Global village
Reconciliation in Kosovo
Christians have made significant efforts to bring reconciliation to Kosovo, a small country between Italy and Turkey.
Femi Cakolli, president of the Kosovan Evangelical Alliance, spoke recently about living where, in the 1980s and 1990s, some 15,000 people were killed, and 20,000 women raped by the Serbian army who would carve crosses on the bodies of their Albanian victims. “This still greatly affects the ministry of the Evangelical Alliance in our country, in which the population is composed of mainly Albanians,” Cakolli says. “When we share the Good News with the population, people still associate Jesus with the Serbians.”
Peacemaking and reconciliation are difficult to teach, not only in general society. Church members, Cakolli observes, seem to be waiting for institutions to make it happen. To combat this inaction, his group hosted a seminar for victims of sexual abuse during which they explained the love of God and that the image of the cross demonstrated that love.
Although Evangelicals are the smallest religious community in Kosovo, they showed leadership by initiating dialogues with the other religious groups on peacemaking. “When it comes to peacemaking and reconciliation” dialogues, Cakolli says, “I would recommend four principles in [this] given order: Know right! Think right! Act right! And Feel right! Most people start with feeling right…. But we can derive from Scripture that peacemaking does not start with a feeling.” WWW.EUROPEANEA.ORG
Intolerance in Spain
Evangelical churches in Spain are a small minority in an overwhelmingly Roman Catholic country, reports Xesús Manuel Suárez García, general secretary of the Spanish Evangelical Alliance. Not to mention that the country has strong and sometimes violent nationalist movements in Catalonia, Euskadi (Basque country) and Galicia.
“The problem underlying this conflict of identities,” he says, “lies far deeper than the mere selfish drive of these three nations to achieve economic privileges. It lies in the inability or unwillingness to understand the other, a problem of disagreement between collectives.
“Positions are very far apart, there is a lot of ‘political hooliganism’ and little willingness to listen,” he says. Most Spaniards envision peace as “when one part imposes itself on all and suppresses the others, which makes it difficult to pay attention to minorities and share quotas of power.”
Evangelicals should be able to offer a different model for society, he says, and his group has taken small steps of convening dialogues among the diverse evangelical community and also public dialogues between non-Evangelicals on reconciliation. WWW.EUROPEANEA.ORG
Persecution in Iran and India
The World Evangelical Alliance and several partner groups expressed concern over freedom of religion in Iran and India to the United Nations in May.
The submission on Iran lists 26 issues including Farsi-language church services, the detention and prosecution of converts to Christianity, the confiscation of church property and legal discrimination on a religious basis.
The submission on India lists 12 issues calling for national legislation against targeted and communal violence, legal action against hate speech, prosecution of police officials who fail to enforce the law or may be complicit in attacks against religious minorities, and protection for internal migrant workers. WWW.WORLDEA.ORG
“We pray that Christian believers will be at the forefront of reconciliation (as did Jesus Christ who Himself reconciled us to God and to each other), of advocating and working for justice and will take on the calling to be peace builders [like] Jesus who came to this world as the Prince of Peace.” — Bishop Efraim Tendero of the World Evangelical Alliance
WWW.WORLDEA.ORG