Evangelicals in Russia are fasting and praying after the country’s Parliament passed anti-terrorism laws that also include severe restrictions on evangelism. The law prohibits evangelism anywhere outside a church or religious site – including private homes. Offenders will be fined; foreign offenders will be deported.
The Christian charity International Justice Mission has reported that one of its lawyers in Kenya has been abducted and killed along with his client and their taxi driver. Willie Kimani, the lawyer, had just lodged a complaint against a police officer on behalf of the client. An autopsy showed that Kimani had been tortured before his death. The Law Society of Kenya has called on all lawyers to boycott courts this week; nationwide protests have also been organised.
Canon Andrew White, known as the “Vicar of Baghdad”, has been suspended from his own charity by the Charity Commission while they investigate allegations that he mis-used charity funds to buy back sex slaves. Canon White says the case is due to some inaccurate statements that he made relating to funding, and that he has never paid money to terrorists; the Commission says it will not comment on active cases, but has added that the incident “seems to stem from a genuine desire by White to help others.”
A church of 400 in California that undertook to build a school in Pakistan had an unusual mission trip recently. On previous visits to the country, church members had discovered that every brick factory in the country was manned by Christian slaves, because Muslims will not do that kind of work; officially they were indentured servants, but it was common for factories to force children to work or to chop off fingers of workers who did not produce enough. The church started buying the slaves’ freedom at a cost of $600-$700 per family. On the most recent trip, a Taliban leader who owned 28 brick factories was being pressured by the government to close them down because of atrocities reported there, and the church raised $96,000 which bought freedom of a total of 4500 people. The sealing of the deal was fraught, but the turning point came when the Taliban leader and the mission trip leader realised they were both 73 years old – and the Taliban leader asked the Christian to pray for his failing kidneys. A local pastor then organised an evangelistic outreach for the next day; 6000 people turned up including 11 Shi’ite Muslim clerics, there were some dramatic healings through prayer, and hundreds became Christians including two of the clerics.
Another well-known Christian ‘prophet’ has spoken out about Brexit, although unlike the last report I gave, he did not claim to have heard from the Lord on the subject, but rather spoke from his understanding of the Bible. Rick Joyner’s opinion was that the EU was a trade network that had gone beyond its permitted boundaries to take over some of the functions of national governments and national judicial systems, and so the UK was better off out of it.
A Christian dating website in California has been told by a court that it must allow gays to use the site. The site has now changed its opening menu from “I’m a man seeking a woman” or vice versa to “I’m a man” or “I’m a woman”.
In Ontario, parents who seek to exempt their children from school lessons with LGBTQ content have been told by the provincial government that this is not possible, because it might make LGBTQ children in the class feel less valued, and because the topic is embedded in all subjects and grades.
A bill before the Irish government seeks to make an exception to the restrictions on abortion for foetuses with certain life-limiting conditions, such as anencephaly or Trisonomy 13. The bill argues that such babies should not be granted the protection of life that other foetuses get because they “have no life to protect”.
Ann Furedi, head of the BPAS, the biggest abortion provider in the UK, wrote an article in the Daily Mail in which she said, “Abortion may be an act of killing – but it kills a being that has no sense of life or death, and no awareness of itself as distinct from others.” Her article did not comment on whether she believes the same rules should apply to adults with severe mental disability or Alzheimer’s disease; nor did it comment on clinical studies that show that babies in the womb feel pain.
The Supreme Court of Mexico has rejected a legal challenge that would have legalised abortion on demand right up to birth. Mexico currently allows abortion on demand in the first trimester only. The reason given for the legal challenge was that abortion protects women’s “free development of personality.”
Charges have been dropped against the pro-life investigator in the USA who exposed Planned Parenthood’s selling of organs from aborted babies. David Daleiden had been charged with using illegal methods to gather his data, but in fact his methods were similar to many other undercover investigations by journalists.
In technology news, researchers at City University, London claim to have developed an algorithm, to spot lies in online conversations. They compared large numbers of truthful messages with lying messages, and found that truthful messages use more personal prom=nouns (“I, me, mine”) while messages with lies in use more adjectives such as “brilliant” or “sublime”. Other clues to lying include linking sentences to each other so that thoughts appear to be connected, and mirroring the sentence structure of the person they are communicating with. The algorithm spotted 70% of lying messages in tests, whereas human testers managed only 54%.
And finally, a preacher in Toronto found a novel way to hand out leaflets during a gay pride march in his city. Instead of standing at the side and offering leaflets, Bill Whalcott registered a group called “Gay Zombie Cannabis Consumers Association”; then he and five others dressed in skin-tight green bodysuits with rainbow-coloured clothing and participated in the march. “If you try to give people a Gospel pamphlet,” said Whalcott, “they swear at you and throw slushies at your forehead. But give them some wackadoodle thing that looks like a condom and call it ‘Zombie Safe Sex’ and they can’t grab it fast enough. I had three thousand out in 20 minutes.” The leaflet contained a message about the dangers of homosexuality that included pictures of anal warts and AIDS.
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