Free Republic

Hundreds of asylum seekers from the Middle East, including from Iran and Iraq, have converted to Christianity in Finland, according to officials in the Finnish Evangelical Lutheran community. ....While some who are seeking to covert cited disillusionment with Islam as the key reason, others said they felt conversion will help them fit into the Finnish culture, according to Sputnik News, which also speculated that an underlying reason also could be to guard themselves against possible deportation. In Finland, 4.1 million of the 5.5 million people are members of the Evangelical Lutheran Church....

Forced to live in secret, Christians in Saudi Arabia are being supported in their faith online. Islam is the state religion of Saudi Arabia, where the legal system is based on Sharia law. Courts regularly impose severe physical punishments, including the death penalty, for apostasy, and non-Muslim places of worship are prohibited. According to the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), Saudi Arabia "remains uniquely repressive in the extent to which it restricts the public expression of any religion other than Islam". The government prosecutes, imprisons and flogs individuals for dissent, apostasy, blasphemy and sorcery, and imposes "systematic,...

The picture is the iconic image of a Vietnamese girl, naked, burned by napalm as she runs down a road.The girl is Kim Phuc, and her life could have ended in that moment. It didn’t. She has taken an extraordinary journey and has not let that searing moment in her life define her: Despite the fear that no one would want her, Kim is now married and has two sons. She says her conversion from the Cao Dai religion to Christianity at the age of 19 changed everything.“And when I read in John 14:6, where Jesus say, ‘I am the...

WASHINGTON – An ISIS fighter who reveled in killing Christians now follows Jesus Christ after a “man in white” repeatedly appeared to him in dreams and said, “You are killing my people,” according to a missionary leader. A worker with the international evangelical group Youth With a Mission, or YWAM, came in contact earlier this year with the ISIS fighter, who, though understandably guarded, confided that he had become a Christian.

On April 25, police raided a Christian worship service in Asella just south of the capital, Addis Ababa. The Church of Asella had just baptized 40 new converts to Christianity, prompting mass arrests.One of those imprisoned, a former Muslim who converted to Christianity known only as “Palus Ejigu,” said, “We were gathered for sharing and encouraging each other with the Word of God. After we finished the service, police imprisoned us. Some of our friends ran away when they saw the way we were harshly handled.”After weeks of suffering harsh prison conditions and abuses, Ejigu was eventually released. But five...

It has become a common occurrence over the years for Muslims in the Middle East who have converted to Christianity to claim to have been compelled to do so after dreaming of a person who they believe is Jesus Christ. Now, one militant belonging to the brutal Islamic State that has massacred Christians has converted to his victims' religion after dreaming of "a man in white" with a startling message, according to one missionary's account. "One of our YWAM workers in the Middle East was contacted by a friend earlier this year and they met up and he was introduced...

They call it the “Kaduri Revival,” and reports over recent months have confirmed the teachings of one of Israel’s most venerated rabbi are leading Jews time and again to accept Jesus Christ as the Messiah. And face persecution. Baptist preacher and radio host Carl Gallups says the threats facing Messianic Jews now in Israel is “reminiscent of what we read about in the New Testament – in the early days of the church.” There, he said, Jews who followed Jesus Christ were persecuted. And today, they “are facing the same hardships and persecution the early church faced,” he said. “Gallups...

Do you find it difficult to believe in God or accept the claims of Christianity? I did, when I was an atheist, but I changed my mind, and my reasons for doing so may be of interest to you in your own personal journey and attempts to make sense of life. I am a freelance writer and lecturer. Since graduating from Oxford in 1973, with a degree in politics and philosophy, I have spent most of my professional life in politics and journalism, loving, as I do, the world of books, ideas and debate. Two questions in particular have always...

This story is miraculous in so many different ways. A man named Ravi said that God showed him a man that he was supposed to go find. He didn’t know his name but he did know what he looked like. After going where God led him, Ravi found the man God showed him. The man was a guru, dedicated by his parents to be the priest in the village temple. After talking to each other for a while, it is revealed that the guru had a dream about Ravi… And you have to watch to see what happens next… Watch...

Atrocities by the Islamic State (ISIS) are softening the hearts of Muslims to Christianity, and evangelistic techniques and technologies are proving effective, but locally-based missionaries say the main reason for the spike in conversions in the Middle East is simply that former Muslims are finding God is real. In war-torn areas of Syria and Iraq where ISIS is fighting to establish a caliphate, Muslim refugees to neighboring countries, Internally Displaced People and people remaining at home are learning about Christ from native aid workers, podcasts and broadcasts. Tent churches among refugees are sprouting like mushrooms. For people who have suffered...

Hauled Aboard the Ark by Peter KreeftI was born into a loving, believing community, a Protestant “mother church” (the Reformed Church) which, though it had not for me the fullness of the faith, had strong and genuine piety. I believed, mainly because of the good example of my parents and my church. The faith of my parents, Sunday School teachers, ministers, and relatives made a real difference to their lives, a difference big enough to compensate for many shortcomings. “Love covers a multitude of sins.”I was taught what C. S. Lewis calls “mere Christianity,” essentially the Bible. But no one...

“Your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions,” asserts the promise of God from the book of Joel. Yet some of those men reportedly seeing visions and dreams are neither Jews nor Christians … but Muslims. What’s more, Middle East evangelists report the dreamers are coming to Christianity because of their visions of Jesus. According to a CBN report, Christian Middle East evangelist Hazem Farraj’s television program “Reflections” is reaching a large Muslim audience. Farraj told CBN that he hears from Muslims who report having dreams or visions of Jesus. Tom Doyle, an evangelist, pastor...

A 15-year-old Egyptian girl, Dina el-Gohary, has written an emotional appeal to President Obama asking him to use his influence to save her father, Maher el-Gohary, who is being persecuted for his beliefs. "Mr. President Obama, we are a minority in Egypt," Dina writes, according to a report from the Assyrian International News Agency. "We are treated very badly. ... We are imprisoned in our own home because Muslim clerics called for the murder of my father, and now the Government has set for us a new prison, we are imprisoned in our own country." Dina and her father are...