Charisma Magazine

This Easter, when many churchgoers sport new suits and dresses, pastors across the country will be preaching with one article of clothing noticeably absent: their shoes.

Some 5,000 pastors are expected to go barefoot on Easter Sunday to raise awareness about global poverty and help provide shoes for the 300 million people worldwide who lack them.

Photo: Samaritan's Feet founder Manny Ohonme

Sponsored by Samaritan's Feet, a North Carolina-based ministry that has collected 3 million pairs of shoes to distribute worldwide, the Barefoot Sunday campaign was announced today in Atlanta. The event falls on the 42nd anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s death and will honor the civil rights leader's legacy. His children, Martin Luther King III and the Rev. Bernice A. King, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, will be among those going barefoot April 4.

Despite a lagging economy and research showing declines in church giving, a charismatic congregation in Tennessee wants to be known for its generosity.

On Sunday, 700-member Grace Center church in Franklin, Tenn., surprised the faith-based Siloam Family Health Center in Nashville with a check for more than $112,000—the total collected from tithes and offerings that weekend. Siloam provides medical care to people with no health insurance at an average cost of $10 per visit.

Less than two weeks after a massive attack in Nigeria that killed 500 Christians, Muslim Fulani herdsmen on Wednesday unleashed more horrific violence on two Christian villages in Plateau state, killing 13 people, including a pregnant woman and children.

In attacks presumably over disputed property but with a level of violence characteristic of jihadist method and motive, men in military camouflage and others in customary clothing also burned 20 houses in Byei and Baten villages, in the Riyom Local Government Area of the state, about 29 miles from the state capital, Jos.

The genocide staged by Sudan's Islamist regime keeps topping the lists of contemporary disasters. Some 3.5 million South Sudanese Christians and animists have been killed in a brutal "conversion" campaign that has lasted more than 25 years. Millions have fled their homes, seeking shelter from starvation, slavery and violent death.

But among the desert mountains across which Moses fled with another persecuted people long ago some of these Sudanese believers have found refuge in a place aptly named The Shelter.

Moroccan authorities deported more than 40 foreign Christian aid workers last week in an ongoing, nationwide crackdown that included the expulsion of foster parents caring for 33 Moroccan orphans. 

Deportations of foreign Christians continued at press time, with Moroccan authorities expressing their intention to deport specifically U.S. nationals. Sources in Morocco told Compass that the government gave the U.S. Embassy in Rabat a list of 40 citizens to be deported.

Photo: Sixteen foster parents from the Village of Hope orphanage were deported last week.