The delegation will testify at a hearing to launch the report, Indonesia: Pluralism in Peril – The rise of religious intolerance across the archipelago, on 25 February at the House of Commons.
An interfaith delegation from Indonesia, co-hosted by Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW) and the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community UK, has begun a week of advocacy in the UK to coincide with this week’s launch of CSW’s new report in Indonesia.
The delegation will testify at a hearing to launch the report, Indonesia: Pluralism in Peril – The rise of religious intolerance across the archipelago, on 25 February at the House of Commons.
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Kingstone Media CEO Art Ayris calls it his "Columbus and the New World moment" -- the first week Kingstone Christian comics launched a mobile sales app -- and he saw six downloads from . . . Saudi Arabia. (See a complete list of 93 new nations touched by Kingstone Comics: on.fb.me/15qV3j2) It's just one more example of how a Florida pastor's passion to reach new audiences with the Gospel through comics and graphic novels has exploded into worldwide demand, taking the Christian message to multitudes of people around the globe, often in hard-to-reach nations. Last week’s gospel festival in Makassar, Indonesia, was planned as an outreach to the 2.6 million-strong Makassar people with less than 500 believers. No one could have predicted the outcome—capacity crowds, amazing healings, death threats and on the last day Peter Youngren being called to the police headquarters to be interrogated for ‘blasphemy against Islam,’ a crime that carries a five-year prison sentence. After pressure from Muslim extremists and with only one day to go until the festival, the city mayor canceled the permit for the event to be held on the huge open grounds in the center of the city. It seemed that all was lost, but God had other plans. “In spite of everything that happened, this has been one of the most amazing weeks in 30 years of gospel ministry because of how God turned this around,” Youngren says. The Youngren ministry has conducted 26 gospel festivals in Indonesia since the year 2000, and only twice has a stadium or outdoor venue been canceled due to security reasons. An astounding 100,000 Christians are killed each year because of their faith, the Vatican reports. “Credible research has reached the shocking conclusion that an estimate of more than 100,000 Christians are violently killed because of some relation to their faith every year,” Vatican spokesman Monsieur Silvano Maria Tomassi said Tuesday in a radio address to the United Nations Human Rights Council. “Other Christians and other believers are subjected to forced displacement, to the destruction of their places of worship, to rape and to the abduction of their leaders, as it recently happened in the case of Bishops Yohanna Ibrahim and Boulos Yaziji, in Aleppo [Syria],” he added. As Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim nation, continues to mourn the death of at least 28 victims of a collapsed mine disaster, Michael Youssef offered the gift of eternal life in Christ on the first evening of a three-day mission at the Istora Stadium on Thursday night. Thirty-eight workers were initially trapped last week when part of the tunnel caved in at Freeport's Grasberg, one of the world's biggest gold and copper mines high in the mountains of the remote Papua province. Ribur was beaten and locked in jail for 60 days because she talked about Jesus. Ribur grew up in a Christian family in Indonesia, and during high school she became interested in mission work. After studying for five years in a Bible school, she joined a community-development group that was teaching agricultural methods to villagers in Aceh, located in the far north of Indonesia’s most western island, Sumatra. Teaching agricultural methods, such as organic farming and livestock breeding, gave the team an opportunity to hear about people’s lives and share their Christian faith if asked. On Human Rights Day, Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW) welcomes the increased global attention on the right to freedom of religion or belief in the past year, and encourages the international community to translate this into action to protect and promote this universal human right.
From headhunters and cannibals to 85 percent of the tribe identifying itself as Christian, the Sawi of New Guinea have undergone significant cultural transformation in the 50 years since the first missionaries arrived in the tribe's isolated jungle villages.
Pioneers-USA, a mission organization with church-planting teams in 100 countries, is celebrating God's work among the Sawi by releasing "Never the Same: Celebrating 50 Years Since 'Peace Child," a short film telling the Sawi's story and documenting a return visit of the first missionaries to reach the tribe. Wycliffe Bible translators are using an effective method to speed up translations by training natives to help.
According to Robert Harmon, the Wycliffe coordinator for the Pacific region, teaching natives the English language so they understand the Bible, commentaries and other printed matter enables them to then translate the Bible into their own languages. |
Walter Blackwood
Associate Pastor with The Bridge Community of Faith in Kelowna BC Canada. Archives
May 2017
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