Ignoring Persecuted Christians in China?

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IRD has spent decades criticizing National and World Council of Churches groups that visited China (among other non-democratic places) and decline to speak out for persecuted Christians. But now IRD is critiquing the World Evangelical Alliance (WEA)! Many evangelical elites seem to have learned little to nothing from mistaken Mainline Protestants, whose errors they are tragically replicating. Please read Faith McDonnell’s piece about the recent WEA trip to China. Sadly, WEA ignored the vast majority of Chinese Christians who do not belong to the official government sanctioned churches.

Perhaps 80 million of China’s Protestants and Catholics (out of 100 million Christians) worship in the unofficial churches, where they often face the possibility of restrictions, harassment, imprisonment or worse. Here’s Faith’s press release about this WEA trip. WEA in past years has been bold in affirming religious freedom globally, and IRD has even partnered with WEA. Let’s pray that WEA returns to its heritage of defense for persecuted Christians.

Faith is a watchdog of religious persecution around the world, and the plight of Sudanese Christians enduring under Sudan’s Islamist regime has long been dear to her heart.  The suffering in Sudan’s Darfur region and of its non-Arab Muslims justifiably gets a lot of attention.  But southern Sudan’s even longer suffering Christians do not get anywhere near equal time. Here’s Faith’s latest article about the tenuous peace agreement in southern Sudan.

Meanwhile, can Christianity incorporate witchcraft?!  The Episcopal Diocese of Washington, D.C., in a recent article, speculated so.  Read Jeff Walton’s article here, which appears in the current issue of Forward in Christ magazine.  So-called croning rituals, which are tied to wiccan beliefs, crop up in radical church circles, occasionally drawing IRD’s distressed attention.

On a very different topic, read Jim Tonkowich’s piece on Christians who struggle with boredom and understanding vocation in the workplace.

And finally, here’s my own article about a recent commentary by former Christian Century editor and ordained United Methodist James Wall likening the movie “Avatar” to Israeli and American imperialism.   And here’s my piece on former Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey warning about unrestricted Islamic immigration into Britain.

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