Brazil: Guns, drugs and God in the slums of Rio
Assis praying over youth gang member, Jadson Marques/AP
It is the scene of an old-time revival, with Pastor Andre Assis laying hands on Alessandro and praying: “Burn all the bad, all the evil, all the demons inside this boy, in the name of Jesus!” The young man sways, eyes closed, knees weak, caught in rapture. But throughout, he never lets go of his 12-gauge shotgun – the one he used an hour before to fend off police trying to enter this slum. He is a foot soldier for one of the drug gangs that control most of Rio’s more than 900 shantytowns.
“In the most dangerous slums, where thousands die in gang wars each year, there are people worth being saved.”
“I’m divided, between receiving the word of God while at the same time doing something bad, something that destroys lives,” says Alessandro, 24, standing amid a half dozen other heavily armed youth in the ‘boca de fumo’, the spot in a slum where packets of cocaine, marijuana and crack are sold at a rapid clip. “Would I prefer not to be in this life? Of course. But everybody has a family to support, and there is no other work here.”
This is the challenge facing Pastor Assis, 36, and the countless other evangelical preachers, whose growing presence in Rio’s violent slums provides the only organized entity aside from drug gangs. Assis is trying to do through God what Brazil’s police have yet to do through guns – bring peace across the vast shantytowns that house about 30 percent of Rio’s 6 million people, thousands of whom die in gang wars each year. Preachers like Assis walk into the most dangerous slums and recruit daily within prisons in their thirst to go after every segment of society, in the belief that every person has a soul worthy of being saved.
“This is how the criminal tribunal functions. If he messes up, they ‘correct’ him by shooting him through both hands.”
During the journey into this shantytown’s Red Command (drug gang) headquarters, coked-up boys ride dirt paths on roaring motorcycles, and barefoot kids idly throw pebbles at a sow and her piglets. Young drug sellers sit in lawn chairs, plastic bags filled with cocaine, marijuana and cash at their feet, high-caliber rifles and 9 mm pistols in their waistbands. Each time a seller dips his hand into a bag to pull out a 1-gram packet of cocaine for a customer, a puff of coke dust rises, glinting in the sun.
Gang members in Rio slum, Jadson Marques/AP
A boy, no more than 16 and accused of stealing from a slum store, is being beaten with a stick, 60 feet from where the drug lord sits for an interview. After the first few whacks, the boy is dragged behind a wall. Brutal sounds of wood on bone are heard. Assis jumps to his feet, hustles over, looks around the wall, winces and looks back at the drug chief, a plea in his expression. He looks back to the beating and slowly returns to the drug lord’s side without intervening. “It’s the criminal tribunal, it is how it functions,” Assis later explains. “First infraction – they are beaten, but not killed. Second time, they ‘correct’ him by shooting him through both hands. If he messes up a third time, he is executed.” It’s the fine line the pastor walks – knowing where to intervene, when to press his luck with an unpredictable drug boss to try and spare a life. Assis says he has managed to halt executions in the past and save some lives.
“Carlos, one of 20 young men saved by Assis, now wants to bring the word of God to the traffickers.”
Saving souls is an entirely different matter. Take Carlos Agusto, a 19-year old foot soldier for the Red Command in a nearby shantytown. He was shot through his right hand during a gunbattle with police. A fellow trafficker fired a bullet into his left hand after a slum court decided he was guilty of skimming profits from his allotment of cocaine to sell. Assis was contacted by one of Carlos’ relatives and found him during one of his regular visits to a nearby hospital. “I was almost dead when I first saw him,” Carlos says of the pastor. “The first thing he told me was that I would live and that I would leave that hospital a saved man.”
Carlos, who now wants to be an evangelical preacher, was one of 20 young men taken in by Assis during the past two years. He finds shelter for them, or they live in the church itself. Carlos pulls up a shirt sleeve to reveal a rough tattoo of Christ. His bullet wounds faintly resemble the holes that marked the hands of Jesus nailed to the cross. Asked about this, Carlos gazes at them, shakes his head and says, “These are not the signs of salvation, but the stains of a life of crime.”
As he tours around the slum, Assis talks about why he goes into places many other preachers would not even think of entering. “We try to bring the word of God to the traffickers because that is where the violence begins. If we can calm them down, we can slowly begin to end the bloodshed.” He continues to greet everyone, residents and drug dealers, with handshakes, back slaps, smiles and questions about their kids and families. They promise, they’ll see him next Sunday in church.
Source: Bradley Brooks, AP (edited/condensed by JNI)
In May the Kurdish government of Iraq gave permission for a Christian radio station to officially begin broadcast operations in Kurdish and Arabic. The establishment of such a station owned and operated by Iraqi followers of Jesus Christ is really an historic development. The station’s headquarters and main broadcasting facility is located in the northern Kurdish region of Iraq, in the capital of Erbil, a city of some one million people, not far from the border with Iran. The station manager requests prayer for “the Lord’s favor to be with us and that we would make a real impact in people’s lives here.”
Recently, Police have found the severed head of the murdered student Khyati Shrestha three days after her headless torso with hands and legs missing was found dumped in Bungamati area of Lalitpur district. She was kidnapped by her teacher, asked the ransom money from her parents. Her parents paid him 10 hundred thousands Rupees to release their daughter, but their daughter was found in 4 pieces. This kidnapper is arrested and he is in the jail, but Nepali people ( mostly students) demonstrating and striking with demanding the kidnapper that he should have death penalty.
Israelites were satisfied with the Tabernacle at Shiloh which facilitated the religious functions of sacrifice, worship and prayer. Yet the Tabernacle was missing the core — there was no Ark of Testimony. 
THE RIVER OF LIFE is RISING!
“Here in Japan, we only have a small percentage of Christians,” Marre explains. “And people in Japan don’t have a concept of going to church, but they love café’s and nightclubs, and they love music. So I felt this nightclub-restaurant setting was much more effective. People can come in not knowing what to expect, and not feeling threatened. Then they can ‘kick back’ and have a good meal so that we can be friends with them and eventually they will be drawn to the Lord.”
Religious responses to Gov. Sanford’s affair
Political sex scandals are a dime a dozen, but Gov. Sanford’s dalliance remains noteworthy for how he invokes his Christian faith to explain himself. On the New York Times‘ fantastic “Room For Debate” blog, religious commentators offer interesting takes on Sanford’s Biblical analogies, particularly the story of King David and Bathsheba.
Another suggests that this episode further reveals a fundamental tension between Christian faith and political conservatism:
Yet it may be a mistake to conclude, as do some liberals, that such moral values should therefore be completely irrelevant to political discourse:
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