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mission crossroads
Tomas (not his real name) is a church minister in Manipur, Northeast India. He had teary eyes when he recalled what happened on May 3, 2023.
“I have never seen such violence in my lifetime,” he said. “They systematically ransacked our places. That first night, they burnt down a church nearby. The sky turned red by flames.”
A few months later, it was reported that 250 churches of different denominations had been burnt. For several weeks, the manhunt continued.
Over 100 people died. The trauma is unimaginable, especially among women and children.
According to the population and housing census of 2021, more than 71% of the people in Ghana identify as Christians in various church denominations.
The pictures of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from Gaza being forced by the Israeli military to evacuate the northern part of the Gaza Strip heading south evoked old memories of the 1948 Nakba. In 1948, Jewish Israeli terror groups destroyed and erased over 500 Palestinian villages and displaced nearly 800,000 Palestinians,¹ including more than 50,000 Palestinian Christians who had to flee, thus becoming refugees in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan and Lebanon.
As a fundamental pillar of our Christian experience and testimony, justice is inseparable from peace and a fulfilling life for every human being as proclaimed by the good news of the Kingdom of God. Currently, there is a grave deficit of both justice and peace in many countries around the world, particularly in Central America.
Christians are minorities in Asia and the Pacific. The area is known to be home to the most Buddhists in the world, with a projection of 476 million followers in 2050. Nonetheless, the Christian population may rise by about 33% and reach 381 million in 2050. The highest growth in church membership occurred between 1970–2020. In countries like China, the phenomenon of house churches continues to grow, which is in direct contrast with the global North, where church membership is declining.
For Pastor Helivao Poget, the situation was familiar. Poget is the director of the National Chaplaincy Program for the 6-million-member Church of Jesus Christ in Madagascar, a PC(USA) global partner, which goes by its Malagasy acronym, FJKM. A social worker and a missiology lecturer at one of FJKM’s theological seminaries, much of Poget’s ministry has been with marginalized people, including those exploited by labor traffickers and Madagascar’s sex tourism industry.
“Screams and hubbubs! The children were excited and happy to leave the huts and go play outside. The air was thick and full of dust and flakes falling from the sky. They thought it was snowing, something which never happened on their tropical island. They were surprised and curious. They run after the flakes, catching them with their hands, rubbing them in their hair and on their bodies,” an eyewitness recalled.
That day was March 1, 1954. The U.S. just tested a nuclear bomb in the atoll of Bikini, in the Marshall Islands in the Pacific. The visible fallout from the explosion continued to drop for several days.
Reading and seeing the testimonies of thousands of migrants who have survived crossing the Darién Gap jungle on foot, their exposure to hunger, bug bites and infections of all kinds, getting lost without being found, being victims of extortion, robbery and sexual abuse by mafias on both sides of the jungle under the complicit indifference of the authorities is a social scandal and degrading to human dignity.
Our denominational response to the Matthew 25 call to aid those less fortunate is lived out through the foci of strengthening worship communities, eradicating systemic poverty and combating racism. An old proverb states that a long journey is made step by step. And so it is that our partners in the Presbyterian Community of Kinshasa (CPK) in the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) are taking steps to improve formal education systems and provide life options that will lead to a more productive and healthy society.
“Water is life” is a statement that is heard frequently throughout Africa as many people cannot take water for granted. This is particularly true in Niger, a country that is mostly within the Sahara Desert, with the remainder lying within the Sahel, a dry ecosystem that transitions between desert and savannah lands.
