Warlord takes six missionaries hostage on Guadalcanal
Solomon Islands warlord Harold Keke has reportedly killed at least 50 people the last year, and 20 in the last month, the AFP news agency reports. Several people murdered were his own supporters.

Now Keke is holding hostage six missionaries from the Melanesian Brotherhood, part of the Anglican Church of Melanesia.

"The recent report from someone who managed to escape from the camp is that the six brothers are still alive but held as prisoners," Archbishop Ellison Pago said in a press release. "The Head Brother and I agree that we must do two things: to ask friends far and near to pray for the safety and release of the Brothers, and for me to communicate with the militants to establish some form of understanding which will lead to a possible immediate release of the six brothers."

Ministry Matters, a publication of the Anglican Church of Canada, recently published an article about the Melanesian Brotherhood and the other three related religious communities. "This is real evangelism that goes on largely unsung, unfinanced, undocumented," wrote Richard Carter.

These evangelists walk the roads with bare feet and no money. These are evangelists whom people can welcome in their homes like returning sons or daughters, who will share whatever food there is and who will sleep on a mat and help hoe the garden, catch the fish or repair the roof. These are the evangelists who will come whenever they are called to pray for the sick, solve a village dispute, calm down a husband who is drunk. And when they visit, they bring a sense of goodness, the sense that something better is possible.

Keke reportedly told the Solomon Islands government why he took the missionaries hostage, but that reason ...