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"Iraq: The Church Under Attack"
Even after the elections, Iraqi believers are feeling the pressure.
from QuickTakes
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Hope has become increasingly rare among Iraq's Christian minority, which says it is under attack as never before. Written threats, kidnappings, bombings, and murder by Muslim extremists are driving thousands of Iraq's minority Christian population out of its ancestral homeland, fleeing for safety to neighboring Jordan and Syria. About 10 percent of Iraq's estimated 800,000 Christians have fled the country, reports The Washington Times.
"The people are terrified, actually, about what is happening," says the Rev. Saad Hanna, a priest at Mary Jacob Church in the Dora section of Baghdad, which recently was blackened by a bomb. Hanna's church is down to about a third of its pre-war membership.
The synchronized bombings of five Baghdad churches last August, a car bombing at a Baghdad church in September, and blasts at two Mosul churches in December sent shock waves through the Christian community.
Yet even in these troubled times, some stalwart Christians are choosing not to leave their homeland. A small group of Pentecostal believers who visited Amman recently from Baghdad reported that their church is growing, despite outward pressure. In another instance, a family returned to the Iraqi capital in order to start a Bible study with women from one of the bombed Catholic churches.
Elizabeth Kendal of the World Evangelical Alliance Religious Liberty Commission (www.worldevangelical.org/rlc.html) offers these prayer points for Christians in Iraq:
- Pray that God, will deliver, protect, and refine Iraq's believers.
- Pray that the war crisis will dissolve ethnic barriers and generate unity among the Christians in Iraq, and fire up a burden for the spiritual transformation of the nation.
- Ask God to bring peace to Iraq, "silence the shouting of the nations" (Ps. 65:5–8), and make tolerance, peaceful coexistence, and civic development burning desires in the hearts of the Iraqi people.
Sources: The Washington Times, Nov. 29, 2004; Baptist Press (www.bpnews.net), Oct. 7, 2004; Assist News Service (www.assistnews.org), Nov. 10, 2004.
Copyright © 2005 by the author or Christianity Today International/Today's Christian magazine.
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