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By Adrienne S. Gaines
Iran's underground Christians still hope the
election brings greater religious freedom.
"[Christians are] watching what's going on and certainly they're hoping for freedom," said David Yeghnazar, U.S. director of Elam Ministries, which trains Iranian Christians to evangelize and disciple their nation.
Yeghnazar said Christians affiliated with his organization are praying for the political situation, neither endorsing candidates nor encouraging members to participate in protests. But Open Doors, a California-based ministry that advocates for the persecuted church, said Iranian Christians who spoke to them on condition of anonymity don't accept the election results that declared incumbent President Mahmud Ahmadinejad the runaway winner of the June 12 election.
Some younger Christians even took to the streets this week, joining hundreds of thousands in supporting opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi, who has accused Ahmadinejad's government of fraud and called for new elections to be held.
“In the big cities young believers are involved in the street protests also and people from smaller villages have joined them,” said Saeed (not his real name), who noted that he did not know of any Christians who voted for Ahmadinejad, though some church leaders and middle-aged Christians chose not to vote at all. “Young Christians have put very open reactions on Facebook and via other ways on the Internet.”
Although neither candidate is perceived as a friend of the church, Christians in Iran believe Mousavi may be more moderate in his approach to religious minorities. Iranian Christian Goudarz (not his real name) told Open Doors he voted for Mousavi "because he is more open-minded and [democratic] than Ahmadinejad."
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 The Public Broadcasting Service on Tuesday banned its affiliate stations from airing new religious programming, citing what it says is a rule that has been on the books for 25 years.
The vote by the PBS board of directors permits stations that already carry "sectarian" shows to continue doing so, the Washington Post reported. The decision represents a compromise from a proposed ban on all religious broadcasts and prevents six stations from having to give up their PBS affiliation in order to continue broadcasting weekly Catholic Mass and other religious content.
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 Police invaded the Sunday service of the Agape Baptist congregation in Vietnam's Hung Yen Province on June 7 and beat worshippers, including women, and arrested a pastor and an elder.
Christian sources said police put the two church leaders into separate cells, and each man was beaten by a gang of five policemen. Pastor Duong Van Tuan of the house church in Hamlet 3, Ong Dinh Commune, Khoai Chau district said that officers beat them in a way that did not leave marks: hard blows to the stomach.
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| Teaching Article From Charisma |
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By Wayne Jacobsen
 If you have a dad who loves you well, celebrate him with joy this Father’s Day. But keep in mind that outside of Norman Rockwell’s America, Father’s Day can be a source of great pain.
Many children today don’t live with their biological father. According to fathersforlife.org, the figure approaches 40 percent nationally and is almost double that in the inner city. Add to that those who simply have a strained relationship with their father over some disappointed expectation, and the pain multiplies greatly. I know many people who find these Hallmark days painful for the love they lacked because a father was absent, or even abusive.
The fallout from absent fathers has been well-documented. Eight-five percent of children with behavioral disorders come from fatherless homes, as do 90 percent of homeless children, 71 percent of dropouts and 63 percent of suicides. It seems we were made for the love of a father, and the pain of not having one has dire consequences.
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