Lovell and Ginny Cary and Lloyd Frazier arrived home safely Saturday January 16. They will under go medical tests this week. When a wall fell on them in Haiti, the roof of the car crashed on to them pushing them downward. They worked themselves out of the car, but the overseer of Haiti died from the crash.

Dr. Elysee Joseph, national overseer, was removed from the car when the top was cut off, and they could reach him. His body is currently being held in a mortuary until a proper funeral can be prepared.

The Canadian group of four that was ministering in Haiti will arrive home tomorrow. The Ohio group arrived home on Saturday. We do not have authenticated information on the Southern New England group as of yet.

The first relief team, led by Bishop Fedlyn Beason, will go into Haiti from the Dominican Republic on Thursday. They will take food and medical supplies. Some of Brother Joseph’s family from the States will go with the group. They will meet with those ministers they can and have a brief memorial service.

Elvis Medina, overseer of Dominican Republic, is already in Haiti and reports that 6,000 people are living on Church of God compound and of those there are 250 people injury and 100 dead. Please continue to keep Haiti in your prayers.

If you would like to contribute to the Haiti Earthquake Relief effort, please indicate Project Number 7650042.

–Douglas LeRoy, General Director

(A video update with Douglas LeRoy and First Assistant General Overseer Tim Hill was posted on January 19 and is available on the Church of God Web site, www.churchofgod.org )

(Source: www.cogwm.org)

By Cameron Fisher, Church of God Communications

According to Rev. Douglas LeRoy, Church of God general director of World Missions, the death of Haitian overseer Joseph occurred when a 20-foot wall collapsed on the vehicle in which Joseph was a passenger. Joseph was returning from the Port-au-Prince airport with former Haitian missionary Lloyd Frazier and former General Director of World Missions Lovell Cary and his wife, Ginny. The group had just arrived in the country and were on their way to a hotel in anticipation of the Haitian National Convention which would have been held this week. Frazier and Lovell Cary were bruised, while Ginny Cary was hurt when a portion of the wall fell on their car. Her injuries are not life-threatening and as of Friday morning, the three had been transported to the neighboring country of Dominican Republic by the U.S. Coast Guard where Mrs. Cary was receiving treatment and arrangements were being made to return the group back to the United States.

Dr. Joseph was a leading pastor and had served the church as national overseer on two occasions. He is survived by his wife and children.

Other groups associated with the Church of God were also in the country when the quake hit. Among them was a delegation from Canada and Southern New England, and a short-term missions team from Potter’s House in Columbus, Ohio. According to Rev. Jacques Houle, administrative bishop for the Church of God in Quebec/Maritimes, three from the Canadian group have died. Traveling with that group was administrative bishop of Southern New England Jonathan Ramsey and Boston area pastor Othon Noel. Ramsey and Noel, as well as the Ohio group are safe, but remain in the country awaiting transportation back to North America. Details on how the three from the delegation were killed is still unclear.

“As you can imagine, communications with these and others in the country is very limited and sometimes third party,” LeRoy stated. “Anything beyond this information, including exactly how and when those not living in Haiti will be returned is unknown. We (World Missions) are diligently pursuing transportation options at this time.”

Since 1933, the Church of God has had a presence in Haiti. Jacques Vital-Herne wrote on March 17, 1933, to S. W. Latimer, the third overseer of Church of God, to affiliate with the Church in Cleveland. At that time, there were eight local churches and by 1936, Haiti had 30 churches. Presently there are 741 local churches, 327 missions and more than 250,000 members. The Church of God is among the largest Christian movements in Haiti and also includes schools, such as the Seminaire Biblique. It is one of four bachelor’s-degree granting schools in Haiti and one of three in the country that is approved to train public school teachers. The Church of God has more than 100 schools (including elementary), several clinics, hospitals According to LeRoy, due to strained communication a full assessment of the casualties among church members and damage to buildings and homes will not be possible for some time. LeRoy did confirm that some of the national buildings were damaged, but the national office and missionary home are intact.

“Please consider giving compassionately to aid and comfort the people who were so greatly devastated by this earthquake,” LeRoy stated. “If we all do what we can, God will supply the needs of His people in Haiti.”

Church of God relief agencies, including Operation Compassion, are already on-site in the country with supplies that were delivered two months ago. More relief is on stand-by waiting for clearance. A Haiti Earthquake Relief Fund has been established through Church of God World Missions. Please indicate Project Number 7650042 when designating your donations either through the Web site www.cogwm.org or through the mail P.O. Box 8016, Cleveland, TN, 37320-8016. In addition, a video update, recorded on January 14, is located on the Church of God Web site.

Faith News will continue to provide updates as they become available. Updates will also be posted on the Church of God World Missions Web site or by visiting www.churchofgod.org.

Despite several government attempts to revive a slumping national economy, the financial crisis remains – a fact, Keller contends, that illustrates America's problems aren't economic but spiritual.

"They have tried everything to fix the economy," Keller told WND, "including throwing a few trillion at the problem, and we are no better than when the 'experts' started to try and fix (it)."

"The crisis is a spiritual problem," said Keller in a statement. "The answer to our economic downfall is not an infusion of trillions of dollars, but the humble prayers of forgiveness and repentance for our sin and rebellion against God."

Want a blueprint for turning our nation around? Get "Taking America Back," Joseph Farah's manifesto for sovereignty, self-reliance and moral renewal.

In a YouTube video LivePrayer released in October, Keller declared, "People are looking for answers from their financial advisors, from their stock brokers, from their elected officials, from the men running for president, from the financial pundits on the TV, from the economists in the financial publications – from every place except where the answer is to be found."

"The answer isn't dollars," Keller said, "it's turning back to God."

Now Keller is hoping President Bush will hear his message by calling Americans to pray.

 

A long historical precedent exists for presidents calling the nation to prayer and fasting. On March 23, 1798, President John Adams issued a proclamation recommending May 9 of that year as a "day of solemn humiliation, fasting and prayer."

"As the safety and prosperity of nations ultimately and essentially depend on the protection and blessing of Almighty God," Adams wrote. He is proclamation called Americans to "acknowledge before GOD the manifold sins and transgressions with which we are justly chargeable as individuals and as a nation; beseeching him, at the same time, of his infinite Grace, through the Redeemer of the world, freely to remit all our offences, and to incline us, by his holy spirit, to that sincere repentance and reformation which may afford us reason to hope for his inestimable favor and heavenly benediction."

President Abraham Lincoln also called for a national day of "humiliation, fasting and prayer" in 1863. In 1952, a joint resolution by Congress, signed by President Truman, declared an annual prayer day, and in 1988, President Reagan declared the first Thursday of every May as the National Day of Prayer.

In his petition to President Bush and Congress, Keller writes, "Our nation is in the midst of an economic crisis that is not going to be solved by the wisdom of men or any amount of money, but only by the grace and mercy of Almighty God."

The petition continues, "We call upon you as the ones the people of the United States have elected to lead our nation, to follow the example of past Presidents and Congress, and call the people of our land to fast and pray for God's favor and blessings on our economy."

Keller's website invites people to sign the petition and states that he is hoping to hand-deliver at least 250,000 signatures to President Bush, House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid Dec. 16.

A former businessman convicted of insider trading in 1989, Keller served two years in federal prison, was released and later earned a degree in biblical studies from Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia.

In 1999, Keller launched LivePrayer, which claims to have responded personally to more than 60 million online requests for prayer since its inception and claims its LivePrayer devotional is received daily by over 2.4 million e-mail subscribers.
 

Incentives such as money, food, foreign liquor, gasoline, among others things are being used to mobilize Hindu extremists against the religious group that makes up only two percent of India’s population.

“People are being offered rewards to kill, and to destroy churches and Christian properties,” a spokesman for the All India Christian Council (AICC) (whose name is withheld for security reasons) told U.K.-based Release International.

“Different tasks have different rewards,” he added.

The “going price” to kill a pastor, for instance, is $250 USD, said Dr. Faiz Rahman, chairman of Good News India (GNI).

Rahman is the head of several orphanages in Orissa State where the anti-Christian campaign began in mid-August and where attacks have been the most violent.

He said he has helped 25 pastors leave a refugee camp, but some 250 church leaders still remain in the government-run shelters.

“All of the pastors are high value targets,” Rahman warned Release International. “We’ve got to get them out of the refugee camps.”

Hindu mobs began to attack Christians in the eastern state of Orissa soon after a Hindu fundamentalist leaders was murdered. Hindu extremists blamed Christians for the swami’s death despite claims by Maoist rebels that they themselves were responsible.

Some 50,000 Christians in Orissa are reportedly displaced, with about 30,000 living in make-shift refugee camps. Thousands of homes, churches, businesses, orphanages and properties of Christians have been burned and destroyed by Hindu mobs, leaving most Christians homeless.

Many Orissa Christians escaped with only the shirt on their back and took no belongings or money with them.

According to AICC, the campaign of terror against Christians has now spread to 14 states, with an estimated death toll of 200.

In addition to using rewards to entice violence, the Bajrang Dal, a well-known youth wing of the Hindu nationalist Vishwa Hindu Parishad organization, is now training women fighters to attack Christians, according to AICC.

“They are meeting in secret and training them to use swords and sticks to fight and destroy,” says an AICC spokesman.

In a letter to the state’s chief minister this past week, Catholic bishops from Orissa charged the Hindu militants of being behind “a calculated and pre-planned master plan to wipe out Christianity” from Kandhamal district, Orissa, and establish a Hindu nation.

The bishops urged the minister to request that the national police remain in Kandhamal until after the parliamentary and assembly elections in Orissa, and for destroyed churches to be rebuilt or repaired by the first week of December in time for Christmas.

India is an officially secular country and the largest democracy in the world. Rights groups have strongly criticized the Indian government for allowing the violence against religious minorities to go on unabated for three months without serious efforts to intervene.

“Thousands of Christians now face the hardship of winter in camps for the displaced. Relief aid is needed now, and India must take urgent action to contain the violence, which has spread to other states,” said Andy Dipper, head of Release International. “The authorities must safeguard the lives and homes of Christians under threat from ultra-nationalist Hindus.”

Other findings announced by Ehud Netzer of Jerusalem's Hebrew University provided new evidence of the lavish lifestyle of the Roman-era monarch also known as the "King of the Jews."

Herod, a Roman-anointed king who ruled Judea from 37 BC until his death in 4 BC, has a special place in biblical history. Herod rebuilt the Jewish temple in Jerusalem, making him a focus of study in the Jewish state.

The Gospel of Matthew says Herod ordered the "Massacre of the Innocents," the killing of male infants in Jesus' birthplace of Bethlehem, out of fear of losing his throne.

Netzer, an authority on Herodian excavations, showed reporters portions of two limestone sarcophagi he says had contained remains of one of Herod's wives, Malthace, and a daughter-in-law.

He said these findings supported his claims that another sarcophagus he found at the site in 2007 had been Herod's tomb. Some experts had said then the evidence seemed inconclusive.

Based on the additional sacrophagi he has found, and despite the absence of any inscriptions or documentation by the ancient Jewish historian Josephus Flavius, Netzer said:

"I would eat my hat if it were someone else's tomb."

At a visit to the dig site in Herodium, outside Jerusalem in the occupied West Bank, where one of Herod's palaces once stood, Netzer showed reporters evidence of what he said was a mausoleum at the site, where the remains of the sacrophagi had been found.

Some bones were also found nearby but Netzer could not verify they belonged to any of the Herod dynasty.

Netzer said the remains of the monarch and his relatives likely disappeared when their tombs were smashed, possibly by Jewish rebels against the Romans from 66 to 72 AD.

He said his team was surprised when they came across further evidence of Herod's cushy lifestyle, a well-preserved mural of gazelles decorating walls of what Netzer believes was luxury seating for a theater.

(Editing by Angus MacSwan)

The representative, on condition of anonymity, reported these facts and figures to a team sent by the Communist Party of India (CPL-ML) on a fact finding visit to Kandhamal district. Officially, according to the state government, the official death toll now stands at 31.

The CPI-ML team visited destroyed villages and refugee camps on 15-16 October, almost two months after the start of the massacre. Here team members met and interviewed magistrates and police officers. Their report signed by J P Minz was published in the November issue of the Liberation magazine.

In addition to the real number of dead the report describes the gap between government reassuring statements about the refugee camps and the real situation.

In the government version of the facts some 12,641 people who fled destruction live in 15 refugee camps where they are well-fed, have access to doctors, drugs and schooling for the children.

The CPI-ML team visited the camps in Phulbani, Tikabali, J Udaygiri and Rakiya where they found that food rations were inadequate, drugs non-existent and pregnant women were left without any medical care.

They depict an atmosphere where terror reigns among Christians, who fear for their lives if they go back.

Fundamentalist groups, who want the central government to pull back the police units it sent in, are organising themselves into armed groups, threatening anyone who refuses to convert to Hinduism.

Whilst this is going on, camp administrators are trying to get the refugees to go back home, telling them that life has gone back to normal.

The CPI-ML inquiry said that the pogrom had been in the works for some time, and that it was organised by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and the Bajrang Dal.

For this reason it calls on the government to ban the two organisations.

"We saw two or three hundred of these Hindus come to our village, wearing saffron headbands and shouting Hindustan for Hindus' and Kill the Christians,'" said Ratna, 47, who trekked nearly 20 kilometers through dense, wet forest in her flip-flops to a government relief camp in Udaygiri, a six-hour drive from Bhubaneshwar, Orissa's capital.

"Our neighbours were among them, to show them the homes of Christians. Only these did they loot and burn," she said, angrily flipping the end of her peach-coloured sari across her shoulder.

A third of these are crowded into 14 squalid government camps, too scared to return to their villages. In many cases, there's nothing left to go back to.

So-called "Saffron Brigades" in these remote, mist-covered hills of Orissa have ransacked and burned hundreds of churches as well as schools, orphanages and health clinics run by Christian aid groups. Their atrocities include the gang rape of a 27-year-old nun and the murder of a 20-year-old Hindu girl who was mistaken for a Christian. One man witnessed his wheelchair-bound brother doused with fuel and set ablaze.

Even though more than 3000 Indian police and paramilitaries have been deployed to the region in recent weeks, Orissa's government appears unable - or unwilling, critics say - to stop the attacks, sparked by the killing in August of an 84-year-old Hindu spiritual leader who opposed the spread of Christianity in India. Police say the region's Maoist rebels killed him, but Hindu groups blamed Christians.

Many villages nestled in the thick green hills of Kandhamal are now ghost towns. Roadside merchants display saffron flags, mainly to protect their businesses from Hindu mobs by signifying that they are Hindu.

Anti-Christian violence has spread to other parts of India. In the southern states of Karnataka and Kerala, long-smouldering tensions have ignited between Hindu extremists and Christian evangelists accused of illegally converting Hindus with promises of food aid, education and jobs.

"Conversion is the biggest violence," said Milind Parande, a senior leader of Vishwa Hindu Parishad, a Hindu extremist group that has launched a campaign against Christian missionaries in India. "It is generating all this reaction. A Hindu is a peaceful person. A Hindu does not believe in violence, but if you provoke him, then I do not know what will happen."

The surge in religious strife is another sign that right-wing Hindu groups are on the rise in India. In August, Hindu protesters, enraged by a botched land deal, shut down the only highway connecting Kashmir to the rest of India, choking off supplies of food, fuel and medicine to more than 12 million people in Kashmir, a mostly Muslim enclave in the foothills of the Himalayas. They attacked scores of truck drivers, killing at least one.

Hindu militant groups such as Bajrang Dal and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS, are gaining notoriety for the viciousness of their attacks against Christians and Muslims.

Analysts say these groups are linked to India's Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, the main opposition party. India's ruling Congress Party has blasted the BJP of instigating Hindu fury against Christians and Muslims to scare up votes as the country gears up for national elections next year.

"The problem is that some people are trying to give the violence a communal colour, but it, most likely, has more to do with politics," said Ajay Maken, a top Congress Party minister. "Perhaps it is the same kind of experiment that was performed in Gujarat is being performed here. It is an election year."

The experiment Maken refers to is the 2002 riots in Gujarat state in which Hindu mobs, egged on by the RSS, massacred more than 1000 Muslims after a train fire killed 58 Hindus.

Investigators ruled that the fire was accidental, but the incident galvanised Hindu support for Gujarat's chief minister, Narendra Modi, a Hindu hardliner whose "get-tough" stance against Muslims catapulted him to BJP stardom.

In India, a mostly Hindu nation of 1.1 billion people, Christians make up less than 3% of the population. But some Hindus see the spread of Christianity as a threat to India's culture and its centuries-old caste system. Most Christian converts are low-caste Hindus, who are accused of using a foreign religion to escape the confines of their caste.

Meanwhile, Christians such as Ratna and Jikhario, a church pastor. are still too scared to return home.

"The brotherly love we had with our Hindu neighbours has been burned and the trust is no longer there," said Ratna.
 

They were ordered to get on their knees and bow before the portrait of a Hindu preacher. They were told to turn over their Bibles, hymnals and the two brightly colored calendar images of Christ that hung on their wall. Then, Mr. Digal, 45, a Christian since childhood, was forced to watch his Hindu neighbors set the items on fire.

“ ‘Embrace Hinduism, and your house will not be demolished,’ ” Mr. Digal recalled being told on that Wednesday afternoon in September. “ ‘Otherwise, you will be killed, or you will be thrown out of the village.’ ”

India, the world’s most populous democracy and officially a secular nation, is today haunted by a stark assault on one of its fundamental freedoms. Here in eastern Orissa State, riven by six weeks of religious clashes, Christian families like the Digals say they are being forced to abandon their faith in exchange for their safety.

The forced conversions come amid widening attacks on Christians here and in at least five other states across the country, as India prepares for national elections next spring.

The clash of faiths has cut a wide swath of panic and destruction through these once quiet hamlets fed by paddy fields and jackfruit trees. Here in Kandhamal, the district that has seen the greatest violence, more than 30 people have been killed, 3,000 homes burned and over 130 churches destroyed, including the tin-roofed Baptist prayer hall where the Digals worshiped. Today it is a heap of rubble on an empty field, where cows blithely graze.

Across this ghastly terrain lie the singed remains of mud-and-thatch homes. Christian-owned businesses have been systematically attacked. Orange flags (orange is the sacred color of Hinduism) flutter triumphantly above the rooftops of houses and storefronts.

India is no stranger to religious violence between Christians, who make up about 2 percent of the population, and India’s Hindu-majority of 1.1 billion people. But this most recent spasm is the most intense in years.

It was set off, people here say, by the killing on Aug. 23 of a charismatic Hindu preacher known as Swami Laxmanananda Saraswati, who for 40 years had rallied the area’s people to choose Hinduism over Christianity.

The police have blamed Maoist guerrillas for the swami’s killing. But Hindu radicals continue to hold Christians responsible.

In recent weeks, they have plastered these villages with gruesome posters of the swami’s hacked corpse. “Who killed him?” the posters ask. “What is the solution?”

Behind the clashes are long-simmering tensions between equally impoverished groups: the Panas and Kandhas. Both original inhabitants of the land, the two groups for ages worshiped the same gods. Over the past several decades, the Panas for the most part became Christian, as Roman Catholic and Baptist missionaries arrived here more than 60 years ago, followed more recently by Pentecostals, who have proselytized more aggressively.

Meanwhile, the Kandhas, in part through the teachings of Swami Laxmanananda, embraced Hinduism. The men tied the sacred Hindu white thread around their torsos; their wives daubed their foreheads with bright red vermilion. Temples sprouted.

Hate has been fed by economic tensions as well, as the government has categorized each group differently and given them different privileges.

The Kandhas accused the Panas of cheating to obtain coveted quotas for government jobs. The Christian Panas, in turn, say their neighbors have become resentful as they have educated themselves and prospered.

Their grievances have erupted in sporadic clashes over the past 15 years, but they have exploded with a fury since the killing of Swami Laxmanananda.

Two nights after his death, a Hindu mob in the village of Nuagaon dragged a Catholic priest and a nun from their residence, tore off much of their clothing and paraded them through the streets.

The nun told the police that she had been raped by four men, a charge the police say was borne out by a medical examination. Yet no one was arrested in the case until five weeks later, after a storm of media coverage. Today, five men are under arrest in connection with inciting the riots. The police say they are trying to find the nun and bring her back here to identify her attackers.

Given a chance to explain the recent violence, Subash Chauhan, the state’s highest-ranking leader of Bajrang Dal, a Hindu radical group, described much of it as “a spontaneous reaction.”

He said in an interview that the nun had not been raped but had had regular consensual sex.

On Sunday evening, as much of Kandhamal remained under curfew, Mr. Chauhan sat in the hall of a Hindu school in the state capital, Bhubaneshwar, beneath a huge portrait of the swami. A state police officer was assigned to protect him round the clock. He cupped a trilling Blackberry in his hand.

Mr. Chauhan denied that his group was responsible for forced conversions and in turn accused Christian missionaries of luring villagers with incentives of schools and social services.

He was asked repeatedly whether Christians in Orissa should be left free to worship the god of their choice. “Why not?” he finally said, but he warned that it was unrealistic to expect the Kandhas to politely let their Pana enemies live among them as followers of Jesus.

“Who am I to give assurance?” he snapped. “Those who have exploited the Kandhas say they want to live together?”

Besides, he said, “they are Hindus by birth.”

Hindu extremists have held ceremonies in the country’s indigenous belt for the past several years intended to purge tribal communities of Christian influence.

It is impossible to know how many have been reconverted here, in the wake of the latest violence, though a three-day journey through the villages of Kandhamal turned up plenty of anecdotal evidence.

A few steps from where the nun had been attacked in Nuagaon, five men, their heads freshly shorn, emerged from a soggy tent in a relief camp for Christians fleeing their homes.

The men had also been summoned to a village meeting in late August, where hundreds of their neighbors stood with machetes in hand and issued a firm order: Get your heads shaved and bow down before our gods, or leave this place.

Trembling with fear, Daud Nayak, 56, submitted to a shaving, a Hindu sign of sacrifice. He drank, as instructed, a tumbler of diluted cow dung, considered to be purifying.

In the eyes of his neighbors, he reckoned, he became a Hindu.

In his heart, he said, he could not bear it.

All five men said they fled the next day with their families. They refuse to return.

In another village, Birachakka, a man named Balkrishna Digal and his son, Saroj, said they had been summoned to a similar meeting and told by Hindu leaders who came from nearby villages that they, too, would have to convert. In their case, the ceremony was deferred because of rumors of Christian-Hindu clashes nearby.

For the time being, the family had placed an orange flag on their mud home. Their Hindu neighbors promised to protect them.

Here in Borepanga, the family of Solomon Digal was not so lucky. Shortly after they recounted their Sept. 10 Hindu conversion story to a reporter in the dark of night, the Digals were again summoned by their neighbors. They were scolded and fined 501 rupees, or about $12, a pinching sum here.

The next morning, calmly clearing his cauliflower field, Lisura Paricha, one of the Hindu men who had summoned the Digals, confirmed that they had been penalized. Their crime, he said, was to talk to outsiders.
 

Extra hands are desperately needed to help finish the ship, which is currently in Denmark for a major refit before its launch before the end of the year, says Operation Mobilisation.

Logos Hope will replace the smaller vessel Logos II, which retired in July after more than two decades of bringing the Gospel to the world.

The renovation of the new vessel includes a complete refit of the bridge and the installation of an extra deck that will be used for OM’s public ministry when it docks at various ports around the world.

A permanent book fair on the ship will offer visitors 8,000 different Christian and education titles. In the new purpose-built Visitor Experience area, meanwhile, they will have the chance to meet the crew and learn more about God’s plan for humanity.

Logos Hope, which will be OM Ships’ largest vessel, is scheduled to visit the UK in early 2009.

Crews on board OM Ships’ vessels are made up entirely of Christian volunteers, who help run the ship as it visits ports around the world.

They also complete practical aid projects in ports and host teaching conferences for local Christians onboard.

"Logos Hope's larger capacity is a means to further this ministry on a scale never realised before," said OM.

OM Ships’ vessels – Logos, Logos II and Doulos - have brought the Gospel to port communities in more than 150 countries around the world and welcomed more than 37 million people to their book fairs.

On the web: www.uk.om.org

Christians, Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists, politicians and civilians joined together in the Peace and Solidarity rally which was held to coincide with the 139th birthday of Mahatma Gandhi – the “Father of the Nation” who is renowned for his acts of non-violent civil disobedience.

“The very killers of Mahatma Gandhi are the same killers of Christians in Orissa, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh and other parts of the country,” declared prominent scholar and peace activist Swami Agnivesh at the rally, according to All India Christian Council (AICC).

Also speaking out against the violence was Indian Union Minister for Indian Railways, Shri Lalu Prasad Yadav.

In his address at the rally, he vowed to personally meet with the country’s prime minister and “discuss urgently urgently about implementing Article 355” in the Constitution, which would allow the federal government to intervene in state affairs to protect Christians against aggression.

“I will also take up the anti-Christian violence in Parliament and debate the hatred of Hindutva forces,” he added.

The rally was the culmination of a five-day protest that began on Sunday. The event is known as a dharna and is an Indian method of seeking justice. Traditionally, participants in the dharna sit at the door of their wrongdoer and fast until they obtain justice.

In the early hours of the rally, chief minister of Delhi, Sheila Dixit showed her solidarity with the protesters by condemning the Hindu fanatics who are responsible for killing dozens of Christians and burning hundreds of Christian homes, businesses and churches.

Just in eastern Orissa state alone, 50,000 Christians are said to be displaced from their homes.

The violence, which began in August, is said to be the worst anti-Christian attacks in the 60 years of India’s independence.

While the Congress had been warning respective state Governments of "grave consequences", a press briefing at the Congress headquarters brought to the fore the confusion prevailing in the party over its approach to attacks on Christians and their institutions. There was also the usual diatribe against the state Government, Bajrang Dal and other Sangh Parivar affiliates.

To queries if the party would seek a ban on Bajrang Dal, AICC spokesperson Abhishek Manu Singhvi said, "What purpose will the ban serve if the state does not act? It is after all a matter of policing."

Asked why the same logic should not be applied to SIMI, he said the outfit was already banned.

A string of attacks on Christians in three states has killed at least 34 people and forced thousands to flee to government camps or hide in forests.

The troubles have been sparked by controversial conversion campaigns by Christian groups in poor tribal areas.

"(There is) a hidden agenda to (make) the entirety of Orissa into a Hindu state," said Archbishop Raphael Cheenath of Cuttack-Bhubaneswar in Orissa, where most of the violence has been concentrated.

Cheenath compared the violence to the slaughter of over 2,000 Muslims in the state of Gujarat in 2002.

He said that hardliners were "following the Modi style," referring to the state's Chief Minister Narendra Modi from the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), who has been accused of giving Hindu mobs a free run to carry out the carnage.

Orissa police say they have arrested more than 300 people over the clashes, including local leaders of the BJP, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).

Hindu nationalist groups have denied their involvement.

While over 4,000 federal police have been deployed in Orissa, Christian leaders and human rights groups say the violence has not been brought under control, and called on the state government, run by Hindu nationalists, to do more.

"The state government has not rooted out the violence - that is quite disconcerting," a spokesman for Amnesty International told Reuters.

"The people in the relief camps who wanted to return have been told they have to re-convert to Hinduism. That should be taken very seriously by the state government."

Cheenath said Hindu activists are trying to scare Christians into leaving the camps by throwing bombs nearby, aiming to forcibly reconvert them to Hinduism once they are outside. The All India Christian Council has listed assaults against Christians it says were carried out since August, including murder, rape, and attacks on churches and schools.

The Hindu, a respected national newspaper, this week carried reports a nun was stripped naked and gang-raped. It said a priest who tried to stop the attack was beaten and doused in kerosene in full view of the police.

According to Orissa authorities, a medical report has confirmed a rape took place.

"We were not impressed by the reaction of the state government," said A.M. Chinnappa, Archbishop of Madras-Mylapore.

Pope Benedict has condemned the attacks and Roman Catholic bishops have urged the European Union to treat persecution of Christians as a humanitarian emergency.

Hindus have opposed missionaries' conversions of lower-caste Hindus, which they said were sometimes carried out by force.

A BJP spokesman in Orissa blamed clashes on the murder of a prominent Hindu missionary belonging to the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and a vocal opponent of Christian proselytising.

"Police failure to arrest the criminals who killed Swamiji and others has angered the local people," the spokesman said."

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has called the violence a "national shame," and on Friday the Home Minister Shivraj Patil called on the Orissa Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik to do more to control the violence.

(Editing by Alistair Scrutton and Jerry Norton)

YWAM said in a report that more than a dozen of its staff and students had been beaten and injured, lost their homes and suffered damage to personal and ministry property at the hands of radicals, who blame Christians for the death of their leader, despite authorities declaring Maoists to be responsible.

The wave of violence was triggered by the killing in late August of a radical Hindu leader in the sectarian violence-prone state of Orissa. At least 51 people have died in violence in the eastern state alone, while tens of thousands have been forced to flee their homes in a bid to escape the violent mobs that have burned hundreds of homes and churches to the ground. The violence has since spread to the west coast state of Karnataka.

Teams of YWAM workers are working to provide refugees with basic necessities and praying for God to intervene in the crisis.

YWAM India joined 90 Christian leaders in Mumbai last week in praying for an end to the violence. They drew comparisons between the situation facing Christians in India to the book of Esther in the Old Testament.

One of the YWAM India leaders who took part in the meeting was quoted in the report as saying, “Queen Esther appeals, through Mordecai, to the people of God to go on a three day fast. The rest is history. God intervenes. That’s the objective of this call to pray and fast. Accordingly, we are urging all our friends to declare three days of prayer and fasting for India from Monday the 29th to Wednesday the 1st of October.”

YWAM’s International Chairman, Lynn Green, threw her support behind the prayer call.

“This coming Thursday is YWAM’s monthly Global Day of Prayer and our focus is on strengthening yourself in the Lord,” she said. “Our brothers and sisters in India are suffering in a way many of us have never faced and we must stand with them, strengthening them with our prayers as they pursue God’s purposes in that nation.”

While the prayer hall near the police station at Yelahanka here was vandalised and the Bible burnt, the church was attacked at Shamboor village in Bantwal taluk of Dakshina Kannada.

Some persons entered the prayer hall and burnt the Bible and two song books. They also damaged the pulpit, a lamp, a clock and two tube-lights. “They barged into the prayer hall and caused the damage,” Bangalore city Police Commissioner Shankar M. Bidari said.

The Yelahanka police have registered a case of trespass, arson and hurting religious sentiments.

The Bantwal rural police have arrested four persons in connection with the attack on the Sacred Heart Church at Shamboor village. The police said the arrested were daily wage workers aged below 20.

Responding to the attacks on Christian institutions, the Chief Minister said: “I have discussed the issue with top-ranking police officers. Everything is under control.”

Asked if the Government had booked any person under the provisions of the Goonda Act in connection with the attacks on churches and prayer halls, the Chief Minister said: “We have given freedom to the police book cases under the Act.”

The Additional Director-General of Police (Law and Order), A.R. Infant, said: “Booking cases under the Goonda Act takes time. We have to build records and see their (miscreants) involvement in such incidents in the past which affect communal harmony. We are looking at the past of those who have been arrested to know if the provisions of the Act can be invoked against them.”

The police sources in Mangalore said that the District Magistrate would have to pass an order to book criminals under the Act. The order would have to be ratified by a High Court Bench. Once that was done, the persons charged under the Act could be detained in judicial custody for a maximum period of one year. The police were said to be compiling documents relating to various offences, and the District Magistrate’s order could come once this process ended.

Meanwhile, the Chief Minister said that the State Government had decided to form Karnataka Bhavykya Mandali (State-level committee for communal harmony) headed by himself following a suggestion from the Centre.