World in Brief

An annual African Apologetics Conference has engaged with postmodern and traditional African worldviews by asking if Christianity is Africa’s faith.

Christians in Africa must be grounded in Biblical truth to argue with postmodernism, traditional Western atheism, traditional African religions, and Christian heresies like the prosperity gospel. A spokesman for the conference said: ‘We need to be able to understand what we believe and why we believe it as Christians and Africans. We need to answer those questions with confidence, clarity and compassion.’

Amid the conflict in Armenia and Azerbaijan, evangelical Christians are saying that people are open to the gospel.

Many people in Nagorno Karabakh are very, very open to the Good News. They are really desperate. They need prayer. They need discipleship. Azerbaijani churches are bringing relief and hope in Jesus’ name. The commanding officer of one soldier gave him the chance to share the gospel and pray over the entire company in Jesus’ name.

The Australian Football League has issued a Gender Diversity Policy that concludes men can play in women’s games as inclusion matters more than competitive advantage.

‘It is the AFL’s view that, in Community Football, considerations of social inclusion have greater priority than concerns that may exist with respect to competitive advantage in relation to the participation of gender diverse players.’ Australian Rules is a full-contact collision sport, akin to rugby.

After being fined $5,000 for holding an in-person worship service in violation of Manitoba province’s public health order, a Canadian church has been prevented by police from holding a drive-in worship service the following week.

In a post on its Facebook page, the Church of God Steinbach showed police blocking churchgoers on a snowy day from entering the church’s park. Unable to enter, dozens of cars lined up outside and listened to the pastor preach from the outdoor stage through radio broadcast.

The Communist Party has drafted rules prohibiting foreigners from discussing religion with Chinese citizens.

China’s Ministry of Justice has published a list of restrictions on foreigners seeking to spread ‘religious extremism’ or ‘undermine China’s national or ethnic unity’ through religion. The list also includes prohibiting foreigners from carrying out religious education, converting people, and preaching illegally.

Suspected members of an insurgent jihadist group have slaughtered 20 Christians in villages in the northeastern part of the country.

A local clergyman said: ‘They tried to force some of our Christians to convert to Islam. They also tried to force my wife and our four children to convert to Islam, but when they refused to convert, they shot my wife in the head while our four children were cut into pieces with a Somali sword.’ The church leader was away from the village on the day of the attack.

A mob of Muslim villagers have attacked the homes and shops of Coptic Christians over rumours that a Christian man posted a comment denigrating Islam on Facebook.

At least one elderly woman was hospitalised for burns suffered in the fire in her home after a crowd close to Islamist groups used stones and Molotov cocktails to target the Coptic Orthodox community. The man accused of posting the comment against Islam on his personal Facebook account said that his page had been hacked.

A Christian organisation working with refugees in a replacement camp on Lesbos after fire destroyed the first camp (see en November 2020), says it is ‘much better than the old Moria and other camps’.

Provisions are being distributed without incident and the different groups supporting the people are collaborating well. This is not always the case among aid groups: single men have been separated from families, and different nationalities have also been ‘zoned’.

An estimated 100 Christians from a tribal community in Chhattisgarh state have been attacked whilst celebrating the birth of a child, and organising festivities for Advent.

Although the exact circumstances leading up to the attack are not completely clear, it’s believed a mob of around 50 people armed with homemade weapons attacked the Christians at night whilst they slept. Bibles were burned, and 27 people required medical attention at a hospital.

A man who became a millionaire after a meteorite smashed through his roof, says he will donate some of the money to build a church in his community.

The coffin maker was working in his garden when the 2.1kg stone crashed through the edge of his roof and embedded itself in the soil. The rock, an extremely rare variety of meteorite, was bought initially by a US meteorite expert and then sold to a collector.

A group of terrorists have killed four Christians and burned down a church and six homes after attacking a Salvation Army post.

It’s believed the group numbered around ten. The Indonesian Government boasts in the Pancasila, the state ideology which promotes religious harmony and tolerance. Police in Indonesia began searching for the perpetrators on Saturday.

The percentage of citizens who are exposed to the Bible has steadily increased despite extreme persecution, according to a new report.

Before 2000, only 16 people claimed to have seen a Bible. After 2000, that number rose to 559 defectors having had sight of a Bible. The annual White Paper on Religious Freedom in North Korea from The Database Centre for North Korean Human Rights found that the number of North Koreans who had seen a Bible had increased by 4% each year since 2000.

A Christian couple, detained in self-proclaimed Somaliland for being ‘apostates and evangelists spreading Christianity’, have been released, allowing them to travel with their youngest child to a safe country and reunite with their two elder sons.

The couple were arrested when Christian material was found at their home. The couple’s lawyer noted that the decision came after European government representatives raised the case with the Ministry of Religious Affairs.

A pastor has been forced to halt the ministry he led, after threats from police and Buddhist monks.

Police visited him and, obeying their instructions to attend the police station, he was taken to an office crowded with monks, who issued a series of threats against him. The monks also had the church attendance list in their possession. The church has endured similar intimidation tactics over the previous five years.

The Muslim relatives of a former sheikh have killed his son, two days after Islamists killed a pastor and his son.

After two hours of trying to get the former sheikh to renounce Christ, he was attacked. They also stepped on his child’s neck, suffocating him. The incident was not reported to the police for fear of further violence by the assailants.

The pastor and son were killed after delivering Christian literature. The pastor’s lawyer was killed in 2019, and the pastor’s wife is still receiving treatment for an attack she suffered for her faith.

The Supreme Court has opted not to hear a case brought by The Satanic Temple that challenged the state of Missouri’s informed consent abortion laws.

Missouri regulations require that a woman pursuing the abortion of her unborn child first obtain an informational booklet and an ultrasound before being allowed to end the child’s life. The Satanic Temple had challenged those laws on the basis that it violated the religious belief that a woman’s ‘body is inviolable and subject to her will alone’.

The government has denied the Evangelical Church of Vietnam (South) permission to hold its scheduled bi-annual Clergy Assembly.

After the group postponed the meeting, the government told the group it needed to comply with the Law on Religion and submit names of its candidates for leadership for government approval. The church body unanimously passed a ‘line-in-the-sand’ motion at its 2017 General Assembly that it could not and would not comply with this Article 34 of the law.