GHANA
Ministry Breaks Slavery Bonds
For generations, girls in the North Tongu District of Ghana’s Volta Region have been slaves to traditional fetish priests. Currently more than 1,000 girls are slaves serving priests at two-dozen shrines where idols are worshiped.
Walter Pinpong, Ghana executive director of International Needs (IN), says the shrine priests will obtain girls aged 4 to 8 from families wanting to break a curse that has been placed upon them. Rather than face threats of familial deaths or other disasters, families will relinquish a young daughter. This has been going on for generations, Pinpong says, because when the slave girl dies, the family must replace her.
Girls work from sunrise to sunset tending the land, yet they must find their own food. At puberty they also become sex slaves of the fetish priest. “It’s a deplorable situation of total illiteracy and abject poverty,” Pinpong told CHRISTIANITY TODAY. But Pinpong, 44, is working to change all that.
In a two-year training program, Pinpong and his IN staff have been able to take 41 residents from the shrines and teach mat-weaving vocational skills. In addition, IN teaches the girls how to read, sew, and bake. Once basic living needs have been met, IN introduces a Bible-study program, and several of the girls have become Christians.
Pinpong is negotiating with fetish priests to trade a tractor for the release of some of the girls. “Ultimately, our aim is to see them spiritually free as well as physically free.”
ISLAM
Rights Coalition Watches Muslims
Two-dozen organizations have joined forces to form the Coalition for the Defense of Human Rights in Islamic Countries to publicize persecution of Christians in Islam-dominated societies.
According to Edgar Dass, coalition member and president of the Pakistani-American Christian Association, the new group will “expose countless unfair trials, religiously provoked murders, [and] beatings of Christian leaders and laity.”
“Sudan, Pakistan, Egypt, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia [have] a growing Islamic fundamentalist movement that is threatening Christians,” says Steve Snyder, president of Christian Solidarity International, a member of the coalition.
One carefully watched case is that of Gul Masih, a Pakistani Christian, sentenced to death last November under that country’s blasphemy law (CT, April 5, 1993, p. 78). Masih appealed his sentence and is on death row awaiting a new trial.
PEOPLE AND EVENTS
Briefly Noted
In Bulgaria, Baptist Union President Teodor Angelov has been elected to head the new United Evangelical Churches, an alliance of 100 representatives from Baptist, Church of God, Congregational, Methodist, and Pentecostal congregations in Sofia, Angelov says the Bulgarian Orthodox Church is disturbed by a growth in evangelical numbers and is behind a media disinformation campaign that accuses evangelicals of everything from terrorism to cannibalism.
• Representatives from 85 Malaysian churches met recently for Missions Fest ‘93, the nation’s first National Missions Conference. The event drew 375 participants interested in serving in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East.
• Peter Cameron, principal of Saint Andrew’s College at the University of Sydney, has lost an appeal of a March 18 heresy conviction (CT, May 17, 1993, p. 90) by the Presbytery of Sydney of the Presbyterian Church of New South Wales. The presbytery had found Cameron guilty of making statements inconsistent with the Westminster Confession by preaching a sermon on women’s ordination in which he said the Bible could not always be taken literally.
• Bishop Casimir Wang Milu has been paroled by Chinese authorities after nine years in a Dashaping labor camp. He had been charged with five offenses related to the Vatican-loyal underground Catholic church in China.
VIETNAM
Free Worship Carries a Price
To avoid government interference with worship, about 40,000 Christians in south Vietnam risk beatings and imprisonment to worship in unregistered house churches. Though less than 8 percent of Vietnamese are Christian, the Communist government attempts to control this rapidly growing group by strictly regulating the official Tin Lanh church. In many areas, these churches must receive authorization from Communist officials for dates of worship, length of service, and sermon content.
“The government is very afraid of anyone they cannot control,” says Tom White, mission director for Voice of the Martyrs (VOTM), an international missionary organization.
VOTM reports that one pastor has been sentenced to nine years in prison for refusing to reveal the names of other house-church pastors. He reportedly has converted 30 fellow prisoners to Christianity.
