Christians in India increasingly under attack, study shows.

Where they are a minority take example in Kenya, and other Christian dominated nations these religions pretend to be friendlier and enjoying the Christians’ tolerance of other faiths !!!

INDIA…early this year a survey was conducted ….found

Country rises to 15 on list of places where those practising faith most likely to be persecuted, with North Korea at No 1 .  Just over 2% of the country’s population is Christian and nearly 80% is Hindu.

The persecution of Christians in India has risen over the past year, pushing it up a league table of countries where the practice of the faith is a high-risk activity, according to a monitoring organisation.

The world’s second most populous country has risen to No 15 on the 2017 World Watch List, up from 31 four years ago. The list, compiled by Open Doors, is headed by North Korea for the 16th year in a row.

Iraq and Syria slipped down the table, mainly because so many Christians have fled from Islamic State, the main source of persecution and violence. The Christian population of Aleppo has fallen from 400,000 before the Syrian civil war to fewer than 60,000 now, Open Doors estimated.

The Middle Eastern countries were overtaken by Somalia, Pakistan and Sudan. Afghanistan was third on the list, while levels of persecution rose most rapidly in Yemen.

India experienced an escalation of attacks on its Christian minority in 2016, usually led by Hindu nationalists acting largely with impunity. Just over 2% of the country’s population is Christian, and nearly 80% of Indians are Hindu.

There was also an increase in Christian persecution across the region “driven by extreme religious nationalism, which is often tacitly condoned – and sometimes actively encouraged – by local and national governments”, said Lisa Pearce, of Open Doors UK & Ireland.

The watchdog estimated that a church was burnt down or a cleric beaten on average 10 times a week in India in the year to 31 October 2016, a threefold increase on the previous year.

 “There is a clear pattern of rising religious intolerance across the Indian sub-continent, which affects many millions of Christians,” said Pearce.

“Religious nationalists attempt to forcibly convert people to the dominant faith of their nation, often turning to violence when community discrimination and non-violent oppression do not succeed in imposing their religious beliefs on minority Christians.

“These Christians are often from the lower castes, such as the Dalits in India who face huge socioeconomic problems. They are an easy target for extreme nationalists.”

Graphic

Elsewhere, Open Doors noted that the sabotage of homes, churches and villages was an increasingly common feature of persecution by extremists bent on eradicating Christians from a particular area. It had been widely seen in Nigeria, Syria and Iraq, where homes had been ransacked, churches destroyed and village water sources poisoned to make return all but impossible.

In the 25 years that Open Doors has been compiling its annual World Watch List, only three countries have led the table. North Korea has come top 16 times, Saudi Arabia seven times and Somalia twice.

NASA FREE TO DEMONSTRATE IN THE CDBs OF MOMBASA,KISUMU & NAIROBI COURT RULES.

Court momentarily stops Matiang’i from barring NASA demonstrators from CBD .

High Court judge John Mativo Tuesday deferred ban on anti-IEBC demos by National Super Alliance (NASA) supporters in Nairobi, Mombasa, and Kisumu central business districts until case filed by Norman Magaya is determined.

This was after acting Interior Cabinet Secretary Fred Matiang’i said the government would charge NASA CEO Norman Magaya for calling the demos that turned bad on Wednesday, October 11. 

1 Essential Ingredient Missing in Most Leaders

Did you know that you get a dopamine rush when someone echoes what you already believe? It’s similar to the buzz we get when we eat chocolate or fall in love. Sounds like we should surround ourselves with people who agree with us, doesn’t it?

Sadly that’s what often happens to leaders, including church and ministry leaders. They are drawn to those who affirm them and tend to avoid, silence, or ignore those who might challenge them.

But as Noreena Hertz explains at the Harvard Business Review, “a vast body of research now points to the import of contemplating diverse, dissenting views. Not just in terms of making us more rounded individuals but in terms of making us smarter decision-makers. Dissent, it turns out, has a significant value.”

When group members are actively encouraged to openly express divergent opinions they not only share more information, they consider it more systematically and in a more balanced and less biased way. When people engage with those with different opinions and views from their own they become much more capable of properly interrogating critical assumptions and identifying creative alternatives.

Studies comparing the problem-solving abilities of groups in which dissenting views are voiced with groups in which they are not find that dissent tends to be a better precondition for reaching the right solution than consensus.

Honest Feedback

It’s extremely hard for a leader to get honest feedback due to the fact that most people’s tendency is to say what the leader wants to hear. Yet how many leaders actively seek out and encourage views alien and at odds to their own? Not many. And, as Hertz demonstrates, this has damaging consequences.

President Lyndon Johnson notoriously discouraged dissent, with many historians now believing that this played a significant role in the decision to escalate U.S. military operations in Vietnam. Excessive group-think is now recognized to have underpinned President Kennedy’s disastrous authorization of a CIA-backed landing at Cuba’s Bay of Pigs. Former employees of the now defunct Lehman Brothers have talked about how voicing dissent there was considered a career-breaker.

Yale economics professor Robert Shiller explained that when it came to warning about the bubbles he believed were developing in the stock and housing markets just before the financial crisis he did so only “quietly” because: “Deviating too far from consensus leaves one feeling potentially ostracized from the group with the risk that one may be terminated.”

Hertz urges leaders to actively signal that they want to hear views different and diverse and in opposition to their own and cites a number of encouraging examples....

Eric Schmidt, the Executive Chairman of Google, has talked about how he actively seeks out in meetings people with a dissenting opinion.

Abraham Lincoln’s renowned “team of rivals” was comprised of people whose intellect he respected and were confident enough to take issue with him when they disagreed with his point of view.

Stuart Roden, Co Fund Manager of Lansdowne Partners’ flagship fund, one of the world’s largest hedge funds, tells me he sees one of his primary roles as being the person who challenges his staff to consider how they could be wrong, and then assess how this might impact on their decision-making.

Of course, for Christian ministry, we’re not talking about encouraging people to challenge core biblical doctrines and practices. We’re speaking more of vision, direction, strategy, administration, problem-solving, management, etc.

Who is your Challenger in Chief? Who questions your choices? Who contradicts your positions?

And are you welcoming them, listening to them, or shutting them down?

Prof Anyang Nyong'o, the Kisumu Governor is Commendably Transforming the County Poised for Tremendous Growth .

Kisumu County is set to have its first dairy processing plant.  The county government says it has already identified land where the plant will be set up in the coming months, in a move aimed at boosting dairy farming in the lake side county.


 Busia could contemplate of fish and Rice factories to start with. Kakamega and Bungoma should have mega private sugar factories, Transnzoia should have maize flour mills so forth. The entire region will produce ordinary chicken for entire Kenyan consumption if they deliberately embarked on thinking outside the box. Devolution can work for us .

Agriculturally , the region boasts of fertile soils sometimes tilling doesn’t necessarily require fertilizers ,

The proposal of Kisumu dairy processing plant, is a case study of what can be achieved when you get forward thinking leaders. Prof Nyong’o is definitely going to transform  Kisumu County.