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WAY OF LIFE'S PERSECUTION WATCH
[Distributed by Way of Life Literature’s Fundamental Baptist Information Service. Copyright 2000. These articles cannot be stored on BBS or Internet sites and cannot be sold or placed by themselves or with other material in any electronic format for sale, but may be distributed for free by e-mail or by print. They must be left intact and nothing removed or changed, including these informational headers. This is a listing for Fundamental Baptists and other fundamentalist, Bible-believing Christians. Our goal is not devotional but is TO PROVIDE INFORMATION TO ASSIST PREACHERS IN THE PROTECTION OF THE CHURCHES IN THIS APOSTATE HOUR. If you desire to receive this type of material on a regular basis, e-mail us, give us your name, address, and the name of the church you are a member of, and request to be placed on the list. Please note that this is not a free service. We take up a quarterly offering to fund this ministry, and each subscriber is expected to participate. To unsubscribe or to submit a change of address, send your name and the request to fbns@wayoflife.org. This is not an automated list. Changes in the database often require two to four days to activate. Some of these articles are from O Timothy magazine. David W. Cloud, Editor. O Timothy is a monthly magazine in its 17th year of publication. Subscription is $20/yr. Way of Life publishes many helpful books. The catalog is located at the web site -- http://www.wayoflife.org/.]
July 30, 2000 (David W. Cloud, Fundamental Baptist Information Service, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061-0368, fbns@wayoflife.org) - The following is another edition of Way of Life Literature’s Persecution Watch, which is published to encourage prayer and vigilance on the part of Bible-believing Christians:
FRANCE
A law proposed by France’s National Assembly would make it a crime punishable by up to two years in prison for "proselytizers." The bill allegedly aims to restrict the growth of "sects," but among the 173 blacklisted groups is the Southern Baptist Convention. "Should the bill become law, evangelism by the groups could be criminalized as an ‘exercise [in] serious and repeated pressure on a person in order to create or exploit a state of dependence.’ The socialist French government would be allowed to shut-down a religious group when two representatives are found guilty of at least one legal infraction, including ‘mental manipulation’" (WorldNetDaily, July 2, 2000).
The term "mental manipulation" could easily be made to apply to Bible preaching and evangelistic witnessing. Though it is an act of love and not hatred to preach the Gospel, the unsaved frequently do not see it that way. They do not like to hear that they are sinners, that God is a holy God of judgment as well as of love, that the unsaved go to an eternal Hell, and that there is only one narrow way of salvation through the Lord Jesus Christ. A man I tried to talk to on visitation last week, for example, got very offended when I asked him if he was born again, and he angrily demanded that I leave his property. Such a man would gladly back a law which labels Christian evangelism a form of mental manipulation.
The French government published a list of dangerous "sects" in 1996; and in 1998, established a government agency called The Interministerial Mission to Battle Against Sects.
Germany, Austria, and Belgium have also set up commissions to list sects. The push to do this in Western Europe came after the mass suicides by members of the Solar Temple cult in Canada, Switzerland, and France in 1994 and 1995.
While the government is responsible to deal with violence and other criminal activity committed in the name of religion, it has no business trying to regulate religious faith and activity.
French Justice Minister Elisabeth Guigou approves the measure. She called it "a significant advance giving a democratic state the legal tool to efficiently fight groups abusing its core values" (Baptist Press, July 5, 2000). She has suggested, though, that lawmakers await final approval to give human rights and church groups a chance to comment.