Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Church only on Sunday?

I suppose I have been blind, or too busy with my own little world...before this morning if you had asked me about the Methodist Church in Fiji, I would not have known there was anything wrong....but now...

The Fijian government has banned all Methodist Church meetings except for Sunday worship in an unprecedented crackdown on religious freedom. This includes house groups, women’s prayer fellowship, choir practice, mid-week communion and youth fellowship, as well as the Church’s governance meetings.

Having withdrawn the permit for the Church’s annual Conference the evening before the event was due to start, the interim government has now notified the Church in a letter from the Fiji Military Council that all other meetings of the Methodist Church are forbidden. All Methodist ministers are also forbidden from leaving the country for any meeting. The Church is responding with prayer and fasting. A planned press conference had to be cancelled last week because of the fear of further arrests. The Methodist Church is the largest faith group in Fiji and the only group to receive this treatment by the Government.


Read the rest of the article here...

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