“Hopelessness. Despair. These kids, they don’t see any way out. There’s a drug problem; there’s an alcohol problem, so the kids might be getting involved in that. Crime is a way out, but there are issues there, too.” Having worked in this creative access area for five years, planting churches, John* is all too familiar with the region's spiritual climate. “A large number of the population are without hope,” he explains. “They’re not spiritually fulfilled at all. [The nation’s major religion] is doing nothing for them.”

Followers of this major religion vary from non-zealous to zealous in their drive to solidify their faith as the official national religion, and the more zealous followers are persecuting other religions through both authorized and unauthorized means.

Legally, the government has passed anti-conversion and anti-proselytization laws to quell the spread of the gospel. “For instance,” John says, “if I witnessed to you as [a citizen] and you become a Christian and you get baptized and you get asked about it, if you say, ‘yeah, I became a Christian, and John convinced me to be a Christian,’ I’ll go to jail. You won’t. You might get beaten up. But I broke the law; you didn’t break the law.”

Off the books, evangelists trying to reach hopeless, impoverished children and their families with eternal life also face serious risks. John tells of one such man who local zealots beat for evangelizing. This religion persecutes all others that try to spread alternative beliefs, and “that persecution ends in people dying.”

For the children in GlobalFingerprints, becoming a Christian—and especially sharing this newfound faith with others—is very risky. Whichever religion a child’s family adheres to is the religion this child legally belongs to, complicating conversion. “There are people who are deeply religious in [this major national religion],” John continues. “They are tolerant of…Christians, but Christians are very evangelical. That’s our calling. We’re to bring people to Christ, and the religious [majority] see[s] that as a real threat, and so that fosters violence.” And this persecution is only getting worse.

Through these looming threats, churches can be intimidated into silence: “For a lot of mainline churches that don’t do a lot of evangelization, there’s not a lot of persecution. But for house churches and the house church movement, where people are actively evangelizing and making disciples, there are a lot of problems.”

Despite the dangers, our team has found that many people are actually very receptive to the gospel. “We’re trying to create a culture of change,” John says. “What’s happening is the parents of these younger kids are starting to see some hope. There’s a future out there for their children.” Since 2019, our national partner has planted a significant numbers of churches within 200 kilometers of this city. “Many of them would look and feel to you like a small group”. Since 2022, GlobalFingerprints has been helping to equip new churches to meet the needs of local children and introduce families to the gospel through practical Christian love.

One sponsored girl’s mother, for instance, found more than just physical healing when she put her faith in Jesus while combating a skin condition. Formerly adamant, this wife and mother of three experienced miraculous healing, has found true joy, and is now active in the local church. The love believers freely shower on the children often has just this kind of powerful ripple effect on the spiritual condition of their family members.

“We’re seen as a very positive influence,” John reports. “We have a little opposition in [two of the sites] because it’s well-known we’re Christian, but we have been consistently doing good things in the community, and so parents who were skeptical, who have seen a lot of government programs come in, make a lot of promises, and not do anything, are over that skepticism. So I think it’s fair to say that the communities see hope.”

The consistent prayer request from our team is spiritual protection: “Spiritual opposition manifests itself in many different ways. Today, we’ve had success. In [our first site] we had a Christmas program where there were almost two thousand people who came. We aren’t experiencing active opposition, but we pray for spiritual protection all the time.”

Please keep the children, the local churches, and our team in your prayers as they strive to be faithful in adversity and to be havens of hope in a despairing world.