Today’s Headlines:

CHINESE HOUSE CHURCHES FACE NEW CRACKDOWN AFTER CHRISTMAS

400,000 EUROPEAN BELIEVERS JOIN IN ANNUAL WEEK OF PRAYER

ERITREAN GOVERNMENT FORMALLY SACKS ORTHODOX PATRIARCH

Today’s Top Stories:

CHINESE HOUSE CHURCHES FACE NEW CRACKDOWN AFTER CHRISTMAS

A campaign to crack down on house churches in Beijing has intensified since Christmas, according to a monitor of the Chinese church. Among the churches targeted was a well-known congregation in Beijing raided by Public Security Bureau (PSB) agents the past two Sundays, reported the U.S.-based China Aid Association.

Eyewitnesses said two uniformed policemen and two plainclothes agents rushed into the rented apartment where the Beijing Ark House Church was meeting, declaring the church was “disturbing the neighbors.” Yu Jie, one of the founders of the unregistered church, said he can’t let the congregation keep worshiping at the apartment because “pressure [from authorities] is already very heavy.”

In another incident, Jin Tianming, pastor of more than nine house churches in the Haidian district, was detained after Christmas and interrogated at a police station overnight. Dozens of other leaders in his church were also questioned. Jin’s church had applied to register with the government, but the PSB denied the request because the church refused to be part of China’s official Three-Self Patriotic Movement (TSPM).

China Aid also reported that five officials from the PSB and Religious Affairs raided a house church of 40 worshipers in Dayinjia, Jilin, Wednesday, Jan. 4, and posted a government seal declaring the gathering as “illegal.” The officials ordered the congregation to move to a TSPM church. Pastor Cui Guojun, 40, was released after a three-hour interrogation at a local PSB bureau.

Five detained church leaders in Ma Na Si county in the Xinjiang autonomous region were released Sunday, Jan. 8, following intensive international pressure. (WorldWide Religious News/WND)

Three Christian women jailed in Indramayu, West Java, Indonesia for inviting Muslim children to their Sunday school last year will stay in prison for three more years after the Constitutional Court rejected a legal challenge to the ruling. The court rejected a plea on Tuesday, Jan. 16, filed by a clergyman to strike off an article in the Child Protection Law which the Indramayu District Court used to put the women behind bars. The court ruled that Rev. Ruyandi Hutasoit had no legal standing in the case and that the article he challenged was not in conflict with the Constitution. The article in the Child Protection Law rules that people found guilty of “persuading children to convert to another religion” are subject to five years in jail and/or a fine the equivalent of US$10,500. The verdict drew criticism from Muslim and Christian communities in the area who said the children had voluntarily gone to the school and had not changed their religion. (WorldWide Religious News/Jakarta Post)

400,000 EUROPEAN BELIEVERS JOIN IN ANNUAL WEEK OF PRAYER

Approximately 400,000 Christians from different denominations in Germany, Austria and Switzerland joined in prayer during the Evangelical Alliance’s annual Week of Prayer Jan. 8-15. In many places they went in the public arena and prayed in town halls, in front of state parliaments and railway stations. Christians in the North German city of Bremen chartered a streetcar which took them through the different quarters while they prayed for concerns such as high unemployment and crime. Included in the prayer booklet was an appeal to pray for the “millennium development goals,” for example, to halve extreme poverty by the year 2015. In most of the 1,250 venues Christians came together for traditional prayer meetings as well as prayer concerts or round-the-clock prayers. It was the 160th week of prayer organized by the Evangelical Alliance. The spiritual focus this year was on the “I am” words of Jesus. Hartmut Steeb, general secretary of the German alliance representing 1.3 million evangelicals, was pleased with the results. The turnout remained stable, and the meetings developed into Bible study courses on the person of Jesus, he said. (Assist News Service)

ERITREAN GOVERNMENT FORMALLY SACKS ORTHODOX PATRIARCH

The government-controlled Holy Synod of the Eritrean Orthodox Church last week served formal notice to Abune Antonios that he is no longer the patriarchal head of the East African nation’s largest religious body. Patriarch Antonios immediately rejected the notice, announcing that he was excommunicating or suspending those who signed his arbitrary dismissal order. Since last August when the Eritrean government stripped Antonios of his ecclesiastical authority and forbid him to administrate the affairs of the church, the patriarch has remained under virtual house arrest at his residence in Asmara. Local sources expect the patriarch to be arrested if he continues to challenge the government-orchestrated takeover of his church. (Compass)