Are Christians wasting their lives?

Two week ago, a man walked into the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs and opened fire. 26 people died. The following day, news broke that Ian Squire, a British missionary and charity worker being held hostage in Nigeria, had been murdered by his captors.

Tragedies like this remind me of what my Christian faith is really about. When the lives of Christians are cut short, we are forced to wonder whether we are wasting our lives. Why should we dedicate so much of our short lives to our faith? Shouldn’t we be making the most our lives rather than wasting our time on something that might not even be true? Was Pastor Frank Pomeroy right to spend hours of his life in church meetings and Bible studies when he could have spent that time with his 14-year-old daughter, Annabella, who died during the attack?

Sometimes people talk about religious beliefs as if they are just a matter of taste. Religions, they say, are just different ways of helping people to find meaning in our short lives. We have a right to pursue happiness in our lives and if we want to do that through Islam, Christianity or none of the above, it’s all equal. We can pick whatever moral code suits us best as long as we don’t impose it on others. If someone’s faith helps them to be a better person, then we have no right to judge what they believe.

But when Devin Patrick Kelley opened fire on the members of First Baptist Church, what his victims believed about life after death really mattered.

Religion is not a matter of personal preference. It’s a lot more like life insurance. Life insurance might give you peace of mind in life, but what really matters is what happens after death. The true test of a policy is whether it pays out. The peace of mind it provides is irrelevant.

Of course, Christianity is about more than just death. It does provide us with a moral code. It is a refuge when life is hard. But if Christianity turns out to be wrong about life after death, then it would be nothing more than a faith of false hopes.   It would be as much use as a life insurance policy that never pays out.

The Bible itself such as much. In 1 Corinthians, the Apostle Paul addresses those who deny that Jesus rose from the dead:

“¹⁵If Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. ¹⁵ More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead. But he did not raise him if in fact the dead are not raised.¹⁶ For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either.¹⁷ And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. ¹⁸ Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost.¹⁹ If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.”

There is no inherent value in faith. It’s not rewarding to dedicate your life to to a God that doesn’t exist- it’s delusional.  

If what Ian Squire believed in the wrong God, they he died for nothing. If 26 victims of the Sutherland Spring shootings were wrong about life after death, then they ‘of all people [should] be pitied’. If they were right, then every moment they spent on their faith was worth it.

There is no middle ground.

"I know everyone who lost their life that day, some of which were my best friends, and my daughter. "And I guarantee without any shadow of a doubt they are dancing with Jesus today. God gets the glory."

Pastor Frank Pomeroy

“Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.”
C.S Lewis

How can God ask us to worship Him?

The idea of God demanding to be worshiped is difficult to swallow. It makes God seem like an attention-seeker who relies on our praise to bolster his fragile ego. The idea that He would create the world or cause events to happen in order that he would be ‘glorified’ through them seems equally problematic.   Even as a Christian, it’s taken me a while to understand how a God who asks us to be humble could ask us to place Him at the centre of our lives.  

Some people answer this objection by referring to God’s role as the Creator of mankind. Just as the carpenter owns the table or chairs she creates, the act of creation gave God certain rights over us, including the right to be worshipped.

I can see the attraction of this argument. But it’s always seemed flawed to me. I am not a mahogany table. I see no reason why the carpenter who made me would be free to let me gather dust in the attic. Having a right to use an object as you please is very different to having unlimited rights over a person. We have word for the latter: slavery.

Even our parents, who literally created us, don’t have a right to use us as they please. I love my parents. But heaven forbid they ever have unlimited rights over me. They are flawed people. We all are.

Every one of us is flawed and so the thought of them having unlimited rights over us is terrifying. When we talk about a God that wants us to praise Him, he sounds like yet another flawed human being. And only the most flawed and selfish people every openly ask anyone else to worship them. He may be powerful, but that doesn’t make His claims over our lives any more valid. If His strength was the only reason He could command our obedience, God would just be another despot.

But God has a right to our praise not because of His strength, but because of His moral perfection. That’s why the act of worshipping God is fundamentally different to worshipping a person. Perhaps it is closer to worshipping a virtue. Most of us, I imagine, would consider the worship of an ideal to be more acceptable than the worship of a person. In fact, many of us already worship a virtue. “Love trumps Hate” seems to have been the standard response to so many of the horrible things that have happened recently. We put our faith in Love. We put our hope in Love. We think of it as the guiding principle of our lives. That sounds a lot like worship to me. 

Don’t get me wrong, worshipping Love is not the same as worshipping God. I do not believe that God is a metaphor or an abstract ideal. (How could anyone worship a metaphor?) Though God is outside of this universe, I believe that He is as real as the world around us. (Yes, I know that Elon Musk, the Independent and Morpheus from the Matrix question whether the world is real,  but let’s forget about them for a minute…)

But in God those virtues are embodied in a person. If God is, as the Bible claims, Love, then worshiping Him is fundamentally different to worshipping a person. To worship something else would be to worship something that wasn’t Love. If only God is perfect, then to worship something else would be to worship something morally imperfect.   If only He is just, then to worship something else would be worship injustice. That is why, I think, God can only allow people to worship Him.  I don’t see how God could be perfect if he were happy for us to worship something that was imperfect. And by God, I mean the Christian God of the Bible.

If God were content for us to worship anything, be it a totem pole or Allah, then he would again be saying it was ok to worship something that wasn’t the perfect embodiment of love, compassion, perfection and justice.

If God were not Love, I don’t believe He would have the right to demand that we worship Him. I’m not certain, but I don’t think the fact that He created us would alone be justification for worshipping Him.

I know this is far from a complete answer. Perhaps it even raises more questions than it answers. Where do the virtue of Love, Justice and Compassion come from in the first place? Are they set by God or are they independent of Him? Some, I know, will find it difficult to accept the claim that God is love itself. But I hope this at least explains why I’ve become more at ease with the idea that God has the right to demand that we worship him.

Donald Trump: A lost cause?

We’ve given up on Donald Trump. It doesn't feel like that. After all, courts have blocked his odious Muslim ban. Every day, a new public figure weighs in with yet more condemnation of his sexist, racist, everything-ist policies.  I’m proud to say that my own pro-refugee placard lies somewhere amidst my laundry, ready for the next anti-Trump protest.  

But while we haven’t given up on fighting President Trump, we have given up on him. That’s clear from the number of less than innovative variations on “F*** Trump” placards at every demonstration. We don’t just oppose his values; we oppose him as a human being. It okay to hate Donald Trump. Some even justify wishing for his death.

Most people believe that human nature is inherently good but corrupted by society. Often this leads us to think that anybody can change. But despite this belief in the innate goodness of man, we don’t expect Donald Trump to change. We see him as a lost cause.  He will stay sexist, racist and obsessed with money to the end of his days.

Though I don’t believe that human nature is innately good, I am convinced that that people can change. As a Christian, I believe that humans, though created in the image of God, have become corrupted. When Donald Trump announced his heartless ban on refugees, we saw the corruption of the image of God. In contrast, when lawyers flocked too airport terminals to offer refugees free legal aid, we saw the love and goodness that comes from being made in the image of God. That’s not to say that some reflect the image of God while others are characterised by this corruption. No doubt, Donald Trump has at some point reflected the image of God. I believe that all of us, whatever our faith, are capable of reflecting both the image of God and the corruption of this image. As the Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once said;

“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

You might call me a pessimist for thinking this way.  If we believe that all of us are capable of acts of extreme evil, how can there be any hope for humanity? If all the good we do is tainted by corruption, how can we be optimistic that humans can change?

John Newton, the writer of Amazing Grace, was a slave trader. Though his career would have been considered respectable at the time, he was guilty of one of the most extreme acts of evil- the trade in ‘human souls’. It was during his time as a slave trader that he became a Christian. Although he had asked God that his sins would be forgiven, he saw nothing wrong with his career as a captain of a slave ship. Even after ill-health but an end to his career, he continued to invest in the slave trade.

34 years after becoming a Christian, Newton published Thoughts Upon the African Slave Trade.  He described the pamphlet, a copy of which he sent to every Member of Parliament, as ‘a confession, which ... comes too late’. He described the shame he felt about his involvement in the slave trade;

‘It will always be a subject of humiliating reflection to me, that I was once an active instrument in a business at which my heart now shudders.’

Now fully convinced of the barbarity of the slave trade, he used his own experiences to campaign against it. He lived just long enough to ‘rejoice at the wonderful news’ when the slave trade was abolished in the British Empire in 1807.

It is true that Newton was not representative of every Christian at the time. While many Christians played key roles in the fight against the slave trade, others profited from the suffering it created.  It also took an undeniably long time for him to see that his involvement in that barbaric trade was morally wrong.

But the fact remains; this slave-trader became an abolitionist. For years, he was no doubt considered a lost cause. He would have been despised. Many slaves and abolitionists would have gladly seen him dead. But, against all the odds, John Newton's life was changed.

We may not be able to wait 34 years for Donald Trump to change. Thankfully, many have been transformed much more quickly than this. The Bible tells how the Apostle (or St.) Paul, a man known for murdering the innocent, was transformed by God in an instant. Throughout history, countless murderers, criminals and even apparent good guys have become different people as a result of God working in them.

Of course, I know that Christians are still only the corrupted image of God and so are capable of evil things. Neither do I deny that some people’s lives are changed dramatically without a belief in God. I cannot, however, say I’m overly optimistic that Donald Trump will be transformed through self-reflection and pulling his own moral socks up. I’m not convinced anyone else is either. 

But I do know that anyone, when they accept that their own moral efforts can never make up for the wrong they’ve done, can ask God for forgiveness. Anyone can ask to be treated as if they themselves lived Jesus’ perfect life. Even Donald Trump.*

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All of this leaves me optimistic. Though I despise Trump’s politics, I don’t think he’s a lost cause. I believe that God can begin to restore the image of God in Donald Trump. Yes, it would be a miracle.

But it's a miracle that's happened before.

* I know Donald Trump claims to be a Christian. But since he's also said he has never asked God for forgiveness, I really don't see how he could be. If he is, however, then I am still confident that, like John Newton, he can become a changed man.

Looking for Utopia

According to the UN, there is enough grain in the world to provide every single person on this planet with 3,600 calories a day. Our bodies need just 2,500 calories every day. Yet 795 million people do not have enough food to eat and 21,000 starve to death each day.

Over the last four years of studying Politics, this is the thing that has shocked me the most. To me, no other fact else capture the tragedy and injustice of this world. When I first read those statistics, I was one reminded of an old saying from the Bible:

“A poor person's farm may produce much food, but injustice sweeps it all away.”

Proverbs 13:23

It’s a verse I first learnt as a child. Our church had just started to serve only Fairtrade tea and coffee. Though it would be years before I developed any firm political opinion, Fairtrade was the first political issue to pique my interest. This first introduction to trade justice was one of the many things that would lead me to study Politics at university.  

Despite what you might think, studying Politics hasn’t turned me into an idealist. In fact, it’s crushed any lingering hopes of a utopian future. We may have eradicated deadly diseases and put an end to horrific human rights abuses but in some ways this world is stubbornly unchanged. Two millennia have passed since the Book of Proverbs was first written, yet daily injustice still sweeps away the food of the poor. Though unprecedented social and economic development has led to better lives for many, our unfair treatment of the vulnerable is so embedded in our trade system that no longer need to consciously choose to exploit them. We simply carry on as we normally do and we leave the world worse off.

Yes, studying Politics has taught me that the world is messed up. But it’s also taught me that everyone wants a better world. Lively classroom debates about how to make the world a better place leave me in no doubt that we all have a conscience. Though the ‘normative’- that is, taking a stance about the way things should be- is usually frowned upon by the academic, no essay ever questions whether the world should be a better place. Academics don’t dispassionately observe our unjust world- they want to change it.  

So how does my faith come into this? Where does all this leave me, an idealist mugged by reality?

My faith still motivates me to try and make the world a better place. While society tries to ‘inspire’ me into challenging injustice, the Bible is unrelentingly clear that standing up for others is not merely commendable. It is a binding moral duty. As the Book of Isaiah puts it; ‘Learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; bring justice to the fatherless, plead the widow’s cause.’  As is clear from the Book of James, the Bible doesn’t mince its words when it comes to condemning exploitation; ‘Behold. the wages of the labourers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, are crying out against you, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts… You have fattened your hearts in a day of slaughter.” Standing aside in a world of exploitation is not an option.

Following a God who is so angry about injustice makes standing up for others a duty. But we know that there are limits to our capacity to change the world. As G.K. Chesterton once said; ‘What’s wrong with the world? I am.’ Reforming our economic system could clearly alleviate suffering, but nothing can completely remove injustice. For that, we must change human nature.

Though I don’t believe that a Utopia is possible, my Christian faith leads me to believe that there will eventually be a world without suffering. Not on this earth, however.  It is too contaminated, too messed up. Instead, I look forward to a world where the human nature at the root of injustice has been changed. My unjust human nature won’t by my own moral efforts, but because of God’s gift of forgiveness.

“He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death' or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away."

Revelation 21:4

Jesus and the Refugee Crisis

“We should first help the Christian people before Islamic people.”

 Victor Orban, Prime Minister of Hungary

Having grown up in an occupied country, Yusef and Mariam knew all too well the sight of foreign soldiers on the street. Though they had been poor and persecuted throughout their lives, their last few months in the Middle-East had been unbearable. When the local governor, a tyrant under the thumb of the occupying power, stepped up his paranoid suppression of political dissent, they feared for their lives. Like so many others, they fled their troubled lives in the Middle-East for the sanctuary of North Africa. They made their 300-mile journey just in time.  Days later, they heard rumours of a state-orchestrated massacre that had left hundreds of children dead.

While their story may seem tragically familiar, Yusef and Mariam were not part of the most recent refugee crisis. You’ll know them, of course, as Mary and Joseph. Their first Christmas, told in quaint carols, may seem hardly relevant to us today.  Yet this young family of refugees lived in a world not so different to ours. Demagogues like Donald Trump would do well to see a nativity play this Christmas.

Yes, the figure at the heart of Christianity would have been hated by the Daily Mail. To be a Christian is to believe that God became a poor and persecuted refugee in an occupied Middle-Eastern country. That’s not to say that he came to this world to fight a political cause. His crucifixion was not the climax of a failed political revolution, but the only act that could heal the broken relationship between man and God. Rather than marking his defeat at the hands of the Roman authorities, his death laid the foundations for the defeat of death itself. But faith in a man like this will inevitably transform your politics.

Sadly, some prominent champions of Christian heritage show no signs of this transformation. No doubt, some of them do hold sincere Christian beliefs. Others may call themselves “Christians” merely as a way of marginalising others.   But you cannot wrap your faith in a flag and call it “Christian Heritage”.

We cannot condemn the refugee while claiming to love Jesus. Every vitriolic headline of the Daily Mail, every malicious anti-refugee policy announced by Donald Trump and every country closing its borders in the name of Christian heritage may as well be attacking Jesus himself.  Would we leave Jesus to linger, alone and helpless, in the squalor of a makeshift camp in Calais? Would we check his teeth to ascertain his age at the border of Egypt? Would we denounce him as a threat to society while his body floated in the Mediterranean Sea?

In the Christian worldview, empathy is not the luxury of the bleeding-heart liberal.  An active empathy at the heart of Jesus’ teaching. You can see it in his command to love our neighbours and you can see it in his death in our place on the cross. He even says that the all the rules and regulations of the Old Testament can be summarised with just commandments: Love God with all your heart and love your neighbour as yourself.

Some try to limit that love towards our neighbours. They say that a country’s first duty is to protect its own citizens. They argue that charity begins at home. They even claim that these desperate refugees threaten the Christian heritage of our country. 

Similar things were said in Jesus’ day. On hearing the commandment to love your neighbour as yourself, one religious leader asked the obvious question: just who exactly is my neighbour?!

He replied with a story that will be familiar to many of us. While walking alone on the road out of Jerusalem, a Jewish man was attacked and left for dead. A Jewish priest saw him. He crossed to the other side of the road and carried on. Then another Jewish man saw him and did exactly the same. Then a Samaritan saw him. Instead of walking past, he stopped and bandaged his wounds. He took him to the nearest inn and paid for his care until he had recovered.

Who was the neighbour to the man on the road? The Samaritan, of course.

We must remember that the Samaritans were marginalised in Jewish society. In fact, most Jewish people would even avoid travelling through Samaria. They were ethnically and religiously different. Yet it was the Samaritan who was the true neighbour to the man in need. By asking “who is my neighbour?”, the religious leaders wanted to make Jesus’ commandments more manageable. Instead, Jesus responded by showing the impossibly high standards set by this radical commandment.

Jesus is clear: we must love our neighbour as ourselves, even if they are a different religion and ethnicity. This doesn’t mean accepting their beliefs. Jesus himself says that the Samaritan religion was not a way to God. It is clear, however, that this commandment is totally incompatible with the idea that we should only look after “our own”. When the Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban refuses to help Muslim refugees, he is not defending “Christian Europe”.  He is breaking this commandment. He is hating the neighbour that we are commanded to love.

Of course, it’s not always simple to see how exactly loving our neighbour as ourselves. Jesus gives this commandment to us as individuals, rather than to any society or government. We can’t help all our neighbours across the world. Yet we do have power to help some. Like the Samaritan, we can use our money to help those in need. We should also remember that our political support for parties or individual politicians can help or hinder our love towards our neighbour.  This is, of course, something we all need to do more of. I know I do too little to help my neighbour and too much to help myself.

For individuals in government, it is clear that Christian heritage cannot be an excuse for standing by while others suffer. Jesus' teaching provides us with principles rather than policies. Loving your neighbour may not be simply letting in all immigrants. What seems loving in the short-term may be unsustainable and damaging in the long run. But loving your neighbour as yourself does mean treating unsuccessful asylum seekers as you would like to treated in the same circumstances. It means refusing to exploit anti-refugee sentiment to drum up political support. It means offering treating all with dignity, regardless of their religion.

All of us, right-wing demagogue or otherwise, should remember that Jesus was a refugee who commanded us to love God and love our neighbour as ourselves. If we use the Christian faith to marginalise refugees, we insult Jesus himself. 

“Remember that [God], who has united you together as human beings in the same flesh and blood, has bound you by the law of mutual love; that that mutual love is not limited by the shores of this island, is not limited by the boundaries of Christian civilization; that it passes over the whole surface of the earth, and embraces the meanest along with the greatest in its unmeasured scope.”

William Gladstone 

Sherlock Holmes, Father Brown and Human Nature

"My friend, I want to tell you and all your modern world a secret. You will not get to the good in people till you have been through the bad in them.” 

Father Brown, The Donnignton Affair

Since picking up The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes in a discount bookshop in the halcyon days of my childhood, I have loved reading detective stories. Over a decade (and half a lifetime) later, while I am still a fan of Sherlock, there is another sleuth who just about beats him in the list of my favourite detectives.

While Sherlock Holmes solves a crime with cold, scientific deduction, G.K Chesterton’s Father Brown unmasks the criminal through philosophical insights, empathy and intuition. Not only do they employ different methods, they approach crime with contrasting worldviews.
Nine times out of ten, the murderers in Sherlock Holmes are “Villains”. Often, those Villains are professional criminals. Sometimes, those Villains will be disguised as “Good Men”. Alternatively, those who at first appear like Villains will turn out to be Good Men. There are exceptions, of course, but, more often than not in the world of 221b Baker Street, the criminals are Villains even before they commit the crime. The job of the detective is not only to solve the crime, it is to unmask the Villain who has been hiding as a Good Man. It seems, to me at least, to be a black and white world in which not only acts, but people, can be divided essentially into “Good” and “Bad”.

The cases of Father Brown are rather different. The murderers are not simply people who have hidden the fact that they are Villains. The apparent Villains aren’t revealed to be Good Men in disguise, but rather men, who, despite being thoroughly unpleasantly, are innocent of the crime in question. Sometimes the criminal’s lives have been marked by deception and criminality. But, more often than not, the culprits are normal people who have committed terrible crimes. In order to solve the crime, Father Brown thinks like the murderer. Rather than seeing the criminal as “the other”, he tries to understand their motive and their justification. He doesn’t just empathise with those who are guilty, he sympathises with them.

Contrary to what you might assume, Father Brown’s empathy with murderers is not based on the idea that humans are fundamentally good. Neither does it come from a belief in relative morality. In fact, as a conservative Catholic priest, he believes that all humans are equally corrupt. He believes in moral absolutes that humans are unable to abide by. As a result, he looks at murderers not with self-righteousness but with humility. He does not think that they are inhuman. In fact, he sees them as just as human as he is. They are equal to him. He looks at the guilty and thinks, as the saying goes, “there but for the grace of God.”

According to Father Brown’s Christian worldview, no-one is perfect. Is that a depressing world view? Not at all. In this worldview, no one has any grounds to be self-righteous. No one is a lost cause. It says something that, despite having been written long before the abolition of the death sentence, Father Brown never talks ominously about the gallows. There is always hope of redemption for those who have done terrible things. That’s not just the experience of one fictional Catholic Priest, it’s the experience of so many people throughout history.

“All men matter. You matter. I matter. It’s the hardest thing in theology to believe…We matter to God- God only knows why.”

Father Brown, A Quick One

Yemen: The Forgotten War and Christians

Today, at noon local time, a seven-day ceasefire came into effect in Yemen. The brief pause in fighting will allow aid to be delivered while the warring parties meet in Switzerland for peace talks. Sadly, BBC News decided not to cover  it, instead focusing on Tim Peake’s flight into space. Then again, perhaps it was fitting-a forgotten ceasefire for a forgotten war. Though forgotten, since March, this civil war has claimed over 5,800 lives and left at least 1.5 million internally displaced. While the world’s attention is still on Syria, charities operating in the country are now describing Yemen as the “world’s largest humanitarian crisis.”  This post will briefly outline the current state of the crisis before looking at its impact on Christians in the country.

Yemen has long been an unstable country. In 2000, Al-Qaeda became increasingly active in the country. Four years later, followers of dissident cleric Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi began an insurgency that has yet to come to an end. The conflict entered a new stage with President Saleh’s resignation in the wake of anti-government protests in 2011. Despite attempts at negotiating a peace agreement, the crisis continued. The insurgency making gains while the government grew weaker. Last September, Houthi rebels captured the capital, Sa’ana, driving the western-backed government southwards to Aden.

The civil war has left Yemen divided.  Houthi rebels control much of the north-west while Alqaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) are present throughout the east of the country. The Aden Government rules only the southwestern tip of the country.

Like Syria, this domestic conflict has hints of a proxy war. While Iran supports the rebels, a Saudi-led coalition is carrying out airstrikes on behalf of the exiled government in Aden. Amnesty International has documented human rights abuses and war crimes on both sides of the conflict. The use of cluster bombs by the coalition forces is particularly worrying given the fact that both the US and the UK have provided them with key logistical support. To add to the chaos, IS launched its first attacks in the country this year.

So where do Christians fit into this complicated picture? Out of a population of around 25 million, just shy of 20,000 people identify as Christians. Like everyone else they have found themselves in a midst of a humanitarian crisis that has left four out of five people dependent on foreign aid. But Christians in Yemen face particular challenges, with Open Doors ranking the country’s Christian community as the 14^th most persecuted in the world.

Even before the latest escalation in the conflict, it was difficult to be a Christian in Yemen. It is estimated that there are just a few hundred indigenous Christians in Yemen, with most Christians having moved to Yemen to find work. Evangelism is banned while leaving Islam is punishable by death. Tribal structures are deeply important in Yemen and so the government rarely intervenes in tribal persecution of converts. Last year, one woman was burnt alive by her relatives after she converted to Christianity. The small number of Christians still left in the government-controlled region still face these risks. Coalition air strikes are sometimes indiscriminate, meaning that churches have been destroyed by bombing.

For those living under Houthi control, the risks are greater still. The Houthi rebels are completely intolerant of any religious dissent. They have repeatedly attacked Islamic schools and universities that do not follow the Houthi’s narrow sect of Shia Islam. Jews have been ordered to convert or leave the country. As a result of this religious suppression, Christians have been forced to worship underground in Houthi-held regions. Militants from Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula are also present in many of the contested areas of the country. In the past, AQAP have been linked to killings and kidnappings of Christians. Understandably, the chaos makes it difficult for stories of persecution to leave the country. However, over the last few months, there has been at least one report of a convert to Christianity being murdered by AQAP militants.

There are many things to pray for in Yemen. Of course, we should pray that the peace talks in Switzerland will lay the foundation for a permanent ceasefire. Aid also needs to get through to the people who need it. We should pray that those who are persecuted would remain faithful and would shun revenge. Christians in the country can be a real light to Muslims in need. But we should also remember that God will build his Church despite the dire situation it seems to find itself in. 

References

 https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/articles/middle-east/17894-with-iron-and-fire-the-houthis-suppress-religious-freedom-in-yemen 

http://morningstarnews.org/2015/11/two-converts-from-islam-slain-in-yemen/

http://www.opendoorsuk.org/news/stories/yemen_150417.php 

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2015/10/yemen-call-for-suspension-of-arms-transfers-to-coalition-and-accountability-for-war-crimes/

http://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/Houthis-to-Jews-convert-or-leave-Yemen-422604

http://www.christiantoday.com/article/war.in.yemen.forces.christians.to.worship.underground.bishop.says/52511.htm