Morning Star News, August 13, 2018

About an hour before midnight on July 31, three policemen and a Hindu neighbour barged into the home of a Christian woman, Anita Rajak, in northern India and ordered her and her husband to either give them money or go to jail.

 The officers told them they couldn’t pray in their house and had come to arrest them.

 They had no money, so they took her husband, Pappu, and another Christian to their Jeep.

 She headed to the police station in the morning and Christian friends stayed with her until police released the two Christians.

  “They had beaten my husband on his face and back while he was in custody.”

  “A Hindu family brought their daughter possessed by evil spirits to us some months ago.  My husband and I prayed for her and she was freed,” Rajak said. “The entire family decided to follow Christ and joined us for worship regularly, but the Hindu neighbours accused us, saying we forcefully convert people, and they beat my husband severely.”

Morning Star News, July 25, 2018

Three children kidnapped in 2015 in eastern Uganda were found in May, malnourished and showing signs of having been indoctrinated in Islam.

Had the children not escaped, they might have been forced into a foreign terrorist group, their father, Badiru Madengho, told Morning Star News.

“It seems the person who took my children had an intention of Islamizing them as well as wanting them to join a terrorist group,” said Madengho, a convert from Islam. “Thank God for saving my children in a miraculous way. Though the children looked miserable, the God who saved them is able to restore them back to good, sound mind.”

Their father suspected Islamists kidnapped them after they came for him but found only the children, who were 10, 7 and 5 years old respectively at the time.

“It has been quite a long period of time looking for my children – I had given up,” Madengho told Morning Star News. “My faith in God had diminished but thank God for sustaining my children. I am very grateful to all the Christians who have continually prayed for us and the children.”

Barnabas News, 24 July 2018

A Christian was sworn in as Malaysia’s top judge on 11 July 2018.

 Tan Sri (Sir) Richard Malanjum has been appointed Chief Justice of the country’s Federal Court and is thought to be the first Christian to hold the post. Before being promoted to the Federal Court in 2015, the 65-year-old was chief judge of Sabah and Sarawak on the island of Borneo. Sarawak is the only state in Malaysia where Christians are more numerous than Muslims, and Sabah also has traditionally had a strong Christian presence.  

 Tan Sri Malanjum has previously argued strongly in favour of Malaysian Christian converts from Islam being allowed to officially change their religion, i.e. without having to go through Malaysia’s sharia court system which would leave them open to being prosecuted for apostasy from Islam.

World Watch Monitor, July 26, 2018

Churches in China are becoming more careful over who they let in to their buildings, as government pressure increases, and a local source says the authorities are “trying to stir up larger more influential churches” to see how the people will react.

The government is especially wary of “high profile” churches that have access to international networks and is also closing some church venues.  More landlords are refusing to continue rental contracts with churches.

2 weeks ago, a Bible Reformed Church was forced to stop its meeting for a third time in a month following a police raid – some of the Christians were arrested for questioning.  The church was also fined 50,000 yuan (US $7,500).

While China has accumulated wealth and emerged as a major player on the world stage, the underlying dark spirits of atheistic Marxism have not disappeared.

Barnabas Fund, 11 July 2018

There has been a troubling incident where, once again, at the order of St Paul’s officials in London, a man was apparently arrested outside the Cathedral for simply reading aloud the King James Bible. This is almost the very translation of the Bible that Tyndale was martyred for almost 500 years ago. 

The man asked the policeman why he was being told to move on while other people were standing there talking, before adding he was a preacher and had been reading the King James Bible there for weeks.  The police officer told him, “I haven’t got a problem with what you are doing, but staff here have asked you to move off of the property.”  When the preacher continues to politely protest, the officer says, “Then I will arrest you for a breach of the peace.”

 In February 2017, a CPS lawyer told Bristol magistrates court, in relation to the arrest of a street preacher in Bristol, that publicly quoting from the King James Bible “in the context of modern British Society, must be considered to be abusive and is a criminal matter”.

 This disturbing trend against public preaching and Bible reading is evidence of the gradual erosion of Religious Freedom taking place in the UK.

Barnabas News, 10 July 2018

Anxious to avoid jeopardising the peace talks before the summit between President Trump and Chairman Kim Jong-un, South Korea clamped down on a twelve-year-long effort of Christians to send Bibles and Scriptural materials by balloon into North Korea.

GPS tracking had confirmed that thousands of Bible-filled flash drives, donated by US students, were successfully dropped into North Korean territory.

Koreans living in China have been carrying out missionary activity for the last 20 years, ministering to North Koreans visiting family in China or having escaped across the border.

The mission team teaches new Christians the Lord’s Prayer, the Apostles’ Creed as well as Bible verses, and sends them back into North Korea to share the Gospel – at risk of imprisonment.

Barnabas News, 10 July 2018

Christian business owners in a predominately Christian Iraqi neighbourhood must pay an extra fee to renew their business licences.

According to the local news site Ankawa Today, the tax is being “exclusively imposed by the Kurdish government on the people of Ankawa and not the other Kurdish towns” and is “clearly discriminatory against Christians”.

Christian residents and business owners claim they are also charged 10% tax when they sell their properties, compared with only 6% in other towns, and are facing discrimination including harassment by the KDP political police.

The news comes amid warnings this week that the number of Christians has fallen by two-thirds in Iraq due to violence during Saddam Hussein’s fall and the rise of Islamic State. It is estimated that there were 1.5 million Christians in Iraq before 2003, but fewer than 375,000 today.

BBC, 1 July 2018

When an imam in Nigeria saw hundreds of desperate, frightened families running into his village, he decided to risk his life to save theirs.  They were fleeing from a neighbouring village – a mainly Christian community.

About 300 suspected cattle herders, mostly Muslims,  had started shooting and burning down their homes.

The imam hid 262 men, women and children in his home and mosque.  The armed men stormed into the Muslim village chasing those who had fled the Christian village and demanded that the imam bring out those he was hiding.

But the defenceless imam refused to comply, refused to allow the armed men into the mosque, pleaded with them, and threw himself on the floor in front of them.  He began to cry and wail, asking them to leave, and to his amazement the herdsmen did go.

He later told the BBC that he wanted to help because more than 40 years ago, the Christians in the area had allowed the Muslims to build the mosque and had freely given over the land to the Muslim community.

World Watch Monitor, June 29, 2018

Christian groups have welcomed an announcement by a Buddhist chief state minister in north-east India that a 1978 law preventing conversions from one faith to another will soon be repealed.

Between the 1960s and 1980s some Christians in the state were subjected to torture, public beatings and detention, as their activity was resisted amid concerns of exploitation and the erosion of traditional cultures.

The 1978 act prohibits “conversion from one religious faith to any other”.  However since its enactment the proportion of Christians in the state has shot up as thousands of followers of tribal religions embraced Christianity.