Christians in Pakistan Won’t Allow Persecution to Stop Them from Celebrating Easter

  I praise God for their courage. We need more examples of that these days.  

3/29/2013 Pakistan (ICN) - Fear and violence will not prevent Christians of Pakistan to celebrate with great devotion, and massive presence, Easter. Mgr Joseph Coutts, Archbishop of Lahore and President of the Episcopal Conference, said: "At Easter, our churches will be packed. The faith of the faithful is alive and strong: violence or attacks, such as that of Joseph Colony in Lahore, have the effect of strengthening it even more."

Archbishop Coutts is convinced that Christians in Pakistan will continue to give a strong testimony: "Let us not lose hope, we know that the Lord is with us and the faithful themselves, even in difficult moments, encourage all priests: the Catholic laity in Pakistan is growing."
The incident of Joseph Colony, where 178 homes of the faithful were burned by a Muslim mob, for an alleged blasphemy case, has not discouraged the faithful in Lahore.

Fr. Bonnie Mendes told Fides: "the atmosphere, despite the tragic violence, is of great optimism and there is a will to rebuild or repair their homes. The reconstruction is being carried out very quickly, people are going back to their homes, the provincial government gave compensation and in a few days, working day and night, more than 30 families have already rebuilt their homes. Caritas is also helping the homeless a lot (Source).

Two Christian Women Detained For Distributing Gospel Tracts in China

(Bazhou, Xinjiang–March 27, 2013) Two Christian women who had printed and were distributing Gospel tracts in the far western region of Xinjiang were held under administrative detention for 10 days and have hired a lawyer to seek a review of their case, ChinaAid has learned.

Wang Yuxia and Zhang Xiaocun were released from their 10 days of administrative detention on March 8 and have retained a rights defense lawyer and have applied for an administrative review of their case in an effort to protect their right to religious freedom in accordance with the law.

The two women, who are passionate about evangelization, had printed up a large number of tracts about the history of Christianity, the Christian faith and the benefits to society of believing in Christianity, and were distributing them in a law-abiding manner on Feb. 25 in the town of Qixing (Seven Stars), the village of Naimudong, in the Group Two area when they were taken into custody by officers from the Qixing police station at about 3 p.m.  They were sentenced to administrative detention the same day.

While they were in detention, the family members of the two women received "Notification to Detainee's Family Members," and when they were released, the two women received their "Administrative Penalty Decision" and their "Statement of Release from Detention."  The two women have now, with the help of their lawyer, drafted an "Application for Administrative Reconsideration" in compliance with the legal procedure for a review(Source). 

The Hypocrisy of Muslim Discrimination against Christians in Pakistan

 

3/14/2013 Pakistan (Pakistan Today) - Two hundred houses were looted and burnt – Bibles were burnt to ash and crosses put to flame – by a mob of over 2,000 Muslims at Joseph Colony, Badami Bagh in Lahore. At the heart of it was a drunken exchange of abuses between two men: a Muslim and a Christian. Somehow, after one day of silence, the exchange was reported to have involved certain allegedly ‘blasphemous’ remarks against the Prophet (PBUH). Sunni Tehreek activists entered the fray to act as ‘witnesses’ to the apparent quarrel in the Christian’s bilSourceliards shop.

First: the accused’s father was arrested under mob pressure last Friday, then the accused turned himself in. However, the climate was reported to have been amplified by the entry of certain external actors and police officials asked the over 200 Christian families in Joseph Colony to leave. They did. The next morning, it was as if police had invited the mob to ransack, loot and burn Joseph Colony as they stood and watched. Media got a full out view of the mob attack. And slowly but surely viewers began to react and condemn the incident – but while confined to drawing rooms. The homes that were burnt were not ours.

We would call the violence: “outrageous”, “madness”, “shameful” but it would not force us to get out of our homes – or even question the everyday practices which cause such an event. Surely, the daily discrimination against Christians, labelling of them as ‘untouchables’ – let alone questioning the perimeters of the blasphemy law is what the debate should have been about. “The violence was wrong but the accused must still be punished” was the view many presented on the day. The fact that a drunk man’s testimony – let alone accusation – has little weight in the due process of law. To the mob who burnt down Joseph Colony “the drunk Muslim was upholding the honour of their Prophet”.
The irony in the ground reality was lost on most Muslim Pakistanis – but certainly not on the city’s 500,000 strong Christian community. Protests began the same day and lasted till Tuesday. But more reason for outrage should have been found. The same police force that stood by and watched 3,000 people loot and plunder Joseph Colony, fired over 500 tear gas canisters on Youhanabad, the largest Christian settlement in the country, with over 4,000 households. Over a hundred Christians were arrested at a point when no one had been arrested for the Joseph Colony mob attack. Policemen in riot gear told a reporter in this newspaper: “These are choorhas.”

The term evoking the severe caste-based discrimination prevalent in the subcontinent Muslims maintains that Christians/choorhas (used interchangeably) are ‘untouchables’. This was clearly the basis of the Asia Bibi case which came to light in late 2010 and by early 2011 had resulted in the murder of both the then Punjab Governor Salmaan Taseer and Minorities Minister Shahbaz Bhatti. Having spent two months back then trying to get to the bottom of the case, the only undisputed fact was that the cleric and two accusing ladies believed that “Christians could not shake hands with Muslims, let alone eat with them”. The principle the public protests against the demand for her release defended was not the honour of the Prophet (PBUH) but the right to maintain the status of Christians as ‘untouchables’(Source).

Five Christians, Including Children, Shot Dead in Nigeria

          

3/20/2013 Nigeria (ChristianToday) - Christian children fleeing from gunmen saved their lives by hiding among the rock formations towering over the eastern side of this northern village, but a 6-month-old baby and a 13-year-old girl never got the chance.

The infant, Alexander Blessed, and the girl, Happiness Adamu, were the youngest of five people from five churches who were slain. Christians were still gathered in and about a home where a funeral for the village chief had taken place in the predominantly Muslim state of Kaduna when, under cover of darkness on a Saturday night (Feb. 23), marauding, black-clad gunmen arrived from the west and began firing.

Eleven Christians were hospitalized with wounds, including Martha Blessed, who was shot as she tried to protect her infant son. Bullets broke both legs of another 13-year-old Christian girl, Gloria Livinus, of St. Patrick’s Catholic Church in Aduwan. The raid came as a shock as area Christians had been living without enmity toward anyone, said John Audi, 45-year-old grandson of the village chief and a member of St. Patrick’s church.

“We were all scattered, and some that were shot were crying,” he told Morning Star News. “We all ran for cover where we believed we could avoid being hit by the bullets.”

Witnesses reportedly said the gunmen spoke in Fulani dialect, but church leaders said the area had been free of the land and property conflicts that have marked relations between Muslim, ethnic Fulanis and predominantly Christian tribes. Islamic extremist groups have increasingly incited Fulani Muslims to attack Christian areas, and witnesses reportedly said the assailants carried sophisticated weapons. Area church leaders questioned how the shooting could have gone on for three hours without response from authorities in a north-central state that has been blanketed with military security forces to counteract terrorist violence.

“This village was attacked for three hours, yet no help came to our people here,” said the Rt. Rev. Danlami Bello, bishop of the First African Church, Kafanchan Diocese, whose headquarters are in Aduwan. “These attacks have gone unhindered without security agencies coming to the scenes of the attacks to assist Christian victims.”

As did others, he suspected a strong religious element to the attack.
“There is no doubt that this attack, like many others on Christian communities in northern Nigeria, had religious bearings,” he said. “There is this desire by Muslim leaders in Nigeria to Islamize the country by force; hence the attacks are aimed at forcing Christians into submitting to Islam.”

The Rev. Casmir Yabo, vicar of the First African Church Mission in Aduwan, told Morning Star News that church members who hid in farmlands west of the village reported seeing about 10 assailants leaving after the attack.

“We believe that the attackers are Muslim Fulani gunmen who invaded and attacked this village. I wept as I saw corpses of the five killed for no justifiable reason,” said Yabo. “The impact of the attack is that at the moment our members are scared of coming to churches for worship services.”

The attack came two days after a similar slaughter of 10 people in village near Jos in Plateau state.
Besides hit-and-run attacks by Fulani Muslims, Christians in Nigeria have also been targeted by the Islamic extremist Boko Haram group in its effort to destabilize the government and impose sharia (Islamic law) nationwide. Christians make up 51.3 percent of Nigeria’s population of 158.2 million and live mainly in the south, while Muslims account for 45 percent and reside primarily in the north. Nigerians practicing indigenous religions may be as high as 10 percent of the total population, according to Operation World, so the percentages of Christians and Muslims may be less.
Attempted Bombing Raymond Markus, 31-year-old uncle to Happiness Adamu, told Morning Star News that the villagers had no reason to expect the onslaught.

“We were all gathered here while prayers were being said when suddenly, we were attacked,” he said. “We all ran in different directions. We are still in shock about this attack.”
He said that his slain niece was a faithful servant of Christ.
“It is a painful thing to lose such a brilliant teenager,” Markus said. “She was an obedient child and was committed in church activities; a very hard working church member.”

Chinese Christians See Mounting Persecution in Country’s Effort to Disband House Churches

 

2/21/2013 China (Fox News) - Christians and human rights advocates are alarmed over an aggressive crackdown on house churches in China, where the faithful are forced to call their gatherings "patriotic" assemblies or sent to prison where they can face torture, according to a new report.

Cases of the government persecuting Christians rose 42 percent last year, amid a three-phase plan by Beijing to eradicate the home-based churches, according to China Aid, a Texas-based human rights group. Experts say the Communist Party in China has long felt threatened by any movement that galvanizes a large sector of the population, fearing it could wield political clout. But the nation has become more systematically hostile to worshippers, according to Bob Fu, China Aid founder and president.

"There have been new tactics of persecution as well, especially with the government using secret directives and memos with long-term, step-by-step strategies to eradicate house churches,” Fu told FoxNews.com. “This is very serious stuff.”

Last year, the government mounted a new three-phase approach designed to wipe out unregistered house churches by forcing them to join the official "Three-Self Patriotic Movement" and stop defining themselves as churches. The phase included having China's State Administration for Religious Affairs secretly investigate house churches and create files on them, the report found. The current wave of crackdowns, which began midway through 2012, is part of the second phase, according to Fu. Fu said the government is using a wide array of subtle and ham-handed tactics to persecute Christians, targeting house church leaders and churches in urban areas.

“Instead of using law enforcement officials directly to attack churches, last year we found they used a softer approach,” he said. “They used utility companies, service committees and neighborhood committees to terminate contracts with rental facilities and cut off electricity and water [to the churches].”

Those semi-official agencies, including industrial and commercial affairs departments, used various excuses to “harass, interfere and ban” church services.

At least 132 cases of persecution affecting 4,919 Christians, including 442 church leaders, were reported last year, up from 93 cases and 4,322 Christians in 2011, respectively. The number of people detained (1,441) and sentenced (9) also increased from the year earlier, the report found.

“Many people, especially in China, don’t even know there are really hundreds and thousands of their fellow Christian brothers being persecuted,” he said. “If a country like China shows it does not respect its own citizens and their most basic freedoms, we should be on alert and take more action from our side in the United States to advance that (Source).”

Vietnam: Five Christian Families Attacked, Beaten Up by Fellow Villagers

2/26/2013 Vietnam (CR) - Newly converted Christians of the Sedang ethnic minority in Vietnam’s Central Highlands were terrorized last week – their homes and personal property badly damaged or destroyed in four consecutive night raids, and some of the faithful seriously injured from beatings in broad daylight, sources said.

Since becoming Christians in the past year, five families in mountainous Kontum Province have reported constant harassment from villagers upset that they are no longer contributing to communal sacrifices and other practices because of their new faith. The attacks from Monday (Feb. 18) to Friday (Feb. 22) constituted a third wave of sustained violence since their conversion, leaving their property severely damaged and their lives threatened.

Attacks on the new Christians – who belong to a Christian Mission Church (CMC) congregation in Ngoc La village, Mang Ri Commune, Tumorong District in northwestern Kontum Province – were primarily motivated by strong tensions within the ethnic group over the families leaving the “old ways.” Ideologically opposed to Christianity, local Communist officials freely permit and even encourage such conflicts, sources said.

At the same time, local Vietnamese officials commonly incite and employ area thugs to attack Christians, whose united faith is perceived as a threat to government ideology and sovereignty. Often officials themselves put on civilian clothes or otherwise disguise themselves, joining in the attacks, sources said.

The assailants last week attacked the Christians’ homes, pelting them with bricks and cement roof tiles and swinging wooden clubs. They then invaded their houses and destroyed their belongings.

The victims managed to take photos with their cell phones, and though taken mostly in darkness, the images are clear enough to show a destroyed fibro-cement roof; a motorcycle with parts bent, broken and missing; dishes and kitchen utensils smashed to pieces; food cast to the ground; badly damaged furniture; broken windows; wooden shutters, doors and frames ripped out of walls; and wooden clubs and bricks strewn about.

The gangs on Friday (Feb. 22) beat a number of the Christians in broad daylight, with some, including women, struck below the abdomen. Several were reported to be seriously injured. One family, threatened with death if they stayed in their home, fled into the forest, where they were forced to spend nights in the cold with inadequate clothing and no shelter.

While the religious freedom environment for many Christians in Vietnam’s larger cities has improved considerably in recent years, that of many ethnic minority Christians in remote and mountainous regions of the country definitely has not, sources said. Regularly occurring incidents demonstrate that Vietnamese authorities actively work to limit and contain Christianity, even as they appear to have given up on eradicating it(Source).

Indian Pastors Face Persecution with Courage

2/25/2013 India (WND) – India’s constitution assures the nation’s citizens of religious freedom, but Christians who are trying to spread their faith say there’s only one problem with that.
“In many cases, that provision is ignored,” said Gospel for Asia Development Director John Beers.
The result is predictable: persecution. International Christian Concern reported recently that local police departments in India are sometimes leading the anti-Christian attacks. Beers said because India’s culture still is rooted largely in traditional religions, Christian missionaries and preachers in India “expect to face persecution.”

“The students training for ministry know they will be beaten,” Beers said. It happened in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh just recently. A pastor was attacked and beaten in his church, and the congregation was threatened by the mob during a Sunday service. The church’s sponsoring missions agency, which asked not to be identified to protect the safety of the congregation, said local Hindu groups were angry about the church’s outreach.

“This kind of persecution happens frequently and much worse in many parts of India. The attackers carried out the assault because we had just finished an outreach in the area surrounding his church one month ago and it affected some of the villagers deeply,” the mission leader told WND.

“It was cold there, many people in our group were showing the love of God to them by providing blankets for the very poor. Some of the people were so touched that they wanted to know this God that we serve and some of them accepted Christ into their lives and became Christians,” the leader said. Hindu nationalists also stoke the fires of persecution by claiming that any Christian activity is carried out by American or British missionaries.

The mission leader says that isn’t the case. “These benevolent, Christian people were all Indians, and the event was planned by them, not Americans,” he said.

He suggested fear drives as much of the persecution as “nationalism.”
“I can only assume their motive, like many in the past, was fear based on loss of control over the people,” the mission leader said.
“Religious persecution is many times rooted in politics, not fear of religious freedom. I am not sure if this was the first time he was attacked but I do know that there have been other similar stories in the same region but, as I said before, this happens quite frequently in many parts of northern India,” the leader said.

“I’m also not sure if this was an organized attack against all Christian churches in the area, but every once in a while, the Hindu extremists do organize much like they did in Orissa several years ago when Christians were beaten and even killed, houses and churches burned,” he said.

Gospel for Asia Vice President Daniel Yohanan doesn’t downplay the impact of persecution, but he says that people in the Far East and Asia approach religious issues differently. He says to understand why Christians in India would endure persecution, the Eastern view of religion and the purpose of life must be understood. In the East, he said, people think their “entire purpose is to find forgiveness of sin.”

“That’s why people go on pilgrimages; that’s why they go to the temple,” Yohanan said.
“They know they’re sinners. … They’ve never heard about Jesus. If you ask someone if they know Jesus, they say Jesus doesn’t live here. Go to the next village,” Yohanan said.

“When they finally hear what Jesus did for them on Calvary, for them, persecution is a minor thing,” Yohanan said. “It’s worth it to go through persecution if they can be forgiven of their sin.
“
They say they’ll give their life if they can have a new life in Christ,” Yohanan said.
“In the West we have believers whose faith doesn’t change their entire life. It may change what they do on Sunday, but not everything. Over there they say that Christ forgave them.”
In America, he said, “we’ve lost a theology of suffering.”

“Because of our prosperity, we see suffering as an absence of God’s blessing in our lives,” Yohanan said. “In the Bible, Joseph was in prison for 13 years and in the perfect will of God, but in America we don’t see it that way.”