Kindgo
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Millions to expose underreported story
Christians around the world set aside Sunday to pray for persecuted
Recent deadly bombings in the Philippines' Muslim-dominated south and in Pakistan have drawn news coverage, but little has been made of the fact that these were attacks specifically aimed at Christians. On Sunday, however, one of the world's most neglected stories will be given attention by millions of people attending 300,000 churches in 130 countries.
The International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church, now in its seventh year, has mobilized Christians to pray for an estimated 200 million Christians who suffer for their faith and another 400 million who live in countries where their religious practice is restricted.
The IDOP grew out of a movement of evangelicals who also provided a groundswell of support to help make concern about religious persecution a factor in U.S. foreign policy. In 1998, Congress passed a bill to set up a section in the State Department on religious freedom and an independent panel to monitor religious freedom around the world. The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom makes policy recommendations to the president, secretary of state and Congress.
Johan Candelin, the IDOP's global coordinator, based in Finland, says the venues for prayer this Sunday will be diverse, including many where the participants themselves are victims of persecution: "We will pray in big cathedrals in Europe, in small house churches in China, in the forest in Vietnam, in homes on Cuba, in secret meeting rooms in Saudi Arabia, in countryside churches in the US, in big meetings in Venezuela and in youth groups in Africa. …"
Persecution is on the rise, according to Candelin, because the Church is growing faster than ever before and mostly in countries where there is a strong anti-Christian sentiment driven either by politics, nationalism or religious ideology.
He says that 1 million new churches have been started in the last 10 years and twice that many are expected in the next decade. About 70,000 new members are added each day.
Terry Madison, president of the U.S. affiliate of a sponsoring group, Open Doors, says he has discovered in his travels that persecuted Christians often pray for believers in the West.
"Their concern is that they would not be distracted by materialism," he said.
Christians in the Central Asian country of Turkmenistan, Madison noted, told one of his group's leaders: "Please pray not that our persecution will go away, but that there will be enough persecution to keep us focused on our Lord, but not too much that it would break us."
Countries of concern
Totalitarian Turkmenistan, a former Soviet republic, is one of the nations recently recommended by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom as a "country of particular concern," or CPC.
Each fall, the secretary of state decides which countries are found to have "engaged in or tolerated particularly severe violations of religious freedom." Once a country is designated, the president opposes those violations with a specified action ranging from a diplomatic demarche, or reprimand, to economic sanctions.
The list of countries the USCIRF has recommended to the secretary of state this year reflects the fact that most reported persecution of Christians is carried out under either Islamic or communist regimes.
Islamic nations on the list are Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Sudan, while communist regimes are China, North Korea, Laos and Vietnam. The commission's recommendations also include India, where militant Hinduism is on the rise, and Burma's militaristic tribal regime.
America's strategic ally and trading partner Saudi Arabia has been recommended several times, but never chosen by the secretary of state as a country of particular concern. Critics point out that this rejection is made despite the State Department's repeated assessment that freedom of religion in the kingdom "does not exist."
In its report this year, the USCIRF says the "Chinese government remains a particularly severe violator of religious freedom. Persons continue to be confined, tortured, imprisoned, and subject to other forms of ill treatment on account of their religion or belief."
In North Korea, according to the USCIRF, "religious freedom remains essentially non-existent. The commission says it has received reports "that officials have arrested, imprisoned, tortured, and sometimes executed North Korean citizens who were found to have ties with overseas Christian evangelical groups operating across the border in China, as well as those who engaged in such unauthorized religious activities as public religious expression and persuasion."
Iraqi Christians have generally enjoyed freedom of worship," the USCIRF says, but "in early 2002, the Iraqi government reportedly passed a law placing all Christian clergy and churches under the control of the Ministry of Islamic Property."
Christians praying this Sunday, however, are more likely to focus attention on places like Sudan, where a declared jihad by the militant Khartoum regime on the mostly Christian and animist south has resulted in more than 2 million deaths since 1983.
Sudan's government is slaughtering Christians who refuse to convert to Islam, according to Dennis Bennett, executive director of Seattle-based Servant's Heart, a relief group working in the African nation.
Villagers in several areas of the northeast Upper Nile region say that when women are captured by government forces they are asked: "Are you Christian or Muslim?"
Women who answer "Muslim" are set free, but typically soldiers gang-rape those who answer "Christian" then cut off their breasts and leave them to die as an example for others.
'Scapegoats of choice'
Open Doors' Madison said that the International Day of Prayer has had a "marked impact on the church in America and its understanding that there is a part of our body that actually suffers for its faith."
The prayer movement began in 1996 through coordination of the World Evangelical Alliance, a global umbrella of national church bodies. In 1998, Prayer for the Persecuted Church, Inc., took oversight of the IDOP organizing efforts in the United States while WEF continues to coordinate the IDOP internationally.
Though a Christian effort, it got much of its spark from a Jewish lawyer, who remarked in a 1995 Wall Street Journal article that unless a serious effort is made to confront persecution, Christians are likely to become the "Jews of the 21st century, the scapegoats of choice of the world's thug regimes."
Michael J. Horowitz, a former staffer for President Reagan, recalled that an Ethiopian pastor who lived with his family was denied asylum in the U.S. despite being jailed 25 times and enduring torture for his faith. The State Department sent a letter to the immigration service, he said, stating, "There is no persecution of Christians in Ethiopia."
Horowitz, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C., said that on one occasion the pastor was hanged upside down with hot oil poured on his feet.
Former New York Times columnist A.M. Rosenthal, also a Jew, was one of the first in the mainstream media to write about persecution of Christians.
In one column, he said: "If I were a Christian, I would complain that Christian leaders, political, religious and business, around the world have failed in their obligations to fight oppression of their co-religionists. I am complaining anyway."
Madison said that while most churches in the U.S. have a small core of believers with a passion to pray regularly and lobby on behalf of the persecuted church, most Christians who participate in the day of prayer don't retain their interest after Sunday.
"Sadly, most church congregations listen, give assent to prayers – may actually pray them – but in terms of long-term change of life, I'm not sure that it's really moved and shaken the church the way we hoped it would," he said. "This is obviously something the Holy Spirit must do."
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/a...RTICLE_ID=29593
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God bless,
Kindgo
Inside the will of God there is no failure. Outside the will of God there is no success.
Posts: 4320 | From: Sunny Florida | Registered: Jun 2002
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