From the latest Christian Faith and Freedom Prayer Update we read this gem:
Please remember that only God can turn
A Mess into a Message
A Test into a Testimony
A Trial into a Triumph
A Victim into a Victor
With that in mind, I bring you snippets of news for your prayers.
Since November 2022, Christian Post reports about rising persecution in 18 countries around the world, especially in Africa, the Middle East and Asia. This is data released by Aid to the Church in Need (ACN), and it claims that more than 360 million Christians live in places where they experience high levels of persecution just for following Jesus.
Persecution in Africa
An ACN report presented to the UK Parliament contained an address by Nigeria’s Bishop Jude Arogundade questioning that “no one seems to pay attention to the genocide” taking place in Nigeria’s Middle Belt. His diocese was targeted by gunmen who killed more than 40 people at a packed Sunday service on Pentecost Sunday last year.
African countries saw a sharp rise in terrorist violence from non-state militants, with more than 7,600 Nigerian Christians reportedly murdered between January 2021 and June of last year, the report said, adding that in May, a video was released showing 20 Nigerian Christians being executed by Islamist terror group Boko Haram and Islamic State’s West Africa Province.
Further news from Nigeria has to do with the upcoming elections. On 25 February, Nigerians will elect a new president amidst gross insecurity, escalating Islamic terror and soaring ethnic and religious tensions. Normally a two-horse race, this year is different with four leading candidates hailing from the four corners of Nigeria (NW, NE, SE, SW), and from its three leading tribes (Fulani, Yoruba, Igbo).
Three are Muslim, one is Christian. Many fear the presidential election could cause the country to blow apart. Should that happen, it would trigger a Christian crisis of monumental, even genocidal proportions, especially for Nigeria’s long-suffering Christians in the volatile mixed Middle Belt and predominately Muslim North.
Nigeria has a population of 220 million, around half of whom identify as Christian. The Nigerian Church is one of the world’s leading missionary-sending Churches. This is a spiritual battle!
Persecution worsening in Asia
The ANC report also noted that religious nationalism has triggered increasing violence against Christians in North Korea, with Hindu nationalist and Sinhalese Buddhist nationalist groups active in India and Sri Lanka, respectively.
The report noted that India witnessed 710 incidents of anti-Christian violence between January 2021 and the start of June, “driven in part by political extremism.” It cited an example of a mass rally in Chhattisgarh state last October, where members of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party applauded as right-wing Hindu religious leader Swami Parmatmanand called for Christians to be killed.
In the Middle East, the report said, a migration crisis threatened the survival of some of the world’s oldest Christian communities.
In Syria, the Christian population declined from 10% to less than 2%, falling from 1.5 million just before the war began to around 300,000 today, ACN said, adding that while the rate of exodus is slower in Iraq, a community that numbered around 300,000 before the 2014 invasion by ISIS had halved to 150,000 by the spring of last year.
At this month’s G20 event centred on religions’ role in helping solve global problems, the Most Rev. Bashar Warda, the Chaldean Catholic Archbishop of Erbil, warned that Christianity in Iraq was “on the very edge of extinction.” During his remarks the archbishop stressed that “sectarian violence” was a significant problem in Iraq.
The country suffered the rise of an Islamic State stronghold during the last decade in which thousands of Iraqi religious minorities were killed or forced to flee their homelands. “Without an end to this sectarian violence, there is no future for religious pluralism in Iraq, or anywhere else in the Middle East he said.
He noted that after around 1,900 years of existing in the region, “we Christians of Iraq now find ourselves on the very edge of extinction.” There is “a fundamental crisis of violence within Islam” that “can no longer be ignored,” he said, adding that it “continues to affect the entire Middle East, Africa, Asia and beyond.”
Ongoing repression in Afghanistan
In November 2022, three women were among 14 people publicly flogged in front of hundreds at a soccer stadium in eastern Afghanistan after the Taliban invited residents on social media to watch the punishment in person.
The individuals who sustained the lashings — between 21 and 39 lashes — were accused of committing crimes including adultery and theft, and took their punishment in the city of PulAlam, located in the country’s Logar Province, The Telegraph reported.
A Taliban spokesperson, Omar Mansoor Mujahid, said the three women were released after receiving their lashings, but some of the men were jailed.
The lashings are the second confirmed use of such punishment since the Taliban’s Supreme Leader, HibatullahAkhunzada, announced the return of a strict interpretation of Islamic Sharia law last week.
When the Taliban ruled the region in the 1990s, the terrorist government used soccer stadiums to carry out public executions and stonings to discourage dissent.
In August, Voice of the Martyrs designated Afghanistan as a “restricted” nation in its annual Global Prayer Guide, saying the government has been “highly antagonistic” toward Christians, who have been increasingly targeted by violent extremist groups since the Taliban took control.
“Although waves of Christians have moved to neighbouring countries to worship openly, Afghan house churches continue to grow,” says the guide, adding that a small number of Christians “are martyred every year in Afghanistan, but their deaths generally occur without public knowledge.”