can cope with a maximum of 40 children and is staffed from noon till 6p.m. by local school teachers after they finish their morning work in the state schools.  A new member of staff has now been added and this has relieved pressure on the others.

The City Council of Jimbolia has granted them a building to house Talita Kum 3 & 4, with space for an after-school trainee hairdressing salon and a computer training area.

Adrian Poppa has to apply to the EU by mid-May for operational costs (mainly staff salaries) for Talita Kums 2, 3 & 4, but has had positive feedback already with the granting of the new building.

Daniel Centre

It is a 6-hour road journey from the Daniel Centre in Cluj to Talita Kum in Jimbolia.    

The converting of the Daniel Centre to independent flats means that they can now house a maximum of 9 young men who are mostly from the local area around Cluj.  One member of staff has been made redundant but that puts more pressure on those who remain.

The young man with mental health issues has broken his arm for the second time, again amazingly in his bed.  But he is now emotionally in a better place.  Continue to pray for divine intervention in his life.

World Watch Monitor, March 19, 2019 

The UN’s Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) barely mentions in their documents and declarations how far women find themselves marginalized due to their religious belief.

Yet 83% of global women identify with a religious faith, according to the Pew Research Center.  Gender-specific persecution research done by Open Doors International seems to be the only research looking at this in detail. Yet millions of women face this double discrimination, for their faith and their gender, every day.

Women are targeted for their faith in 42 out of 77 countries where, to enforce religious norms, violence is used against religious minorities.

Sexual assault, forced marriage and rape are the most-reported pressures experienced for their faith by Christian women in 57% of the countries surveyed in the latest report from Open Doors. 

Governments and non-state actors sometimes perpetrate or tolerate these injustices to intimidate or drive out disfavoured religious groups, as in the cases of Yazidi women in IS-controlled territory, and religious and ethnic minorities, including Rohingya Muslims and Kachin Christians, in Burma.

Biblically illiterate Home Office slammed

Barnabas Fund, 26 March 2019

An Iranian man seeking refuge in the UK has had his claim refused by the Home Office who informed him in a letter that his decision to convert to what he described as “peaceful” Christianity and to leave Islam because “[in it] there is violence, rage and revenge” was “inconsistent”.

The letter, described as “unbelievably offensive” by the man’s immigration caseworker, cites excerpts from the Bible – including Exodus, Matthew and Revelation – and states, “these examples are inconsistent with your claim that you converted to Christianity after discovering it is a peaceful religion”.

In a staggering display of Biblical ignorance, the Home Office official quoted examples from Revelation, without any regard for the context of the verses, in the letter as evidence that Christian Scripture is “filled with imagery of revenge, death, destruction and violence”.

Nathan Stevens, from the legal firm representing the asylum seeker, asked, “Whatever your views on faith, how can a government official arbitrarily pick bits out of a holy book and then use them to trash someone’s heartfelt reason for coming to a personal decision to follow another faith?”

Morning Star News, March 29, 2019

Nearly two months after Hindu extremists in India humiliated, beat the 39 adults of the fellowship and tried to force the Christians to praise a Hindu god, one of the Christians is still in hiding.  The attackers had later gone to the homes of the assaulted Christians, threatening further injuries if they obtained medical help or reported the attack to police.

The brutality of the assault was so severe that the church members still tremble at the mention of it. Brandishing large wooden sticks, the assailants walked into the house at about 2 p.m. and began reviling and striking the Christians.  The hour-long attack included beatings that went on for more than half an hour.

Many of the assailants belonged to the Bajrang Dal, the Hindu extremist youth wing of the World Hindu Council (VHP).

They forced the Christians to lick their feet with their tongues and tried to force them to say, ‘Jai Shri Ram [Hail, lord Ram].’  Three Christians complied, but the rest of them refused and said that they would rather die.