National Day Of Prayer

Organizers say this year’s National Day of Prayer may have more participation than any other in recent history now that the observance is under fire.

“I really believe this is going to be one of the strongest—if not the strongest—showing and outpouring of prayer that you’ve seen for an observance of the National Day of Prayer (NDOP) in our history,” said Michael Calhoun, director of strategic communications for the NDOP Task Force.

Street Preaching Leads To Arrest

A UK street preacher has been arrested under a law meant to prosecute violent soccer fans for hooliganism. Police say that Dale Mcalpine was loudly proclaiming anti-gay sentiments in a shopping district; Mcalpine says that he was merely handing out leaflets and engaging passers-by in conversation. Onlookers worry that Christians are being prosecuted for proclaiming what they see as Biblical truths.

Mcalpine says he had a quiet one-on-one conversation about sin with a woman who had been passing by the spot where he had set up a stepladder outside a cell phone store, reported U.K. newspaper The Daily Mail in a May 1 article. During that chat, he told the woman that the Bible condemns as sinful an array of behaviors, including homosexual contact. However, says Mcalpine, he did not proclaim any anti-gay speech as he preached loudly from his perch on the stepladder.

Unhindered Persecution

Two recent outbreaks of violence that claimed nearly 1,000 lives in northern Nigeria show that the country’s political leaders are unable to effectively resolve conflicts that transcend both socio-economic and religious issues, said a U.S. government commission.

In releasing its annual report April 29 in Washington, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom cited Nigeria as a country where violence is tolerated by the government, which it said allows Christian and Muslim perpetrators to continue their attacks unhindered.

Reigious Persecution

The numbers are shocking: 12,000 people killed in a cycle of violence between Christians and Muslims stretching back more than a decade.

The location: Nigeria, the most populous nation in Africa, lying on the continent’s fault line between the largely Muslim north and predominantly Christian south.

The number of people convicted and sentenced for the killings: Zero.

That’s just one of many stark assessments about the level of religious persecution around the world today in a huge new report from the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.

The report names more than two dozen countries as offenders. Some engage in what’s classically thought of as religious persecution.