World in Brief

FEBA Radio broadcasts on shortwave to reach listeners across a wide area of the Horn of Africa and shares audio content on micro SD cards that can be played on mobile phones, it was reported in May.

In partnership with the local church, house groups are run where people listen to the programmes on the SD cards. Currently 96 house groups and more than 700 Christians are meeting in an area where Christian believers are often attacked, churches shut down, preaching forbidden and there is antagonism towards the gospel.

Muslims will very soon outnumber practising Christians in Europe, the Belgian Justice Minister claimed in late April.

Koen Geens told the European Parliament that the continent ‘does not realise this, but this is the reality’. Speaking to Parliament’s Justice and Home Affairs Committee, Mr Geens said that the shift in balance between Christians and Muslims was not because there are too many Muslims, but because ‘Christians are generally less practising’.

A Chinese church won a land dispute with the government, but only after the pastor’s wife was killed while authorities tried to demolish the church, it was reported in April.

On 14 April, Ding Cuimei and her husband, pastor Li Jiangong, were pushed into a pit by a bulldozer and covered with soil as they were protesting the government-enforced demolition of their church building. Li escaped, but Ding suffocated to death. Amidst public outcry over Ding’s death, the government has ruled that the church does have the right to the land on which their church is built.

In April, at the John Calvin Centre, a conference took place for 26 elders from churches all across Egypt.

These elders were selected by a national committee of the Synod of the Nile. Many met each other for the first time. By the end of eight days they had become good friends and partners committed to praying for one another. They returned home enthused to serve more diligently as ‘overseers’ of the Lord’s flocks entrusted to their care. The vast majority of the 92 million Egyptians are Muslim, with 14–20% professing Christians. About 1.5 million of these are committed evangelicals.

Islamist militants are suspected to have killed 20–40 villagers in North Kivu province in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo on 3 May.

The dead include two elders of the CECA 20 (Communaute Evangelique au Centre de l’Afrique) Church and their wives. A local Christian missionary said thousands of people have fled the area.

In early April, a young Christian boy was kidnapped in Upper Egypt, before being released 12 days later after the payment of a hefty ransom.

Anthonius Farag (13) was snatched outside his school early on 5 April, in the village of Mansheyyit Manbal, off Matay (230 km south of Cairo). This is not an isolated case. According to the Coalition of Coptic Egypt (CCE), a Coptic advocacy group, the Upper Egyptian province of Qena alone saw 72 cases of kidnappings, extortion and related violence against Copts from 2011 to 2014.

Eritrean Christian refugees are forgotten by the world, it was reported in April.

Often eclipsed by the crisis in the Middle East, one in 12 Eritreans has fled their country, many of those leaving being Christians. Eritrea has been branded ‘one of the world’s fastest emptying nations’ and ‘the North Korea of Africa’. In 2015, 40,000 risked death from drowning to escape to Italy. Others fled to Sudan or Ethiopia. Eritrea has jailed hundreds of Christians simply because of their faith. Many are now living in makeshift refugee camps in neighbouring Ethiopia.

A conference on religious radicalisation, Boko Haram and terrorism in Nigeria was held by the largest group in the European Parliament on 3 May.

The European People’s Party Working Group on Inter-religious Dialogue’s conference had two sessions: the first on the broader situation of Nigeria and the other on the threats and needs for peace and security in the region.

A pastor and his pregnant wife were assaulted and their church set on fire on 17 April after they refused to praise a Hindu god.

Pastor Dinbanhu Sameli and his wife Meena, seven months pregnant, lead a church in the troubled Bastar district of the Chhattisgarh state.

Severe drought and intense heat have plunged millions from three states of India into a water crisis, it was reported in April.

Authorities are mobilising relief by delivering water to thirsty areas via railways and water tankers, yet thousands of villages face ongoing water scarcity as temperatures continue to climb. Nearly 17,000 villages in Rajasthan are dealing with severe water shortages. The water scarcity impacts 13 Bridge of Hope centres and dozens of Gospel for Asia-supported workers in the area, making it difficult for them to maintain normal daily life.

A woman in her 20s who suffered sexual abuse as a child has been euthanised in the Netherlands, in a case described as horrifying.

The unnamed woman was killed last year, despite treatment for trauma showing some signs of success. MPs slammed the move and a disability rights group said it was deeply concerning that euthanasia should be seen as an answer to the damage of sexual abuse.

On 17 May one of the 276, mainly Christian, girls taken from Chibok Secondary School in Borno State on 14 April 2014 by Boko Haram was found. 218 of the girls are still missing.

Amina Ali Nkeki was found carrying a baby by an army-backed vigilante group in the huge Sambisa Forest, close to the border with Cameroon.

Muslim Fulani attacks on Christians have advanced beyond Nigeria’s central zone into a southern state, with a massacre on 25 April taking at least 27 lives.

Following a February massacre in Agatu, in the central-eastern state of Benue, and the attack in April on three predominantly Christian villages in the south-eastern state of Enugu, church and rights figures began to describe Muslim Fulani aggression as posing a threat of civil war. Enugu shares a border with Benue.

North Korean secret agents in April murdered a Korean Chinese pastor, who lived in Chiangbai, a town on the Chinese side of the Sino-Korean border.

Han Choong Yeol, who pastored a Three-Self Church of 600 members, helped North Korean refugees by giving them food, medicines, clothes and other goods they needed for survival back in North Korea. On 30 April, when Pastor Han didn’t return home, a large search was set up and his body found, maimed by stab and axe wounds.

A Pakistani court in April granted bail to the lead suspect in the brutal 2014 killings of a young Christian couple, Shahzad Masih (26) and his pregnant wife Shama Bibi (24), burned alive in a brick kiln where they worked as bonded labourers, which is illegal in Pakistan.

National outrage meant the case had moved to Pakistan’s Anti-Terrorism Court and the state itself became the prosecution plaintiff against the double killing – unprecedented moves. Yet the Anti-Terrorism Court allowed the kiln’s owner, Yousuf Gujjar, to walk free on 16 April.

Translators working in Paraguay in April announced the publication of the first-ever Bible for the Southern Énxet people (Éxnet Sur), an indigenous people group living in the Gran Chaco region of western Paraguay.

Developed jointly between the Church Mission Society, Paraguayan Bible Society and the Anglican Church of Paraguay, the publication of the Énxet Bible was officially acknowledged in a special ceremony hosted by the Bishop of Paraguay on 16 April.

After hearing the gospel and watching The Passion of the Christ, many in a remote tribal village in the Philippines came to Christ, it was reported in April.

The lives of tribal people in the remote village of Manobo were changed forever when missionaries from Christian Aid Mission began holding Bible studies and screening parts of The Passion of the Christ film in their village. ‘After consistently teaching over the past eight months from Genesis onward, we were able to present the gospel. Nearly the whole village responded and trusted Jesus as Lord and Saviour’, the ministry director said.

One of two church leaders jailed since December was released on 10 May.

Telahoon Nogose Kassa, head of disciple-ship at the embattled Khartoum Bahri Evangelical Church, was released after Sudan’s National Intelligence and Security Services (NISS) arrested him without charges on 13 December 2015.

The United States Department of State announced on 13 April that Tajikistan has, for the first time, been designated as a ‘Country of Particular Concern’ (CPC) because of its record on religious freedom.

The decision followed a report released the same day by the US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) recommending which countries should be recognised as CPCs. Uzbekistan has been designated a CPC for the 11th consecutive year.

Another church in Tanzania’s extreme north-west corner, Kagera – bordering Uganda, Burundi and Rwanda – was burned to the ground on 2 May by suspected arsonists.

No group has claimed responsibility for the fire that destroyed the Roman Catholic church in Nyarwele, the third church in four months to be burned down, after the Tanzania Assemblies of God and Pentecostal Assemblies of God churches. Seven suspects are currently helping police investigations following the burning down of other churches in the region last year, six within one week in September 2015.

In April, a US evangelist was arrested and ordered to be held for 30 days without charge ahead of deportation, but was subsequently released.

Declaring David Byle ‘a threat to public order’, authorities took him into custody on 6 April after asking him to report to the immigration office in Istanbul regarding his application for a residency permit. However, Byle was released on 14 April after a judge overturned the order to detain him for 30 days. The arrest took place days before Byle was set to teach a group of Turks how to tell people about the gospel.

Muslims in a village in eastern Uganda in April killed Christians’ pigs and tore down their church building.

A Muslim mob demolished the building of the 450-member Nalugondo Church of Uganda at about midnight on 12 April, shouting ‘We cannot live together with neighbours who are infidels. We have to fight for the cause of Allah’. Nalugondo village is near Bugade, Mayuge District, 93 miles east of Kampala. Two days earlier, on 10 April, a group of Muslims slaughtered a church lay leader’s pigs, a key source of income.

Researchers believe that prayer can have a positive effect on those fighting addiction, it was reported in early May.

Researchers from New York University, who worked with longstanding members of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) to assess their cravings after looking at various images, found that prayer can minimise alcohol cravings by stimulating the parts of the brain which are responsible for attention and emotion.

Vietnam’s new ‘Law on Belief and Religion’, scheduled to come into effect this year, will add another layer of governmental repression and control to an already pressurised church, Vo Tran Nhat, Executive Secretary of the Vietnam Committee on Human Rights, said in April.

‘They’re going to adopt a new law, a law on religion. This law is not a law on religion; it’s just a law on how to manage the control of religion’, he said.