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JERUSALEM, Israel – Iran has decided to extend the prison sentence of a recently imprisoned Christian convert due to his support for “Evangelical Zionist Christianity,” the persecution watchdog Article 18 reported.

Ismaeil Maghrebinejad, 65, was sentenced in January to three years in prison for “insulting Islamic sacred beliefs,” “propaganda against the Islamic Republic,” and “apostasy.” Maghrebinijad, whose daughter and son-in-law live in the United States, is a former Muslim who converted to Christianity. It is illegal to leave the Muslim faith in Iran.

Now, Maghrebinejad will face two extra years in prison following a hearing on Feb 27 for his “membership of a group hostile to the regime.”

The court document said the group teaches “Evangelical Zionist Christianity.”

Article 18 Advocacy Director Mansour Borji, says Maghrebinejad is a member of an Anglican church, and this labeling of him as evangelical shows that “such blanket labeling is inaccurately applied to any Christian arrested for their religious activities, as the revolutionary courts try to justify their violations of religious freedom.”

Maghrebinejad has 20 days to appeal.

Open Doors USA reports that Maghrebinejad is not a recent convert to Christianity but gave his life to Christ nearly 40 years ago and that he has been “harassed” by Iranian authorities for years.

Maghrebinejad is just one of many Iranian Christians who are persecuted each year.

Article 18 recently reported that nine Christian converts who were sentenced to five years in prison last year for committing “actions against national security” lost their appeals on Feb. 25. None of their attorneys were allowed to attend the hearing.

Their names are Behnam Akhlaghi, Babak Hosseinzadeh, Mehdi Khatibi, Khalil Dehghanpour, Hossein Kadivar, Kamal Naamanian Mohammed Vafada, and Shahrooz Eslamdoost.

All nine were arrested last year between January and February.

Iran is number 9 on the Open Doors’ 2020 World Watch List, and Christians who worship in secret are frequently monitored and imprisoned for following Christ. 

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Hindus in India have removed a Jesus Christ statue from a Christian cemetery after the property owners received complaints.

According to CBN News, the 12-foot statue was removed March 3 from Mahima Betta cemetery in a town just 30 miles north of Bangalore, India.

“It is very sad, unfortunate and regrettable that the police, bowing to the pressure of a few outsiders, have forcefully removed the statue of Lord Jesus,” Archbishop Peter Machado wrote March 4 in an article for AsiaNews.

“It is a blow to the communal harmony of the people in our villages and also a violation of the religious freedom guaranteed to us by the Indian Constitution,” Machado said.

Machado told the Catholic News Agency that Christians have been visiting the statue at the cemetery for some 40 years “without any difficulty.”

“There is absolutely no problem from local people to our burials, nor our prayers and devotions on the hill,” he said.

Source: Christian Headlines

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Last week, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the most important abortion case since Whole Woman’s Health vs. Hellerstedt. In that 2016 case, the court struck down a Texas law requiring abortion clinics to have admitting privileges at a hospital within thirty miles of their location. The court said that such a law placed undue burdens on a woman’s access to abortion. That law would have led to the closing of about 75% of the state’s abortion clinics.

So far, the headlines about the case heard by the court this past Wednesday have mostly been about Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer threatening Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, but there’s much more at stake in June Medical Services v. Russo.

This case involves a Louisiana law nearly identical to the Texas law struck down by the court. Note here that I am emphasizing the word “nearly.” Despite what you may hear from The New York Times and elsewhere, the laws are not identical, especially in how they would play out on the ground in their respective states.

That’s why, after a federal district court initially struck down the Louisiana law based on the Texas law precedent, the Fifth Circuit reversed the district court ruling, with the majority opinion citing two important ways the Louisiana law and the Texas law are different.

First, the Louisiana law would only affect about thirty percent of women seeking an abortion. Second, the requirements for doctors to obtain admitting privileges are less strict in Louisiana than Texas, meaning abortion providers could more easily comply with the law and fewer would be forced out of business. With these differences in mind, the circuit court concluded that the Louisiana law did not impose an “undue burden” on a woman’s right to an abortion.

So here we are, barely four years after deciding Whole Woman’s Health, a recently remade Court is agreeing to hear a case which could overturn precedent and create significantly more elbow room for state-level restrictions. The whole thing has abortion rights advocates, shall we say, a bit nervous.

Much of the oral arguments centered around what constitutes “an undue burden” on abortion. Chief Justice Roberts raised the possibility that the issue was a factual one. What may constitute an “undue burden” in one state, may not in another. Such factors as the number of clinics and doctors in each state, in light of the geographic size and population of the state, would need to be considered.

Source: Christian Headlines

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After an Episcopal rector at a Washington church tested positive for coronavirus, the Episcopal Diocese of Washington is instituting a sweeping set of policies designed to help stop the spread of the disease — including suspending the use of wine during Communion.

This week officials announced the Rev. Tim Cole, a rector at Christ Church in Washington’s Georgetown neighborhood, had tested positive for the coronavirus that causes the illness known as COVID-19. The cleric was the first confirmed case in the region, and the church’s organist, Tom Smith, has since tested positive for the virus.

The reaction was swift: Cole was quickly hospitalized, Smith is in quarantine, and health officials asked parishioners who attended services recently to self-quarantine due to their potential exposure to the virus.

But church officials expanded safety measures beyond Christ Church on Monday (March 9), when the Rev. Mariann Budde, the bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, distributed a letter outlining new diocesanwide policies meant to curb the spread of the disease.

The new policies include:

In an interview with Religion News Service, Budde explained that she decided to implement the precautions after conversations with churchgoers as well as local health experts and officials at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. She said she also looked to policies enacted in the Diocese of Olympia in the state of Washington, where an outbreak of COVID-19 has led to 162 confirmed cases in the region, resulting in at least 23 deaths.

“There seems to be a body of consensus that, even though the common cup is scientifically shown to be a very low risk for transmission of infectious bacteria and virus, the recommendation for now was suspending it out of an abundance of caution,” she said.

Budde said she has been in conversation with someone from the church virtually every hour over the past few days — including Cole, who remained in stable condition over the weekend.

Source: Religion News Service

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AYLETT, Va. (BP) — Internet service is spotty in rural, unincorporated Aylett, Va. There, a small women’s group at Beulah Baptist Church read an article in the March print edition of the Dover Diary, spotlighting ministry in the U.S. during the coronavirus outbreak.

The account of fear, wisdom and xenophobic bullying written by Carter Tan, English pastor of Grace Chinese Baptist Church of Richmond, Va., about 50 miles away, caught the eyes of Friendship Women on Mission member Judy Shepard.

“It’s a difficult situation for all people groups in this point in time,” Shepard, wife of Beulah Baptist pastor Ed Shepard, told Baptist Press. “We just wanted to let them know that a sister church in the association was praying for them, and continuing to remember them in our prayers.”

Shepard bought a simple card of encouragement for all 15 or so members of the mission group to sign.

Tan had written the article — also published in BP — weeks earlier, when U.S. cases of COVID-19 were perhaps in the single digits. Cases were only linked to those who had traveled abroad, but community or person-to-person transmission has since been documented in the U.S.

He had written of the sentiments of this coronavirus and the effect that it was having on his congregation, partially out of fear and partially out of good old precautionary common sense, as he put it in the article,” Shepard said. “And then, the thing that was really beginning to add to all of this decrease in attendance for these reasons, was that his daughter unfortunately at school had had a boy come up to her and had teased her by calling her ‘coronavirus.’ And that just struck a vein within me that the cruelty that we can have towards people who are God’s children, just as we are.”

Tan told BP he appreciates the sentiments of the women he’d never met a sister church he had never visited.

“It was just really sweet,” Tan told BP. “And for me as a pastor, you know, knowing that this is not the local church that’s going through this, but it’s the kingdom of God, and other churches are encouraging us during this time, … that God’s kingdom is larger than a local church.”

Cases of COVID-19 have since swelled to more than 800 in the U.S., where at least 28 have died from the disease, according to official tallies Tuesday (March 10). At least five cases have been reported in Virginia, and the U.S. National Guard is preparing to deploy to New Rochelle, N.Y., where the largest cluster of U.S. cases — 118 — have been reported.

Source: Baptist Press

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