Stories: Christianity
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‘Our Second Mother’: Iran’s Converted Christians Find Sanctuary in Germany
On a breezy Sunday morning, 17 Christian converts are being baptized into a Berlin congregation just in time for Christmas. The yellow, stained-glass windows, situated high enough to catch the sun’s beams, are glowing. The old wooden pews creak as more people, Bibles in hand, shuffle in to take a seat. Pastor Gottfried Martens, in an emerald green-colored...
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Iran’s Oppressed Christians
I met Mori in the basement of a Lutheran church in Berlin’s Zehlendorf district. A 28-year-old refugee who once ran a small business in Iran, he converted to Christianity five years ago and spoke to me on condition that I use only his first name in order to protect his identity. In 2011, delayed on the way to a...
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Evangelical Christianity Is Big in Nigeria — 87 Football Fields Big
Photo above: Under an open-air pavilion built to seat a million people, children sleep on mats spread out on the cobblestones while their parents enter their 6th consecutive hour of worship. All-night prayer vigils are at the core of the country's booming Pentecostal movement. Some churches draw worshippers in the hundreds of thousands. At one church, the Redeemed Christian...