In Depth:  The Christian Post

Nearly half of churchgoers in the United States haven’t watched an online service in the last four weeks, and among those who have, only 40% say they’ve been watching services from their regular home church, according to polling data.

48% of churchgoers reported that they had not watched any church online in the last four weeks. Less than half of the remaining 52% who did watch church online said they watched the service of their own church, with 23% reporting that they streamed a different church online.

Samaru Madkami, a teenage Christian convert, was killed on 4 June by a group who reportedly cut up his body into pieces.

Pastor Bijay said the group (thought to be Hindu radicals, some of whom did not live locally) ganged up to kidnap Christians in the remote Kenduguda village. Madkami’s father filed a report saying that a group of villagers picked up his son at around 11pm and told him that they needed him for a meeting in the jungle. When they returned to abduct the father an hour later, he escaped to a police station.

In May, a judge blocked the appointment of a former Christian missionary and pastor to head the country’s federal Indigenous Affairs Agency after concerns were raised by advocacy groups that oppose evangelical outreaches to tribes in the Amazon.

Ricardo Lopes Dias had worked with New Tribes Mission, now called Ethnos260, for ten years. The group’s missionaries have engaged in efforts to contact unreached people groups and tribes deep in the Amazonian rainforest.