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        <title>Christian Daily International | Asia</title>
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        <description><![CDATA[Asia news from Christian Daily International providing biblical, factual and personal news, stories and perspectives from every region, focusing on religious freedom, integrated gospel and other issues that are relevant for the global Church today. ]]></description>
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                <title><![CDATA[ACCM2026 panel calls for shift from church programs to disciple-making cultures at church, denominational and national Alliance levels]]></title>
                <link>https://www.christiandaily.com/news/accm2026-panel-calls-for-shift-from-church-programs-to-disciple-making-cultures</link>
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                                                            <dc:creator><![CDATA[CDI Staff]]></dc:creator>
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                            <media:title><![CDATA[From left, Dr. John M. Chandra, Rev. Dr. Lito Villoria, and Rev. Edmund Chan with Asia Evangelical Alliance General Secretary Dr. Bambang Budijanto as moderator during the morning panel on the third day of the Asia Conference on Church & Mission, June 11,]]></media:title>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Christian Daily International ]]>
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                                    <![CDATA[ From left, Dr. John M. Chandra, Rev. Dr. Lito Villoria, and Rev. Edmund Chan with Asia Evangelical Alliance General Secretary Dr. Bambang Budijanto as moderator during the morning panel on the third day of the Asia Conference on Church & Mission, June 11, 2026, at GCF South Metro in Alabang, Metro Manila. ]]>
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                            <media:title><![CDATA[Rev. Dr. Lito Villoria, Executive Chairman of the Philippines National Disciplemaking Campaign Committee, addresses delegates during the morning panel at the Asia Conference on Church & Mission, June 11, 2026, at GCF South Metro in Alabang, Metro Manila.]]></media:title>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Christian Daily International ]]>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Rev. Dr. Lito Villoria, Executive Chairman of the Philippines' National Disciplemaking Campaign Committee, addresses delegates during the morning panel at the Asia Conference on Church & Mission, June 11, 2026, at GCF South Metro in Alabang, Metro Manila. ]]>
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                            <media:title><![CDATA[Dr. John M. Chandra, Senior Pastor and Synod Chairman of Gereja Pantekosta Kharismatika di Indonesia, speaks during the morning panel at the Asia Conference on Church & Mission, June 11, 2026, at GCF South Metro in Alabang, Metro Manila.]]></media:title>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Christian Daily International ]]>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Dr. John M. Chandra, Senior Pastor and Synod Chairman of Gereja Pantekosta Kharismatika di Indonesia, speaks during the morning panel at the Asia Conference on Church & Mission, June 11, 2026, at GCF South Metro in Alabang, Metro Manila. ]]>
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                            <media:title><![CDATA[Rev. Edmund Chan, Founder of the Global Alliance of International Disciple Making Churches, addresses delegates during the morning panel at the Asia Conference on Church & Mission, June 11, 2026, at GCF South Metro in Alabang, Metro Manila.]]></media:title>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Christian Daily International ]]>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Rev. Edmund Chan, Founder of the Global Alliance of International Disciple Making Churches, addresses delegates during the morning panel at the Asia Conference on Church & Mission, June 11, 2026, at GCF South Metro in Alabang, Metro Manila. ]]>
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                                                                            <pubDate>Thu, 11 Jun 2026 21:52:00 -0400</pubDate>
                <description><![CDATA[On the third and final day of the Asia Conference on Church & Mission, three church leaders from across Asia called evangelical congregations and denominational networks to stop measuring ministry success by attendance figures and program activity, arguing that the global church's failure to prioritize discipleship has produced a generation of spiritually shallow Christians — and that only a deliberate, relational, and intergenerational approach to disciple-making can reverse it.]]></description>
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On the third and final day of the Asia Conference on Church & Mission, three church leaders from across Asia called evangelical congregations and denominational networks to stop measuring ministry success by attendance figures and program activity, arguing that the global church's failure to prioritize discipleship has produced a generation of spiritually shallow Christians — and that only a deliberate, relational, and intergenerational approach to disciple-making can reverse it.
The morning panel, held Thursday, June 11, at GCF South Metro in Alabang, Metro Manila, featured Rev. Dr. Lito Villoria, Senior Pastor of GCF South Metro and Executive Chairman of the Philippines' National Disciple-making Campaign Committee; Dr. John M. Chandra, Senior Pastor and Synod Chairman of Gereja Pantekosta Kharismatika di Indonesia (GPKDI); and Rev. Edmund Chan, Founder of the Global Alliance of International Disciple Making Churches and Leadership Mentor at Covenant Evangelical Free Church in Singapore. The session focused on how churches, denominations, and national alliances can move from event-based ministry to intentional, measurable disciple-making.
ACCM 2026, organized by the Asia Evangelical Alliance in partnership with the Philippine Council of Evangelical Churches (PCEC), has gathered 210 delegates from 25 nations under the theme "Disciple or Die 3.0" — the third in a series of gatherings since the AEA's 2024 general assembly in Mongolia first sounded the alarm over the state of discipleship across the continent.
Providing a pathway to transition to disciple-making

Villoria, who is part of the leadership of the Philippine Council of Evangelical Churches (PCEC) representing 92 denominations, opened by naming what he described as the central challenge with national alliances: talking about disciple-making without giving churches a workable path to practice it.
"Many churches, even denominations and leaders, are talking about disciple making and discipleship, but it is not really getting traction at the church level," he said. "So that is the challenge."
He outlined four practices a national alliance must stop if it is serious about change. The first is treating disciple-making as a conference activity and “just do the same conferences of inspiring the churches, but not really providing them a pathway on how they can be disciple-making churches," he said. Second, success can no longer be measured only in attendance and events. "We need to ask ourselves: are disciples being formed? Are disciples discipling others? Are they growing toward spiritual maturity?"
Third, Villoria argued, alliances must stop assuming pastors already know how to lead this kind of transition. And fourth, national alliances cannot function only as coordination platforms. "Coordination is helpful, but coordination alone will not produce disciple-making churches." Agreement that discipleship matters is not enough, he said — what is needed is alignment, which he defined as actually restructuring the life of a congregation around the mandate to make disciples. "It's difficult. It requires culture change and it will take time."
For the PCEC specifically, Villoria described four commitments. The first is maintaining a clear biblical vision — consistently communicating that multiplying disciples is not one agenda item among many but the central one. The second is aligning national strategy with measurable outcomes: tracking how many denominations are taking concrete steps, how many churches have a defined discipleship pathway, how many individuals are in a small group and actively discipling others. The third is working through the alliance's 92 member denominations, regional networks, and theological institutions. The fourth, he said, is the most foundational: the whole movement must be sustained by prayer.
"A disciple-making movement cannot be manufactured by strategy alone," Villoria said. "Strategies are needed, structures are helpful, training is necessary — but only the Holy Spirit can revive the church, transform the hearts, and empower ordinary believers to make disciples."
New metrics to keep community “on fire for discipleship”

Chandra, who has served as a pastor in Indonesia for 36 years, offered an honest account of his own journey toward recognizing what he called the shallowness of information-heavy ministry.
"I'm just teaching them — informing them," he said of his earlier approach. "But I would like to go deeper." After three decades of preaching, he came to see that equipping disciples requires more than classroom time or biblical content transferred at scale. Discipleship, he argued, must be understood as the purpose of the church's existence — not one program among many.
Chandra named five habits he believes churches must abandon. The first is focusing solely on evangelism without discipleship. "We have to make sure we just want to reach, but also make disciples of God." The second is associating discipleship with information transfer alone. The third is treating discipleship as a program rather than the defining purpose of church life. The fourth — and what he described as the hardest — is failing to build genuine relationships. "If you ask me what is the hard thing I have to learn when transforming my church and denomination, it is how to build relationships." The fifth is accumulating disciples without deploying them.
Three years into the transition at his own congregation, Chandra described removing the traditional weekly attendance count from the board. "We count the offering that comes in from the service — but let's count how many people we can serve to become disciples," he said. The new metric, he explained, keeps the community "on fire for discipleship."
At the denominational level, Chandra said he began by discipling six pastors personally — deliberately small, deliberately slow. "I learned from Jesus: he discipled 12," he said. "I started with six." Each of those pastors now disciples others, and the pattern is beginning to multiply through GPKDI's network of churches across nine provinces in Indonesia. By May 2029, he said, the denomination has set a goal of seeing 50 percent of its local churches become disciple-making churches — defined as congregations where at least 30 percent of members are actively discipling others.
The framework guiding the movement, he said, is built around four values he described with the acronym REAL: Relationship first, Empowered by the Word, Authentic and accountable, and Life transformation as the expected result.
Hope for the global Church is not in the masses

Chan closed the panel with what he described as a view from the broader horizon — data on the condition of the global church that he said demands a response.
Citing figures from a Pew Report, Chan said there are approximately seven million churches worldwide. Of those, four million are stagnant — neither growing nor making disciples. Two million are in decline, with Europe as a particular example, where former church buildings are being repurposed for other uses. Only one million, he said, are growing — and not all of them in healthy ways. Annual growth of Christianity globally stands at approximately 1.8 percent, he noted — a figure he called very low.
"This is the state of the globe," he said.
Chan described a gathering of approximately 400 Christian leaders in Louisiana late last year, convened to pray and deliberate over how to reverse those trends. The initiative broke into 30 working groups. One conclusion surfaced consistently across all of them: discipleship is the key.
"If we are committed to this focus, we need discipleship — healthy discipleship for healthy churches," Chan said.
He argued that the core deficit is not resources or strategy but a specific kind of leadership. He distinguished between what he called weak leaders, who lack both knowledge and skill; good leaders, who have those but lack resilience when tested; and strong leaders, who persevere through opposition. The greatest need in the church today, he said, is not strong leaders — it is wise leaders. "For wisdom-based leadership, we must come back to the sacred Scriptures and the foundations of the church so that there are healthy, godly leaders who lead wisely."
Chan offered three anchors for that kind of leadership: reestablishing the Lordship of Jesus Christ, refocusing on spiritual maturity as the goal rather than programs or growth metrics, and committing to spiritual multiplication — investing deeply in a few rather than broadcasting to many.
He illustrated the point with an account from a bishop he has been mentoring, who entered a discipleship journey in 2019 after years of fruitful public ministry but, by his own account, a private experience of spiritual emptiness. "People viewed me as doing well — having vision, having a lot of spiritual gifts," the bishop said, according to Chan. "What people did not realize was that I was feeling spiritually empty." After going through a discipleship program, the bishop recruited four senior pastors, then 12 lay pastors, organizing them into small groups of no more than five pastoral couples. The pattern spread. Eventually, he was mentoring five cohorts of seven bishops each — 35 bishops in total — and the approach had been adopted as the diocesan standard through 2030, spreading to all 165 dioceses in the country.
"One man, changed by the Lord, came under the authority and lordship of Jesus, passed it on — and God lodged a movement," Chan said.
His closing word to the assembled delegates echoed the conference's emphasis on depth over scale. "Hope for the global church is not in the masses," he said. "Jesus did not invest himself in the masses. He invested in a few. Continue to minister to the masses — but invest."
ACCM 2026 concludes Friday, June 12, with a joint session bringing together the conference delegates and an estimated 1,000 Filipino pastors for a focused intensive on intentional disciple-making.]]></content:encoded>
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                <title><![CDATA[Major public hearing in India reveals systemic anti-Christian violence]]></title>
                <link>https://www.christiandaily.com/news/major-public-hearing-in-india-reveals-systemic-anti-christian-violence</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.christiandaily.com/news/major-public-hearing-in-india-reveals-systemic-anti-christian-violence</guid>
                                                            <dc:creator><![CDATA[Surinder Kaur]]></dc:creator>
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                            <media:title><![CDATA[Panel members at hearing on anti-Christian hostilities on June 1, 2026 in New Delhi, India.]]></media:title>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Christian Daily International ]]>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Panel members at hearing on anti-Christian hostilities on June 1, 2026 in New Delhi, India. ]]>
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                                                                            <pubDate>Thu, 11 Jun 2026 13:28:00 -0400</pubDate>
                <description><![CDATA[In central India’s Chhattisgarh state, followers of tribal religion in Bastar District recently dug up the grave of a tribal Christian buried 20 years before. They unearthed his skeleton, burned it and scattered the ashes.]]></description>
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In central India’s Chhattisgarh state, followers of tribal religion in Bastar District recently dug up the grave of a tribal Christian buried 20 years before. They unearthed his skeleton, burned it and scattered the ashes.
The message to the living Christian community was unmistakable.
Degree Prasad Chouhan, a human rights attorney for marginalized communities in Chhattisgarh, brought this testimony to an unofficial public hearing known as a “people’s tribunal” on June 1.
The People’s Tribunal on Violence Against Christians in India in New Delhi was convened at the Constitution Club by Karwan-e-Mohabbat, an Urdu phrase meaning “Caravan of Love,” a civil society organization founded by human rights activist and author Harsh Mander that accompanies victims of communal and religious violence across India, along with a collective of concerned citizens.
More than 200 people attended the hearing. Survivors, lawyers, researchers, community representatives and human rights defenders from Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Gujarat and Odisha states testified before a panel of eminent scholars, journalists and activists.
It was only the second such hearing since the Kandhamal massacres of 2008, when Hindu nationalist mobs burned hundreds of church buildings, killed dozens of Christians and drove tens of thousands from their homes in Odisha state.
John Dayal, a veteran journalist, human rights activist and one of the organizers of the hearing, opened the proceedings by reaching back through decades of violence to show that what was being documented was not new. He recalled the 1999 murder of Australian missionary Graham Staines and his two young sons, Philip and Timothy, burned alive in their vehicle while asleep in Manoharpur village, in Odisha’s Keonjhar District, by a mob led by Bajrang Dal member Dara Singh.
Dayal reminded the gathering that the subsequent judicial inquiry initially contained language suggesting Staines had brought the crime upon himself by converting people, a line that civil society was forced to take to the Chief Justice of India to have struck from the record.
“What we have heard today is this design, this conspiracy of the government, to which the state is blind, to divide the community within and without, to isolate it from civil society, from the larger India that grew up governed by a constitution,” Dayal told Christian Daily International.
Vidya Dinker, a social activist who served on the tribunal panel and participated in field visits to Chhattisgarh and Odisha before the Delhi hearings, returned to Staines when she addressed the gathered survivors.
“When they went to the jeep and opened the jeep door, all that was left of Graham Staines was his spine that could not be destroyed by that fire of hate,” she said at the hearing. Turning to Christian leaders in the room, she added, “I think Christian leadership now needs to show some spine.”
She singled out bishops, cardinals and archbishops, saying the tribunal had repeatedly heard survivors describe how when violence came, established church leaders did not come with them.
“We do not hear them speaking enough for ordinary Christians,” Dinker said.
She warned that the communities being targeted today in remote rural areas and small evangelical congregations were simply the first.
“It is only a question of time,” she said. “Since you have decided that you follow the ultimate revolutionary, please lead the resistance.”
When the Dead Cannot Rest
Syeda Hameed, a recipient of the Padma Shri, one of India’s highest civilian honors, and a former member of the Planning Commission of India, the country’s apex economic policy body, began her remarks at the hearing by describing the India of her childhood: a Muslim girl who attended a convent school and recited the Lord’s Prayer at home every day, with her parents’ blessing.
“We are leaving behind a conflict-ridden world for the next generation,” she said, “but we hope you find a way.”
Then she addressed what she had heard at the hearing all day.
“I am very moved by the whole question of burials,” she said. Of the Bastar exhumation that Chouhan had described, she was unequivocal. It was, she said, “the greatest atrocity” against a community.
Father Ajay Singh, former director of the Odisha Forum for Social Action of the Catholic Church, told the tribunal that the denial of burial rights represented “one of the gravest forms of humiliation inflicted upon Christian communities.”
He described cases in which funeral processions were obstructed, burial in village graveyards was denied, and the bodies of deceased Christians were allegedly removed and subjected to reconversion ceremonies against the wishes of their families.
Irfan Engineer, director of the Centre for Study of Society and Secularism in Mumbai, served on the tribunal panel. The son of the late Dr. Asghar Ali Engineer, the renowned Islamic scholar and communal harmony activist, he said at the hearing that narratives around ghar wapsi, a Hindi term meaning “homecoming” used by Hindu nationalist groups to describe the reconversion of Christians and Muslims to Hinduism, were frequently deployed to legitimize coercion and discrimination.
Genuine freedom of conscience, he said, must remain central to India’s constitutional framework.
Prayer Meetings as ‘Crimes’
A.C. Michael, coordinator of the United Christian Forum (UCF), which monitors and documents attacks on Christians across India, described the growing normalization of hostility toward Christian worship.
Peaceful prayer meetings, he said at the hearing, are increasingly portrayed by authorities and Hindu nationalist groups as threats to public order and national interest. Christians gathering in homes or small halls to pray face accusations of conducting illegal conversion activities, charges that carry criminal penalties under anti-conversion laws enacted by more than a dozen states governed by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
The BJP is a Hindu nationalist party that has governed India at the national level since 2014.
Chouhan pointed to a pattern civil society organizations have documented for years: hundreds of incidents are reported annually in Chhattisgarh alone, but First Information Reports (FIRs), the official complaints that trigger police investigations in India, are filed in only a fraction of cases. Where complaints are registered at all, he said, they are frequently filed against victims rather than perpetrators.
The Supreme Court of India in October dismissed multiple cases brought under Uttar Pradesh’s anti-conversion law, finding they suffered from what it called “incurable legal defects” and appeared aimed at harassment rather than legitimate law enforcement. Despite the ruling, arrests and police interventions at prayer meetings and church services have continued.
Historian Tanika Sarkar of the tribunal panel noted at the proceedings that established churches with long institutional histories appeared relatively protected, while newer congregations, house churches and small evangelical groups bore the brunt of the hostility.
“It is the new churches which show the growth of Christianity, they are being attacked,” she said.
Minorities Enjoy ‘Full Freedom’
Three days after the tribunal concluded, Minister for Minority Affairs Kiren Rijiju stood at Bharat Mandapam, a government convention center in New Delhi, and told a celebratory gathering marking 12 years of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s BJP government that minorities in India enjoy “full freedom.”
He called reports of persecution “propaganda” spread by opposition parties and foreign powers jealous of India’s growth. He challenged anyone to name a single person who had left India because of their religious identity.
The U.S.-based Pew Research Center published findings in 2024 that quietly addressed that challenge. Christians, who make up approximately 2.3 percent of India’s population of 1.4 billion people, account for 16 percent of Indian emigrants. Muslims, who make up roughly 14 percent of the population, account for 33 percent. Hindus, who make up 80 percent of the population, represent only 41 percent of those who leave.
The Rev. Vijayesh Lal, general secretary of the Evangelical Fellowship of India (EFI), also addressed the hearing before giving CDI his response to the minister’s claims.
“The real question is not whether Christians have freedom on paper, but whether the poorest Christian in the most remote village can exercise that freedom without fear,” Lal said. “When families struggle to bury their dead, when prayer gatherings attract suspicion, and when victims struggle to access justice, the gap between constitutional promise and lived reality becomes difficult to ignore. A democracy is ultimately measured by how confidently its most vulnerable citizens can exercise the rights it guarantees.”
The EFI is the national umbrella body of evangelical Christians and a charter member of the World Evangelical Alliance, which represents more than 600 million evangelicals worldwide.
India’s overall persecution score on Open Doors’ 2026 World Watch List stood at 84 out of 100. The country now leads the world in Christian detentions, with 1,622 believers arrested, imprisoned or detained without trial in the most recent reporting period, and its violence score reached 16.1 out of a maximum 16.7, the highest recorded since Open Doors began tracking India in 1993.
The EFI’s Religious Liberty Commission documented 747 verified incidents of violence, intimidation and discrimination against Christians in 2025, more than five times the 147 cases documented in 2014, the year the BJP first came to power nationally.
Harsh Mander, who founded Karwan-e-Mohabbat and steered the tribunal, told CDI he was not done.
“We will continue to speak out in different ways,” he said. “People listen to our voice.”
He recalled 2017, when his organization spent nearly a month traveling from Assam state to Andhra Pradesh, visiting families who had suffered lynchings and offering what he described as atonement and solidarity.
“It was a very useful attention probe,” he said. “We went on this journey, and we will try to do the same. The country needs to know, and we will keep speaking out about it, intervening in court, and various other ways.”
Concluding the tribunal’s proceedings, Mander said the incidents placed before the panel pointed to something more troubling than a series of unconnected attacks. The testimonies, he said, pointed to a coordinated effort to push India’s most vulnerable citizens to the margins of the republic that the Constitution promises.
He called on citizens, institutions and governments to act urgently to defend it.]]></content:encoded>
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                <title><![CDATA[The delivery system is you: Singapore pastor challenges Asian Church to embody discipleship, not just teach it]]></title>
                <link>https://www.christiandaily.com/news/the-delivery-system-is-you-singapore-pastor-challenges-asian-church-to-embody-discipleship-not-just-teach-it</link>
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                                                            <dc:creator><![CDATA[CDI Staff]]></dc:creator>
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                            <media:title><![CDATA[Rev. Edmund Chan addresses evangelical leaders at the Asia Conference on Church and Mission in Manila. Chan called on church leaders to become the delivery system for discipleship rather than relying on programs or curriculum.]]></media:title>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Christian Daily International ]]>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Rev. Edmund Chan addresses evangelical leaders at the Asia Conference on Church and Mission in Manila. Chan called on church leaders to become "the delivery system" for discipleship rather than relying on programs or curriculum. ]]>
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                                                                            <pubDate>Thu, 11 Jun 2026 03:09:00 -0400</pubDate>
                <description><![CDATA[A Singapore-based pastor told evangelical leaders gathered in the Philippines that the church's core problem is not organizational but spiritual — tracing most failures in ministry back to a breakdown in discipleship and obedience, and calling on church leaders across Asia and beyond to become intentional disciple makers rather than program managers.]]></description>
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A Singapore-based pastor told evangelical leaders gathered in the Philippines that the church's core problem is not organizational but spiritual — tracing most failures in ministry back to a breakdown in discipleship and obedience, and calling on church leaders across Asia and beyond to become intentional disciple makers rather than program managers.
Rev. Edmund Chan, founder of the Global Alliance of International Disciple Making Churches and leadership mentor at Covenant Evangelical Free Church in Singapore, delivered the opening keynote on the third day of the Asia Conference on Church and Mission (ACCM), which brought together over 200 evangelical leaders from 25 countries in Manila. Chan has served as a guest lecturer in doctoral programs at five seminaries across four countries, and his address drew on that teaching experience to frame discipleship as the foundational issue facing the global church today.
He opened with a simple analogy: a shoe factory produces shoes, a paper factory produces paper, so what does the church produce? "The church is to produce disciples," Chan said. "The crisis of discipleship today is a crisis of product — not just are you producing disciples, but what kind are we producing?"
Chan framed his address around five diagnostic questions: why discipleship is so important, why it is so neglected, what it actually is, what makes it so difficult, and how it can best be accomplished. The questions, he said, provide a framework for understanding what genuine disciple-making looks like — and where most churches fall short.
A chain of consequences
"There are no church problems," Chan told attendees. "All we have are people problems. And what we have in people problems is actually a heart problem." He traced that chain further — from heart problems to obedience problems, from obedience to faith, and from faith to spiritual maturity. "If there's discipleship, there's great maturity. If there's great maturity, there's great faith. If there's faith, there's obedience. If there's obedience, there's a transformation of heart," he said. "That is why discipleship is so critical in the life of the church."
The same logical chain, Chan argued, explains why neglecting discipleship has such wide consequences. A church that fails to produce mature disciples does not simply have a programming gap — it has a people problem, which is at root a heart problem, which flows directly from the absence of genuine formation.
Misunderstanding as neglect
Chan argued that discipleship is commonly neglected not simply through inaction, but through misunderstanding. There are three ways to neglect something, he said: by not doing it, by starting and then stopping, or by doing it wrongly. The third, he suggested, is the most common failure in churches today.
Many churches, he said, treat discipleship as a program rather than a way of life, and confuse knowledge transfer with genuine formation. "Truth doesn't change lives," he said. "It is truth of life that changes lives." He drew a contrast between a Western philosophical understanding of truth as content — shaped, he said, by Enlightenment thinking — and an ancient Jewish conception of truth as connection: with God, with one another, and with the lost. When that relational dimension is stripped away, he said, truth becomes mere recitation rather than transformation.
Alignment and the call to follow
Asked to define discipleship in a single word, Chan offered "alignment" — a life oriented entirely around following Jesus. He described discipleship as five interlocking commitments: to know Jesus, to love him, to serve him, to proclaim him, and to become increasingly like him. Disciple-making, he said, is reproducing that same orientation in others.
He cited Luke 9:23, noting that Jesus' call to take up the cross is explicitly daily — a detail he said many churches have quietly dropped. "We have lost the dailiness in discipleship," Chan said. "In a lot of churches, the discipleship program is weekly, and we miss the call to live out our discipleship daily." He referenced an ancient Jewish blessing, also refered to by an earlier speaker, in which a disciple is wished to be so close to his master that the dust from the master's feet settles on him. That image of proximity, Chan said, captures what discipleship is meant to feel like — not distant admiration but intimate, daily pursuit.
Chan spoke with candor about his own spiritual history, describing himself as a third-generation Christian who backslid for four years before returning to faith. The experience shaped a conviction he said has served as a guiding compass since 1975. "If Jesus is not Lord of all, he is not Lord at all," he told the gathering. "I told myself — if I come back to Jesus, I must be all in. He must be all in all."
He also drew a direct line between discipleship and holiness, warning that the two cannot be separated. "We cannot walk with God by holding hands with the devil," he said. "There is a call to separation." The theology of repentance, forgiveness and a redeemed life lived in freedom, Chan said, must be central to any serious disciple-making effort.
The obedience problem
On the question of why discipleship is difficult, Chan pointed to obedience. He said the Great Commission is frequently misread: Jesus did not simply instruct his followers to baptize and teach, but specifically to "teach them to obey — teach them to submit to all things whatsoever I have commanded you." The word "observe," he said, is the hinge the church has missed.
When believers face a conflict between the word of God and personal experience — pain, pleasure, competing desires — three responses are available, Chan said. The first is backsliding. The second is repentance, returning to God's word. But he identified a third, which he described as widespread in the global church today: remaining in the pew while refusing the cost of obedience. "They don't backslide — they're still in church. They don't repent because it's too costly to obey. They pay lip service to God," he said. That posture, he warned, produces what he called "lukewarmness," and a lukewarm church cannot be an intentional disciple-making church.
Discipleship as a lived relationship
To illustrate his point, Chan played a short video in which a senior pastor described how Chan's investment in him — regular meetings over lunch during a sabbatical period — had provided practical and spiritual counsel through a demanding season of ministry. What the pastor said he valued most was not strategy or teaching, but simply feeling cared for and loved.
That detail, Chan said, captures the essence of disciple-making. "It's not about building a large movement or a megachurch," he told the gathering. "It's about helping the redemptive community of disciples of Jesus to journey together, to pilgrimage together, to share lives together."
The delivery system
Chan closed with a conversation from earlier in his ministry, in which a leader from Navigators observed that while most ministries rely on curriculum as their delivery system, Chan had made himself the delivery system. Chan said he owed that instinct entirely to his own mentors, who had shaped him not through materials but through the investment of their lives. "Their lives were the delivery system," he said, "and therefore I'm simply passing on that which I have learned."
He urged church leaders to do the same: to follow Jesus as disciples, make disciples, multiply disciples and mobilize them for the purposes of God — one soul, one disciple, one small group at a time. The goal is not a passion for discipleship as a ministry model, he said, but a passion for Jesus himself. "You and I," Chan told the room, "we are the delivery system."
The Asia Conference on Church and Mission brought together evangelical leaders from across Asia and beyond calling on participants to embrace intentional disciple-making as the defining task of the church in the present generation.]]></content:encoded>
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                <title><![CDATA['Discipling is not a technique': Indian theologian calls Asian church leaders to radical accountability at ACCM2026]]></title>
                <link>https://www.christiandaily.com/news/discipling-is-not-a-technique-indian-theologian-calls-asian-church-leaders-to-radical-accountability-at-accm2026</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.christiandaily.com/news/discipling-is-not-a-technique-indian-theologian-calls-asian-church-leaders-to-radical-accountability-at-accm2026</guid>
                                                            <dc:creator><![CDATA[CDI Staff]]></dc:creator>
                                                                                                                            <media:content  url="https://www.christiandaily.com/media/original/img/0/47/4755.jpg">
                            <media:title><![CDATA[Rev. CB Samuel, honorary theological adviser for Micah Global and EFICOR, challenged Asian evangelical leaders to name at least five people they are actively discipling — and to ask honestly whether they could.]]></media:title>
                                                            <media:credit role="author" scheme="urn:ebu">
                                    <![CDATA[ Christian Daily International ]]>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Rev. CB Samuel, honorary theological adviser for Micah Global and EFICOR, challenged Asian evangelical leaders to name at least five people they are actively discipling — and to ask honestly whether they could. ]]>
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                                                                            <pubDate>Thu, 11 Jun 2026 00:27:00 -0400</pubDate>
                <description><![CDATA[A veteran Indian Bible teacher challenged evangelical leaders gathered at a major Asian missions conference to confront what he called a pervasive failure of personal discipleship, pressing them to name at least five individuals they are actively discipling — and to ask themselves honestly whether they could.]]></description>
                <content:encoded><![CDATA[
A veteran Indian Bible teacher challenged evangelical leaders gathered at a major Asian missions conference to confront what he called a pervasive failure of personal discipleship, pressing them to name at least five individuals they are actively discipling — and to ask themselves honestly whether they could.
Rev. CB Samuel, honorary theological adviser for Micah Global and EFICOR, delivered the closing keynote address on the second evening of the Asia Conference on Church and Mission (ACCM) on June 10, drawing on Paul's first letter to the Thessalonians to lay out what he described as the essential character of a disciple maker.
"Discipling is not a technique," Samuel told participants. "You pour your life into other people."
He opened with a personal reflection, describing a difficult season in his own life during which he had turned to the Psalms of lament — noting that more than a third of the 150 psalms fall into that category. He suggested that contemporary Christian music, particularly in Asia, often fails to reflect the pain of ordinary people. "Our songs should capture the pain of our people and the cry to God," he said. "Otherwise, we are totally disconnected."
The majority of his address focused on practical accountability in discipleship. Samuel recalled a staff conference model used by a Sri Lankan Christian leader, who required everyone on his leadership team to write the names of five people they were discipling on the back of their name badges and could be questioned about any one of them at any time. Leaders who lacked current knowledge of those individuals' lives were removed from organizational leadership, Samuel said. "If you can't even name one person you're discipling, what right do you have to talk?" he recounted the leader as saying.
He also described asking a prominent Christian leader to recommend someone from among his disciples for a ministry program. The leader reportedly told Samuel he had no one to recommend, saying his organizational responsibilities had left him no time to disciple anyone. Samuel credited him for his candor but used the exchange to press his point: "If you don't have time to disciple, you are in the wrong position."
Working through 1 Thessalonians 2, Samuel identified six characteristics he said define a genuine disciple maker. The first is courage. Paul had been beaten and mistreated, yet continued to proclaim the gospel, Samuel noted. "You cannot be a disciple maker without taking risks," he said, arguing that 21st-century Christians are often too committed to personal comfort to follow that example.
The second characteristic, he said, is integrity — freedom from flattery, self-promotion and hidden motives. Samuel was pointed in his critique of Christian leaders who use their platforms for personal enrichment. "If you don't have a reputation as a person of integrity, don't disciple," he warned. "The one you disciple will not be Christlike. He will be like you."
The third quality Paul models, Samuel said, is the tender care of a nursing mother. He highlighted Paul's willingness to use maternal language — "we were delighted to share with you not only the gospel of God but our lives as well" — as evidence that discipleship requires the discipler's life to be genuinely accessible. "You can't be a discipler if your home is not open to the people you're discipling," he said.
Fourth is hard work. Samuel recalled his own father, a health professional, expressing disappointment when Samuel entered Protestant ministry — not for theological reasons, but because Protestant pastors in his experience were slow to respond to needs, unlike Catholic priests. His conclusion was that "if you're a discipler, 24 hours, seven days a week is for the person you're discipling."
Character — holiness, righteousness and blamelessness — was the fifth quality, with Samuel drawing a distinction between the three terms: holiness as a person's relationship with God, righteousness as conduct within the community of faith, and blamelessness as one's reputation before the wider world. All three, he argued, are required.
The sixth characteristic is a father's heart — encouraging, comforting and urging those being discipled toward lives worthy of God. "That is the heart of a disciple maker," Samuel said.
He closed with an appeal, asking participants to pray silently and honestly over whether they could name five people currently in their care — and, if not, to commit before God to rebuilding that foundation. "I want to be known for discipling people," he said, framing it as the question by which Christian leaders will ultimately be judged. "God is not going to ask any of us how good a director of our organization we were. He's going to ask you how good a disciple maker you were."
ACCM drew evangelical leaders from across Asia and beyond to Manila, convening under the theme "Disciple or Die." Samuel's address was the final plenary session of the conference's second day.]]></content:encoded>
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                <title><![CDATA[AI, marketplace and youth emerge as major fronts for disciple-making movement at ACCM2026]]></title>
                <link>https://www.christiandaily.com/news/ai-marketplace-and-youth-emerge-as-major-fronts-for-disciple-making-movement-at-accm2026</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.christiandaily.com/news/ai-marketplace-and-youth-emerge-as-major-fronts-for-disciple-making-movement-at-accm2026</guid>
                                                            <dc:creator><![CDATA[CDI Staff]]></dc:creator>
                                                                                                                            <media:content  url="https://www.christiandaily.com/media/original/img/0/47/4749.jpg">
                            <media:title><![CDATA[Mark McClendon said AI is the churchs sharpest tool for global harvest—already built, already in place, waiting for leaders to formally commission it for mission.]]></media:title>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Christian Daily International ]]>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Mark McClendon said AI is the church's sharpest tool for global harvest—already built, already in place, waiting for leaders to formally commission it for mission. ]]>
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                            <media:title><![CDATA[Decades of patient relationship-building taught Dr. Andrew Liuson that reaching kings—presidents, mayors, and executives—is central to the Great Commission, not peripheral to it.]]></media:title>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Christian Daily International ]]>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Decades of patient relationship-building taught Dr. Andrew Liuson that reaching "kings"—presidents, mayors, and executives—is central to the Great Commission, not peripheral to it. ]]>
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                                                                                                <media:content  url="https://www.christiandaily.com/media/original/img/0/47/4751.jpg">
                            <media:title><![CDATA[Ps. Keith Cote said young leaders across the globe arent disengaged—theyre bored, gifted, and waiting for a senior leader to trust them with something that truly matters.]]></media:title>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Ps. Keith Cote said young leaders across the globe aren't disengaged—they're bored, gifted, and waiting for a senior leader to trust them with something that truly matters. ]]>
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                                                                            <pubDate>Wed, 10 Jun 2026 22:25:00 -0400</pubDate>
                <description><![CDATA[Three major thrusts for accelerating disciple-making across Asia — artificial intelligence, marketplace outreach and the empowerment of young leaders — took center stage during an afternoon panel discussion on the second day of the Asia Conference on Church & Mission (ACCM) 2026, held June 10 at GCF South Metro in Alabang, Metro Manila.]]></description>
                <content:encoded><![CDATA[
Three major thrusts for accelerating disciple-making across Asia — artificial intelligence, marketplace outreach and the empowerment of young leaders — took center stage during an afternoon panel discussion on the second day of the Asia Conference on Church & Mission (ACCM) 2026, held June 10 at GCF South Metro in Alabang, Metro Manila.
The panel, which drew on presentations by Mark McClendon, Regional Director of the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) for Southeast Asia and South Korea; Dr. Andrew I. Liuson, Chairman Emeritus of the Philippine Council of Evangelical Churches (PCEC) and Chairman of Cityland Development Corporation; and Ps. Keith Cote, Next Gen Summit Lead of the Global Leadership Network, addressed how evangelical churches across Asia can move from strategic conversation into measurable action — the stated ambition of this third edition of the "Disciple or Die" gathering.
The conference, organized by the Asia Evangelical Alliance (AEA) with the PCEC and hosted by Greenhills Christian Fellowship South Metro, brings together 210 delegates from 25 nations around a seven-year vision: to see a movement of disciple-making churches across the continent by 2033.
AI as the sickle, the internet as the cloud
McClendon opened the panel with a case for artificial intelligence as a strategic tool for completing the Great Commission, framing his argument through Revelation 14:14-16 — the image of one seated on a cloud, sickle in hand, reaping a ripe harvest.
Drawing on that passage, McClendon argued that the internet functions as the cloud on which the church is already seated, that tens of thousands of satellites now in orbit and rapidly multiplying form a global transmission network reaching every corner of the earth, and that artificial intelligence is the sharp, precise instrument placed in the church's hands at this exact moment in history.
"The entire harvest infrastructure — internet, satellites, artificial intelligence — is not being built," McClendon said. "It's already in place."
He acknowledged the hesitation he sensed among delegates. "I'm not saying AI is holy. It's not holy. I'm not saying that it's not dangerous. It could be." But he pressed the point that in every generation — from the printing press to radio to television to the internet — God had taken tools built for commerce, entertainment and power and placed them in the hands of his church for the sake of the gospel. AI, he said, was next in that line.
McClendon pointed to three concrete applications any congregation could pursue immediately: using AI as a 24-hour discipleship companion for new believers; deploying AI to train members in how to share their faith, study Scripture and mentor others; and using AI to multiply outreach across multiple languages and platforms. He noted that across Southeast Asia alone, AI can now handle seven to ten major languages, with capability expanding every few weeks.
His sharpest challenge was directed at leaders. He said churches had a long history of letting promising tools quietly die on the shelf once initial energy faded, and called on those with authority to formally commission AI for mission, the same way they would commission a missionary. "The greatest enemy is the slow, comfortable drift of good intentions that never become decisions," he said.
McClendon closed with a three-step challenge: gather leadership within the next two weeks to spend one hour exploring an AI discipleship tool together; identify one discipleship or outreach process currently limited by capacity; then make a formal leadership decision to run a 90-day pilot, assigning a leader, setting a goal and measuring results.
Discipleship in the marketplace: reaching the kings
Liuson, speaking from decades of business and church leadership experience in the Philippines, framed the second major thrust around a single word drawn from the apostle Paul's commissioning in Acts 9: kings.

Liuson said he had long focused on the more accessible, the poor, the farmer, those at his own social level, and had largely overlooked the people positioned higher in society. He argued that the Lord's specific mention of "kings" alongside Gentiles and Jews in Paul's mandate was deliberate. "Kings are people who are around us who are more knowledgeable, more influential, more powerful, more educated," he said. "The president of a company is the king in the company. The little mayor in the small town is the king of that small town."
He traced biblical examples, such as Philip and the Ethiopian treasurer, Joseph in Egypt, Daniel and his friends before four successive kings, to show that God had consistently used ordinary people to reach those in positions of power. He then drew from his own story of joining a Manila rotary club in his thirties, deliberately and patiently building relationships with senior businessmen over years through small gestures, meals and eventually the sharing of the gospel through Evangelism Explosion.
Liuson described how that patient consistency eventually opened doors to share with mayors, senators, a vice president and several Philippine presidents. He acknowledged the intimidation that many church members feel at the prospect of approaching influential people and urged leaders to equip their congregations with confidence in their identity as ambassadors for Christ.
"Successful witnessing is taking the initiative to share Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit and leaving the results to God," he said.
Young leaders: bored, gifted and waiting to be trusted
Cote addressed the third major thrust: the next generation. He opened by asking delegates to name someone they were currently building into, calling that question a diagnostic for whether churches were genuinely committed to what they professed.
"I truly believe that the church is the hope of the world," Cote said, "but the hope of the local church is its young leaders."
He described a pattern he encountered among young leaders across the globe: they reported feeling frustrated, tired, stressed and anxious, but the word he heard most often was "bored." Not because they lacked activity, but because no one was calling them to do something significant for God. They wanted to be challenged, entrusted with real responsibility and coached, not managed, entertained or kept waiting until they were deemed old enough to matter.

Cote offered seven questions he said every senior leader needed to sit with: Are you modeling discipleship? Are you calling young leaders out by name and letting them know they are needed? Are you releasing them to do things their way rather than requiring your own approach? Are you teaching them in the moment rather than waiting weeks for a formal debrief? Are you functioning as a "wow leader" — one who engages with a young person's idea and helps them work through it — rather than a "how leader" who reflexively explains why an idea will not work? Are you genuinely asking young leaders for their perspective on how to reach their own generation? And are you regularly reminding them of who God says they are — because many, he said, will preach those truths to others while privately dismissing them as inapplicable to themselves?
Cote cited a 23-year-old who now runs global operations for his organization and a 23-year-old from Brazil who leads all Latin American and Caribbean ministry in three languages. Both had been identified and invested in years earlier. He also described an 18-year-old worship leader who had been on the verge of quitting her local church before someone recognized her gifts and gave her real responsibility.
"They don't want to remove you from ministry," he told senior leaders. "They want to be empowered by leaders like you that says, 'Go do it. I trust you. I want to coach you.'"
He closed by pushing back against a consumer model of ministry development. Real investment in young leaders, he said, is not quick or formulaic. "Don't take the easy way. Don't get the McDonald's drive-through version."
From conversation to commitment
The session moderator noted that the three presentations — on AI, the marketplace and youth — together represented what God has placed in the church's hands: a tool, a platform and a generation. The closing question put to delegates was what they intended to do with all three.
The ACCM continues through June 12, with a final day bringing visiting delegates together with an estimated 1,000 Filipino pastors for a joint intensive day on intentional disciple-making.]]></content:encoded>
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                <title><![CDATA[At ACCM2026, panel warns Asia's churches risk raising consumers, not disciples]]></title>
                <link>https://www.christiandaily.com/news/at-accm2026-panel-warns-asia-s-churches-risk-raising-consumers-not-disciples</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.christiandaily.com/news/at-accm2026-panel-warns-asia-s-churches-risk-raising-consumers-not-disciples</guid>
                                                            <dc:creator><![CDATA[CDI Staff]]></dc:creator>
                                                                                                                            <media:content  url="https://www.christiandaily.com/media/original/img/0/47/4744.jpg">
                            <media:title><![CDATA[The panels central argument, shared across all three speakers despite their different institutional vantage points, was that the Asian church has drifted into measuring success by the wrong indicators — attendance, budgets, events, academic credentials, ]]></media:title>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Christian Daily International ]]>
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                                    <![CDATA[ The panel's central argument, shared across all three panelists with their different institutional vantage points, was that the Asian church has drifted into measuring success by the wrong indicators — attendance, budgets, events, academic credentials, institutional reach — while the one thing Jesus actually commanded, making disciples, has quietly been sidelined. ]]>
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                                                                                                <media:content  url="https://www.christiandaily.com/media/original/img/0/47/4745.jpg">
                            <media:title><![CDATA[Dr. Theresa Lua, General Secretary of the Asia Theological Association, called on seminaries to move beyond training professional clergy, arguing that theological education must equip the whole people of God — lawyers, doctors, artists and business people]]></media:title>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Christian Daily International ]]>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Dr. Theresa Lua, General Secretary of the Asia Theological Association, called on seminaries to move beyond training professional clergy, arguing that theological education must equip the whole people of God — lawyers, doctors, artists and business people — to live as disciples in every sector of society. ]]>
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                            <media:title><![CDATA[Dr. Gustavo Crocker, General Superintendent of the Church of the Nazarene, warned that success in one generation can produce spiritual amnesia in the next when intentional discipleship is neglected — a pattern he called the Joshua syndrome.]]></media:title>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Christian Daily International ]]>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Dr. Gustavo Crocker, General Superintendent of the Church of the Nazarene, warned that success in one generation can produce spiritual amnesia in the next when intentional discipleship is neglected — a pattern he called the "Joshua syndrome." ]]>
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                            <media:title><![CDATA[Sharon Croos, Vice President of Asia Region of Compassion International, told conference delegates that externally thriving ministries can mask a deeper failure when leaders prioritize platform over spiritual formation.]]></media:title>
                                                            <media:credit role="author" scheme="urn:ebu">
                                    <![CDATA[ Christian Daily International ]]>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Sharon Croos, Vice President of Asia Region of Compassion International, told conference delegates that externally thriving ministries can mask a deeper failure when leaders prioritize platform over spiritual formation. ]]>
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                                                                            <pubDate>Wed, 10 Jun 2026 08:01:00 -0400</pubDate>
                <description><![CDATA[Theological institutions are producing graduates ill-equipped for real-world ministry, denominational structures risk fossilizing into gatekeeping institutions, and Christian leaders across Asia are growing more exhausted than fruitful — these were among the pointed assessments delivered during the second-day morning panel of the Asia Conference on Church and Mission (ACCM), held in Manila.]]></description>
                <content:encoded><![CDATA[
Theological institutions are producing graduates ill-equipped for real-world ministry, denominational structures risk fossilizing into gatekeeping institutions, and Christian leaders across Asia are growing more exhausted than fruitful — these were among the pointed assessments delivered during the second-day morning panel of the Asia Conference on Church and Mission (ACCM), held in Manila.
The panel, moderated as an interactive session rather than a traditional forum, brought together three voices from distinct streams of Christian life and work: Dr. Theresa Lua, General Secretary of the Asia Theological Association; Dr. Gustavo Crocker, General Superintendent of the Church of the Nazarene; and Sharon Croos, Vice President of Asia Region for Compassion International. Each panelist addressed the conference theme of leadership as discipleship, and after each presentation, delegates broke into table discussions to process and respond to what they had heard.
Seminaries serving academics rather than mission
Lua opened with a challenge directed at theological institutions, including the one she leads. The core problem, she said, is that seminaries have narrowed their focus to training professional clergy — pastors, missionaries, and church workers — while largely neglecting the broader people of God.
"There has been a call for decades to provide theological education for all those people in order to empower them to serve in a wide spectrum of ministries in the church and beyond," Lua said. She described this narrowing as the "academization" of theological education — a drift toward intellectual credentialing that widens the gap between academic institutions and grassroots Christian communities.

Lua argued that the strongest seminaries worldwide are those closely connected to local congregations, designing curriculum around the actual questions and pressures people in those churches face. She cited what she called "whole life discipleship" as the necessary corrective: equipping believers to follow Christ not only in church activities but in every area of their working and public lives — as lawyers, doctors, government servants, artists and business people.
"The call is to see the whole of the people of God live out the whole of their lives under the lordship of Christ for the sake of the wholeness of God's mission for the whole world," Lua said. She added that theological education must become missiological in its orientation, with curriculum shaped by the real challenges churches face in their specific cultural contexts rather than inherited Western frameworks.
Following her presentation, delegates discussed at their tables what practical changes their seminaries or church contexts could implement within the week.
The Joshua syndrome and generational succession
Crocker, speaking from his experience leading what he described as the world's largest Wesleyan denomination, present in 166 nations, reached back to the book of Judges to diagnose what he called the "Joshua syndrome."
He drew from Judges 2:10, where a generation arose that neither knew the Lord nor what he had done for Israel. Joshua and the elders had witnessed God's acts firsthand, Crocker said, but they failed to ensure the next generation knew the Lord personally. The result was idolatry, compromise, and cycles of oppression.

"Success in one generation can lead to spiritual amnesia in the next if we neglect intentional discipleship," Crocker said. He argued this pattern threatens every denomination, movement, and local church today — and is not a relic of ancient history.
He contrasted the Joshua model with Paul's approach in 2 Timothy 2:2, where the apostle charged Timothy to entrust what he had received to reliable people who would in turn teach others. Crocker called this a "seven-generation chain" — from Jesus through the apostles to Paul, Timothy, faithful men, and beyond — and described it as the antidote to the syndrome. He pointed to the ruins of the seven early churches in Turkey as a cautionary illustration: physical structures did not survive, but the principle of generational transmission meant the church of Jesus Christ continued to flourish.
Crocker pressed the assembled leaders on their own accountability, noting that many in the room had been in leadership for more than 30 years. He estimated that the average age of Jesus' disciples was 26 — the same demographic as participants in the Arab Spring and various revolutionary movements — yet many current leaders withhold trust from younger generations until they are middle-aged.
"We went from being groundskeepers to gatekeepers," Crocker said. He drew a distinction between the two: a groundskeeper understands that Jesus builds the church and that the leader's role is to care for it, while a gatekeeper acts as though the church belongs to them. "If I am building the church, it's my church," he warned, "and hell is going to break loose."
Following his remarks, delegates returned to their tables to discuss what would need to change — within their denomination, local church, or sphere of influence — to move from the current state toward genuine generational discipleship.
Activity without intimacy
Croos, the final panelist, challenged leaders to examine not the metrics of their ministries but the spiritual condition of the people those ministries produce. Drawing on his years working across Asia with Compassion International, he identified a pattern he described as movements that remain externally successful while quietly losing their soul.
"The moment can become successful while slowly losing its soul," Croos said. "Performers may attract crowds, but only disciples can transform communities or nations."

He described a scenario familiar to many in the room: growing churches, rising budgets, packed events and strong social media engagement — alongside leaders who are physically active but spiritually depleted. The problem, he argued, is that modern leadership training has taught people how to build platforms without attending to their inner life in Christ.
Croos outlined five dimensions he considers essential to leadership understood as discipleship. The first is abiding — remaining in Christ as the foundation of everything else. "If leaders are not abiding in Christ, leadership eventually becomes performance," he said. The second is character, which he placed above competency as the primary leadership challenge. "The world celebrates gifting, but God develops character," he said, noting that many ministry collapses occur not because of lacking skill but because character failed to grow alongside influence.
The remaining three dimensions he named were multiplication — producing disciple-makers rather than followers; vulnerability — leading from honesty about weakness rather than protecting an image; and sacrifice — choosing others above self as the servant ethic of kingdom leadership. He acknowledged the particular pressure Asian cultural norms place on leaders to project strength and hide struggle, including a conversation he had heard about a senior denominational leader who felt unable to be transparent even with his wife.
Croos closed with a direct question to the room: "Who are people becoming because of your leadership? More dependent on Christ or more dependent on you? More like Jesus or more like the culture around them?"
After his presentation, delegates engaged in a final round of table discussion, identifying one concrete change they would carry back to their national, denominational, or church context.
The Asia Conference on Church & Mission 2026 runs June 9–12 at GCF South Metro in Alabang, Metro Manila, organized by the Asia Evangelical Alliance in partnership with the Philippine Council of Evangelical Churches. The conference carries the theme "Disciple or Die 3.0" and is oriented toward a concrete goal: that by 2033, 20 percent of evangelical churches represented by AEA member alliances across Asia will become disciple-making churches.]]></content:encoded>
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                <title><![CDATA[At ACCM2026, Asia Evangelical Alliance leader warns: Two centuries of evangelism without discipleship have 'cost us a lot']]></title>
                <link>https://www.christiandaily.com/news/at-accm2026-asia-evangelical-alliance-leader-warns-two-centuries-of-evangelism-without-discipleship-have-cost-us-a-lot</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.christiandaily.com/news/at-accm2026-asia-evangelical-alliance-leader-warns-two-centuries-of-evangelism-without-discipleship-have-cost-us-a-lot</guid>
                                                            <dc:creator><![CDATA[CDI Staff]]></dc:creator>
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                            <media:title><![CDATA[Dr. Bambang Budijanto, General Secretary of the Asia Evangelical Alliance, addresses delegates from 25 nations at ACCM 2026 in Manila, arguing that two centuries of evangelism without discipleship have left the Asian church in crisis, June 10, 2026.]]></media:title>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Christian Daily International ]]>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Dr. Bambang Budijanto, General Secretary of the Asia Evangelical Alliance, addresses delegates from 25 nations at ACCM 2026 in Manila, arguing that two centuries of evangelism without discipleship have left the Asian church in crisis, June 10, 2026. ]]>
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                            <media:title><![CDATA[Godfrey Yogarajah (right), Chair of the Asia Evangelical Alliance and the International Council of the World Evangelical Alliance, and Rev. Botrus Mansour (left), Secretary General of the World Evangelical Alliance, pray for Bishop Joel Montes as he recei]]></media:title>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Christian Daily International ]]>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Godfrey Yogarajah (right), Chair of the Asia Evangelical Alliance and the International Council of the World Evangelical Alliance, and Rev. Botrus Mansour (left), Secretary General of the World Evangelical Alliance, pray for Bishop Joel Montes as he receives the first DCAR certificate on behalf of his late father's denomination at ACCM 2026 in Alabang, Metro Manila, June 10, 2026. ]]>
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                                                                            <pubDate>Wed, 10 Jun 2026 07:21:00 -0400</pubDate>
                <description><![CDATA[The General Secretary of the Asia Evangelical Alliance pressed evangelical leaders Tuesday to confront what he called three deep internal fractures keeping the church trapped in an event-driven model, and introduced a continent-wide tracking system to hold congregations accountable for the shift toward intentional disciple-making.]]></description>
                <content:encoded><![CDATA[
The General Secretary of the Asia Evangelical Alliance pressed evangelical leaders Tuesday to confront what he called three deep internal fractures keeping the church trapped in an event-driven model, and introduced a continent-wide tracking system to hold congregations accountable for the shift toward intentional disciple-making.
Dr. Bambang Budijanto opened the second day of the Asia Conference on Church and Mission (ACCM) 2026 at GCF South Metro in Alabang, Metro Manila, with a keynote that moved from diagnosis to action. He unveiled a set of cascading numerical targets, from the continental level down to the individual congregation, and launched a new digital registration and certification platform, which he called DCAR (Disciple-making Church Advancement Record), to track progress against those goals.
The conference, organized by the AEA in partnership with the Philippine Council of Evangelical Churches, has gathered 210 delegates from 25 nations under the banner "Disciple or Die 3.0." Building on two prior gatherings — in Mongolia in 2024 and South Korea in 2025 — organizers have framed Manila as the moment for measurable commitment, not just further discussion.
The three fractures
Budijanto told delegates that despite growing consensus on the importance of discipleship, three internal problems have kept most churches from making the transition.
The first, he said, is a long-standing confusion between urgency and emergency — and he argued it is the most consequential misreading of the Great Commission in the history of the modern Church.
Budijanto's starting point was not a critique of zeal, but a distinction within it. Every genuine revival, every season of spiritual awakening, he observed, carries with it an acute sense of urgency. People encounter Christ and feel, rightly, that there is no time to waste. The problem, he argued, is what churches have done with that urgency over the past two centuries: they have converted it into emergency thinking, and emergency thinking produces a fundamentally different — and far more limited — response.
He illustrated the difference with a medical analogy. When a patient arrives at an emergency room with multiple problems, doctors do not treat everything at once. They perform triage — identifying the single most pressing threat to survival and addressing that, setting everything else aside for later. The goal in an emergency is not restoration; it is stabilization. Keep the patient alive today, and deal with the rest when there is more time.
That logic, Budijanto argued, is exactly what has shaped the dominant model of mission across Asia and much of the world. Faced with billions of people outside the faith, the church looked at the scale of the task, felt the weight of eternity, and made a triage decision: get people to heaven first. Move them from lostness to salvation. Evangelism above all else. Discipleship can come later.
The consequence, he said, has been an approach that stops at the threshold rather than walking people through the door. Converts are made but not formed. Decisions are recorded but not nurtured into durable, reproducing faith. The church fills its pews with people who have prayed a prayer but were never apprenticed to a way of life.
True urgency, Budijanto told the room, does not cut corners — it insists on doing the whole thing now. The Great Commission, he said, is not a triage protocol. It is a comprehensive mandate: go, make disciples, baptize, teach obedience. None of those elements is optional. None is deferred to a second stage. The urgency of the commission should accelerate discipleship, not replace it with something shallower.
"Evangelism without discipleship has cost us a lot," he said.
He was careful not to dismiss evangelism itself — the problem is not sharing the gospel but treating that moment as the finish line. A church consumed by getting people in the door, he suggested, while investing almost nothing in what happens to them afterward, has mistaken the beginning of the journey for its end. After two centuries of emergency-mode mission, the visible result is churches across Asia filled with nominal Christians who have never discipled anyone and are not expected to.
The second fracture is what he called the domestication of discipleship. Based on his own survey, Budijanto said more than 90 percent of discipleship activity takes place inside church buildings and is directed at existing Christians. That, he argued, directly contradicts the scope of the Great Commission. "If discipleship was just for Christians in the church building, the Great Commission should say, 'go to all churches,'" he told the room. "My Bible says go to all people, go to all nations."
The third fracture is the displacement of disciple-making from the church to parachurch organizations. While expressing appreciation for such organizations, Budijanto was clear that the mandate belongs to the local church. "Great Commission is for the church," he said. "Bring it back to the church and strengthen the church."
He drew on the Greek structure of Matthew 28 to reinforce the point, noting that "make disciples" is the sole imperative in the passage — "go," "baptize," and "teach" are all participles subordinate to it. He estimated that fewer than 5 percent of Christians globally are actively discipling others, which means the vast majority are disobeying what he described as the last command Jesus issued before his ascension.
From movement to metrics
Budijanto then introduced a tiered definition of what a disciple-making church, and alliance, would actually look like in practice, offering concrete thresholds at every level of the evangelical ecosystem.
At the congregational level, he proposed that a local church qualifies as a disciple-making church when at least 20 percent of its members are personally discipling others. The figure, he explained, draws on the Pareto principle: 20 percent of a group typically drives 80 percent of its outcomes, meaning that if one in five members is actively discipling, the effect ripples through the rest of the congregation.
He was specific, however, that small group participation does not meet the bar. Citing research from the United States, he noted that 90 percent of small groups produced no disciples at all.
Moving up the structure: a denomination becomes a disciple-making denomination when 30 percent of its local churches meet that 20 percent threshold. A national evangelical alliance becomes a disciple-making alliance when 40 percent of its member denominations achieve that status. And by 2033, the AEA's continental goal is for 50 percent of its national alliance members to qualify as disciple-making alliances.
For the Philippines specifically, Budijanto pointed to the PCEC's 92 member denominations as a baseline for what achieving those thresholds would require. For Indonesia, the figure is 103 denominations.
He also reframed the purpose of the church in terms that pushed back against institutional measures of success. "I'm grateful if your national alliance has a big building," he said. "How many staff, how many members — but the question is how many of them are obeying Christ and discipling others? How many churches in your alliance are discipling others?"
A platform for accountability
To support the movement toward those targets, Budijanto introduced the DCAR platform, an AI-assisted digital registration system available in multiple languages. Pastors attending the conference were encouraged to scan a QR code on cards distributed at the tables, register their congregation, and — if their church already meets the 20 percent threshold — submit a declaration for certification.
Declarations require endorsement from a recognized authority: a national alliance leader or a denominational head who can verify the claim. Once endorsed and approved by AEA, a signed certificate, bearing the signatures of both Budijanto and Rev. Botrus Mansour, Secretary General of the World Evangelical Alliance, is issued to the church.
Budijanto said the first certificate, numbered 0001, would be awarded at the conference. He expressed hope that by the next edition of the gathering, certificate number 5,000 would be awarded, and by 2030 or 2033, the number would reach 100,000.
The platform is also designed to give national alliances a geographic view of where disciple-making churches are concentrated and where gaps remain, allowing organizations with discipleship resources to identify areas of greatest need.
A testimony of transition
Budijanto closed his keynote by describing the story of a Filipino church leader — the late Bishop Herley Montes — whose church had stalled at around 200 to 300 members across multiple church plants. When a mentor asked him how many disciples he had, Montes initially answered with his attendance figure. The mentor pressed him: not attenders — disciples.
"He could not answer," Budijanto said.
After being mentored in disciple-making principles and implementing the transition from an event-based to a disciple-making model, Montes's mother church grew to approximately 4,000 members, with around 500 daughter churches. The first six months of that transition, according to Budijanto's account, saw roughly half the congregation leave — members who wanted to attend services but were unwilling to disciple others. Montes, however, remained committed and ultimately saw abundant fruit as a result.
Montes died in early May 2026, weeks before the conference. His son, Bishop Joel Montes, attended the Manila gathering in his place and received the first DCAR certificate on behalf of the denomination — an organization of 520 local churches, most of which Budijanto described as disciple-making congregations.

The ACCM 2026 conference continues through Thursday, concluding on Friday with a joint session expected to bring together the visiting international delegates and an estimated 1,000 Filipino pastors for a day of intensive engagement on disciple-making practice.]]></content:encoded>
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                <title><![CDATA[At ACCM2026, head of global discipleship movement calls Asian Church to repent, resolve, and realign]]></title>
                <link>https://www.christiandaily.com/news/at-accm2026-head-of-global-discipleship-movement-calls-asian-church-to-repent-resolve-and-realign</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.christiandaily.com/news/at-accm2026-head-of-global-discipleship-movement-calls-asian-church-to-repent-resolve-and-realign</guid>
                                                            <dc:creator><![CDATA[CDI Staff]]></dc:creator>
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                            <media:title><![CDATA[Bishop Efraim Tendero, WEA Global Ambassador and Executive Director of the Galilean Movement, delivers the second keynote address at the Asia Conference on Church & Mission 2026 in Manila, Philippines, June 9, 2026.]]></media:title>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Christian Daily International ]]>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Bishop Efraim Tendero, WEA Global Ambassador and Executive Director of the Galilean Movement, delivers the second keynote address at the Asia Conference on Church & Mission 2026 in Manila, Philippines, June 9, 2026. ]]>
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                                                                            <pubDate>Tue, 09 Jun 2026 13:06:00 -0400</pubDate>
                <description><![CDATA[On the evening of June 9, 2026, as 210 evangelical leaders from 25 nations gathered in Manila, the second keynote address of the Asia Conference on Church & Mission (ACCM) 2026 opened with challenging pictures illustrating church decline and moving towards a call for revival by returning to the Church’s key task of disciple making.]]></description>
                <content:encoded><![CDATA[
On the evening of June 9, 2026, as 210 evangelical leaders from 25 nations gathered in Manila, the second keynote address of the Asia Conference on Church & Mission (ACCM) 2026 opened with challenging pictures illustrating church decline and moving towards a call for revival by returning to the Church’s key task of disciple making.
Bishop Efraim Tendero, former Secretary General of the World Evangelical Alliance and now WEA Global Ambassador and Executive Director of the Galilean Movement, followed the evening session’s theme "Revive Us Again, O Lord," drawn from the prayer of the prophet Habakkuk in chapter 3, verse 2.
He opened with images of six historic churches that were converted to mosques or residential houses. Six buildings, six congregations that had once proclaimed the gospel, now repurposed because the churches died.
"Why did they die?" he asked the room. "Because they did not disciple."
Churches full of leaves, but where is the fruit?
Citing Lifeway Research data from 2024, he noted that in that year alone, 3,800 new churches were planted across the United States — but in the same year, 4,000 closed their doors. More churches were dying than being born. Across two decades of data, the pattern held. And globally, a study by the Joshua Project had found that only 11 percent of the world's population could be counted as committed followers of Christ, with nearly two-thirds still having no personal relationship with Jesus.
"After almost 2,000 years, we have fallen behind and still have much more to do," he said. "Do we say we need a revival today? I think we need a revival today."
Tendero turned to John 15 where Jesus says that true disciples will bear fruit and then compared the passage to the image of the barren fig tree from Matthew 21: Jesus approaching it hungry, finding nothing but leaves, and pronouncing judgment. "Our churches today are full of leaves, full of activities, full of many events, full of many programs," Tendero said. "But Jesus is asking: where's the fruit? Where are the disciples?"
The early church had what today's church has lost
Against that diagnosis, Tendero pointed to the explosive missionary vitality of the first-century church. In Acts 8, when persecution scattered believers from Jerusalem throughout Judea and Samaria, those who were scattered went everywhere preaching the word.
In Acts 19, the apostle Paul, rejected at the synagogue in Ephesus, moved his daily teaching to the Hall of Tyrannus, and kept at it for two years. Some manuscripts of the text note that he taught from eleven in the morning until four in the afternoon each day. The result: the whole province of Asia heard the word of the Lord, and seven churches took root.
"Despite persecution," Tendero said, "the early church spread out rapidly."
He also quoted Tertullian's second-century declaration that Christians had penetrated every level of Roman society: the army, the navy, the marketplace, the palace. They were, in his words, everywhere. "After almost 200 years, they were able to reach almost the entire Roman Empire. In fact, even the persecution of the churches during that time never stopped the Christian church to spread."
It was the early church's fire, Tendero argued, its commitment to making disciples, not merely making attenders, that generated that kind of movement. And it is precisely that fire which today's church, burdened by programs and events, has lost.
Three movements toward revival
Tendero went on to offer a three-part framework for what revival would require of church leaders gathered in Manila.
First: repent of the great omission. Tendero reached into Ephesians 4:11–12, where Paul describes apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers given to the church — and names their primary purpose: to equip the believers for the work of ministry. That equipping, he argued, has been systematically neglected. The result is a church that functions like an army where only two percent of the soldiers know how to shoot, while the rest are spectators.
"We neglect the equipping of believers for the work of the ministry," he said. "Let us repent of this great omission."
Second: resolve to fulfill the Great Commission. Tendero returned to the text of Matthew 28:19–20, building on the grammatical observation Godfrey Yogarajah had made earlier in the evening — that among the verbs in the passage, only one carries the weight of a command. Not "go." Not "baptize." Not "teach." The imperative is "make disciples." Going, baptizing, and teaching are the means; disciple-making is the mandate.
He recalled a statement he had heard from another Asian leader at a gathering two years earlier: that disciple-making is not one of the strategies given by Jesus. It is, rather, the only strategy given by Jesus.
"Let us fulfill the only strategy given by Jesus to his disciples," he said.
Third: realign with the Holy Spirit. Citing Acts 1:8, Tendero pressed on the connection between the Spirit's power and the church's witness. Churches today, he observed, often have power — the power of amplification, production, and institutional momentum — but lack the power to become witnesses for Christ. That boldness, he argued, is the fruit of discipleship, not of organizational capacity alone.
He pointed to Acts 4, where Peter and John, threatened by the authorities and forbidden to preach, returned to the gathered community of believers. The response of that community was not strategic deliberation. It was immediate, instinctive prayer — and the room was shaken, the believers filled with the Holy Spirit, and they continued to speak the word with boldness. When difficulties come, Tendero asked the delegates, what is the church's first instinct? Strategy, or prayer?
Both the World Evangelical Alliance and the Lausanne Movement, he noted, had in recent years identified the greatest gap in global mission as discipleship. "The Holy Spirit is calling the church today to go back to the main thing that Jesus wanted us to do."
Divine authority, divine presence
Tendero closed by returning to Matthew 28, beginning at verse 16. Eleven disciples stood on a mountain in Galilee. They saw the risen Jesus, and some worshiped but others doubted.
Those who choose to worship, to submit to the Lordship of Christ, receive both a command and a promise. The command is singular and non-negotiable: make disciples of all nations. The promise is double: all authority in heaven and earth has been given to Christ, and he will be with his people to the end of the age.
"With the divine authority and the presence of Jesus," he said, "we can fulfill the only plan of Jesus — and that is to make disciples of all nations."
The Asia Conference on Church & Mission 2026 runs June 9–12 at GCF South Metro in Alabang, Metro Manila, organized by the Asia Evangelical Alliance in partnership with the Philippine Council of Evangelical Churches. The conference carries the theme "Disciple or Die 3.0" and is oriented toward a concrete goal: that by 2033, 20 percent of evangelical churches represented by AEA member alliances across Asia will become disciple-making churches.]]></content:encoded>
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                <title><![CDATA[‘Covered in the dust of the rabbi’: at ACCM2026, WEA head emphasizes discipleship happens in community]]></title>
                <link>https://www.christiandaily.com/news/covered-in-the-dust-of-the-rabbi-at-accm2026-wea-head-emphasizes-discipleship-happens-in-community</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.christiandaily.com/news/covered-in-the-dust-of-the-rabbi-at-accm2026-wea-head-emphasizes-discipleship-happens-in-community</guid>
                                                            <dc:creator><![CDATA[CDI Staff]]></dc:creator>
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                            <media:title><![CDATA[If we lose discipleship, we lose the center of our mission. Rev. Botrus Mansour, Secretary General of the World Evangelical Alliance, delivers the keynote address at the opening session of the Asia Conference on Church & Mission 2026, Manila, June 9, 20]]></media:title>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Christian Daily International ]]>
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                                    <![CDATA[ "If we lose discipleship, we lose the center of our mission." Rev. Botrus Mansour, Secretary General of the World Evangelical Alliance, delivers the keynote address at the opening session of the Asia Conference on Church & Mission 2026, Manila, June 9, 2026. ]]>
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                                                                            <pubDate>Tue, 09 Jun 2026 12:20:00 -0400</pubDate>
                <description><![CDATA[On the evening of June 9, 2026, 210 evangelical leaders from 25 nations gathered in Manila for the opening session of the Asia Conference on Church & Mission (ACCM) 2026. Rev. Botrus Mansour, Secretary General of the World Evangelical Alliance, delivered the first keynote address of the conference. His message was primarily a pastoral argument, grounded in ancient Jewish practice, for why discipleship must be done in community — and what the Church loses when it forgets this.]]></description>
                <content:encoded><![CDATA[
On the evening of June 9, 2026, 210 evangelical leaders from 25 nations gathered in Manila for the opening session of the Asia Conference on Church & Mission (ACCM) 2026. Rev. Botrus Mansour, Secretary General of the World Evangelical Alliance, a global fellowship of some 650 million believers in more than 160 countries, delivered the first keynote address of the conference.
His message was primarily a pastoral argument, grounded in ancient Jewish practice, for why discipleship must be done in community — and what the Church loses when it forgets this.
The risk of losing the center
Mansour opened by highlighting the many pressures bearing down on the Church across Asia and the world: rapid social change, the disruption of AI, rising secularism, nationalistic and religious tensions, economic uncertainty.
What is the Church’s response to these challenges? Reading the Bible, dependence on the Holy Spirit, drawing closer to God in prayer — all of these are right answers, he said. But discipleship integrates all of them. It is the center. "If we lose discipleship, we lose the center of our mission."
He noted that churches that stop intentionally making disciples don't collapse overnight. Programs continue, buildings stay full for a while, activities may multiply — but without discipleship, the church slowly loses its transformative power. Echoing earlier remarks from AEA leaders that evening, he underlined the urgency of disciple making: the church's mandate from Christ is non-negotiable.
“Discipleship is done in community”
Rather than giving a comprehensive theology of discipleship, Mansour said he wanted to make just one important point — an element he believes the evangelical world, shaped by individualism and consumerism, is in danger of missing: "Discipleship is done in a community."
Coming to faith is individual, he acknowledged. No one inherits it. No one comes to Jesus as a group. But the tendency to make discipleship itself a purely individual pursuit — a personal Bible plan, a private spiritual formation program — is where the model breaks down. Western consumerism reinforces this, shaping church attenders who come because they like the worship or the preaching, relating to the church as consumers rather than as covenant community.
"We sometimes think that discipleship is only individual," he said. "But it is done as a group of people."
The dust of the Rabbi
To illustrate this point, Mansour reached back into the first-century Jewish world in which Jesus himself was formed.
Every Jewish child began learning the Scriptures by heart from a young age. The most gifted might aspire to become a talmid (תַּלְמִיד), a disciple, of a distinguished rabbi. If accepted, the talmid didn't simply attend the rabbi's lectures. He lived with the teacher. He traveled with him. He followed closely.
The goal wasn't merely to learn the rabbi's teaching. It was to become like the rabbi — to imitate his character, his way of responding to people, his manner of prayer and problem-solving and conflict resolution. "They observed his habits," Mansour said. "They saw how the rabbi prayed. How he treated people. How he responded to challenges. They lived life with him — all of its parts."
There was a blessing that captured this aspiration. People would say to a talmid: May you be covered with the dust of your rabbi. The roads of first-century Judea were unpaved. To be covered in your rabbi's dust meant you had walked so close to him, for so long, that his journey had become yours.
"Maybe today," Mansour said, "we should tell each other: may you be filled with the dust of discipleship — with the dust of the Lord."
Formation of this kind cannot happen at a distance. It requires proximity. It requires presence, Mansour argued.
The goal of discipleship is to be transformed into Christ’s image
Mansour went on to offer three dimensions of what this looks like in practice.
First: the desire to become like Jesus. Access to teaching has never been easier — any sermon, any passage, any preacher, available on demand. But discipleship is not primarily about information.
"It's not that I want only to know what Jesus taught me," Mansour said. "We need to be transformed to be like him." The question for every believer is not what they have learned, but whether they love like him, serve like him, forgive like him, obey like him. Citing Romans 8:29, he named the goal of discipleship as being conformed to the image of Christ.
Second: every disciple needs another disciple. Scripture is full of this pattern — Moses and Joshua, Elijah and Elisha, Paul and Timothy. Paul's instruction in 2 Timothy 2:2 is explicit: what you have heard, entrust to faithful people who will teach others also. "Discipleship is life shared from one believer to another," Mansour said.
He described his own practice when he returns home from his heavy travel schedule: gathering the men of his church for coffee or a meal. "We're not sitting there telling each other, 'Let's open the Bible and you teach me.' But at least when we share fellowship, we hear each one's challenges. We laugh a little bit." That shared presence, that mutual knowing, is essential to discipleship.
We need, he argued, someone who can encourage us when we are discouraged, challenge us when we are drifting, and walk alongside us through the ordinary stretch of life.
Third: disciples grow in circles of fellowship. "Schools have three things: a teacher, a student, and a curriculum," Mansour noted. "New Testament discipleship is different. It has a teacher, a way of life, and resemblance."
The first disciples didn't just attend Jesus' lectures. They watched him pray, watched him minister, watched him respond to the Pharisees' traps, watched how he treated women and the poor and the outcast. "They learned not only from what he taught, but from what he lived."
That kind of formation happens in relationship — in face-to-face circles where you can see one another's expressions, share one another's tears, and actually know each other. He pointed to the first church in Acts, devoted to both teaching and fellowship, as the model.
"You live the life together. This is discipleship. We carry one another's burdens. We become a spiritual family," he said.
Jesus reversed the selection model by going and calling his disciples
Mansour closed with an observation about how Jesus’ approach to making disciples was decisively different. In the ancient system he described, students applied to rabbis. The distinguished teacher accepted the most gifted candidates. The model was selective and hierarchical.
Jesus reversed it entirely. He did not wait for candidates to apply. He went himself. And he did not choose the distinguished, the excellent, or the highly qualified. He chose fishermen. A despised tax collector. Rough people from Galilee.
"If I wanted to start a team for leadership," Mansour said, "I would not go to those types of people." But Jesus did. "The Lord wants everyone. He goes and gets a team. He works through ordinary people."
Discipleship in the way of Jesus is not a program for the gifted or the spiritually advanced, Mansour said. It is the mode in which the whole church — ordinary people — grows together into the likeness of Christ.
"Iron sharpens iron," he said near the close, "and one man sharpens another. That is the life of the community of discipleship. Not at a distance. But in a relationship."
The church flourishes, he argued, when people walk together toward a common goal: when they are becoming, all of them, slowly and in community, like the rabbi they follow. Covered, in the end, in his dust.
The Asia Conference on Church & Mission 2026 runs June 9–12 at GCF South Metro in Alabang, Metro Manila, organized by the Asia Evangelical Alliance in partnership with the Philippine Council of Evangelical Churches. The conference carries the theme "Disciple or Die 3.0" and is oriented toward a concrete goal: that by 2033, 20 percent of evangelical churches represented by AEA member alliances across Asia will become disciple-making churches.]]></content:encoded>
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                <title><![CDATA[Asia Conference on Church & Mission opens in Manila, calling evangelical leaders to 'Disciple or Die 3.0']]></title>
                <link>https://www.christiandaily.com/news/asia-conference-on-church-mission-opens-in-manila-calling-evangelical-leaders-to-disciple-or-die-30</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.christiandaily.com/news/asia-conference-on-church-mission-opens-in-manila-calling-evangelical-leaders-to-disciple-or-die-30</guid>
                                                            <dc:creator><![CDATA[CDI Staff]]></dc:creator>
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                            <media:title><![CDATA[Delegates from 25 nations gather at GCF South Metro in Alabang, Metro Manila, for the opening session of the Asia Conference on Church & Mission 2026, June 9, 2026.]]></media:title>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Christian Daily International ]]>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Delegates from 25 nations gather at GCF South Metro in Alabang, Metro Manila, for the opening session of the Asia Conference on Church & Mission 2026, June 9, 2026. ]]>
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                            <media:title><![CDATA[Filipino performers lead delegates in worship during the opening session of the Asia Conference on Church & Mission 2026 at GCF South Metro in Alabang, Metro Manila, June 9, 2026.]]></media:title>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Christian Daily International ]]>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Filipino performers lead delegates in worship during the opening session of the Asia Conference on Church & Mission 2026 at GCF South Metro in Alabang, Metro Manila, June 9, 2026. ]]>
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                            <media:title><![CDATA[Godfrey Yogarajah, Chairman of the Asia Evangelical Alliance and Chairman of the International Council of the World Evangelical Alliance, delivers the opening remarks at ACCM 2026 in Manila, Philippines, June 9, 2026.]]></media:title>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Christian Daily International ]]>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Godfrey Yogarajah, Chairman of the Asia Evangelical Alliance and Chairman of the International Council of the World Evangelical Alliance, delivers the opening remarks at ACCM 2026 in Manila, Philippines, June 9, 2026. ]]>
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                            <media:title><![CDATA[Dr. Bambang Budijanto, General Secretary of the Asia Evangelical Alliance, addresses delegates at the opening session of ACCM 2026 in Manila, Philippines, June 9, 2026.]]></media:title>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Christian Daily International ]]>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Dr. Bambang Budijanto, General Secretary of the Asia Evangelical Alliance, addresses delegates at the opening session of ACCM 2026 in Manila, Philippines, June 9, 2026. ]]>
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                            <media:title><![CDATA[Bishop Dr. Noel Pantoja, National Director and CEO of the Philippine Council of Evangelical Churches, welcomes participants to the Philippines at the opening session of ACCM 2026 in Manila, June 9, 2026.]]></media:title>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Christian Daily International ]]>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Bishop Dr. Noel Pantoja, National Director and CEO of the Philippine Council of Evangelical Churches, welcomes participants to the Philippines at the opening session of ACCM 2026 in Manila, June 9, 2026. ]]>
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                                                                            <pubDate>Tue, 09 Jun 2026 11:27:00 -0400</pubDate>
                <description><![CDATA[With 210 delegates gathered from 25 nations across Asia and beyond, the Asia Conference on Church & Mission (ACCM) 2026 officially kicked off on Monday evening, June 9, at GCF South Metro in Alabang, Metro Manila.]]></description>
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With 210 delegates gathered from 25 nations across Asia and beyond, the Asia Conference on Church & Mission (ACCM) 2026 officially kicked off on Monday evening, June 9, at GCF South Metro in Alabang, Metro Manila.
Organized by the Asia Evangelical Alliance (AEA) in collaboration with the Philippine Council of Evangelical Churches (PCEC) and hosted by Greenhills Christian Fellowship South Metro, the four-day gathering carries a bold theme alongside a concrete seven-year vision: to usher in a movement of dynamic disciple-making churches across the continent by the year 2033.
The conference follows two previous milestone gatherings convened by the Asia Evangelical Alliance: the AEA's 11th General Assembly in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia in August 2024, held under the banner "Disciple or Die," where Christian leaders from across the region sounded an alarm about the state of discipleship on the continent; and the Asian Evangelical Leadership Forum near Seoul, South Korea in June 2025, convened under the theme "Disciple or Die 2.0," which deepened the strategic conversation around mobilizing leaders for intentional disciple-making.
Manila's gathering marks what organizers are calling "Disciple or Die 3.0" — no longer a time for discussion alone, but for committed, measurable action.

The state of the Church in Asia requires provocation
The opening session, themed "Revive Us Again O Lord" from Habakkuk 3:2, started with an address by Godfrey Yogarajah, Chair of both the Asia Evangelical Alliance and the International Council of the World Evangelical Alliance.
Speaking about the striking theme of the gatherings, Yogarajah acknowledged that the phrase "Disciple or Die" might unsettle some — and argued that it should. The state of the Church in Asia, he said, demands nothing less than provocation. Asia is home to over four billion people, he noted, with vast portions of the continent never having heard the name of Jesus Christ — not for lack of resources, but because the church had drifted from its central mandate.
"Somewhere along the way," he said, "the church stopped making disciples and started making attenders. We filled pews, we built buildings, we ran programs and events, but we forgot the Great Commission."
Yogarajah turned to the text of the Great Commission as recorded in Matthew 28:19, underscoring that the Greek imperative at the sentence's heart is not "go" or "baptize" or "teach" — those are participles, the means — but "disciple." The command is non-negotiable. "We have no right to call ourselves the church of Jesus Christ, if we are not doing the one thing he commanded us to do above all else," he argued.

Referring to the theme "Disciple or Die," Yogarajah said that a church where 80 percent of adult members are consuming rather than reproducing is a church one generation away from decline. A denomination most of whose churches have stopped multiplying disciples is a denomination in crisis, whatever its budget or prayer activity. And a national evangelical alliance with no strategy or accountability for disciple-making has confused coordination with commission.
Set against that diagnosis, Yogarajah spoke about the 2033 Dream: a vision for 50 percent of national evangelical alliances across Asia to become disciple-making alliances — defined as those where 40 percent or more of their member denominations are actively pursuing the mandate; where 30 percent or more of local churches are disciple-making churches; and where, at the congregational level, at least 20 percent of adult members are personally discipling others.
"This is not an impossible number," he said. "It is simply enough yeast to leaven the whole batch."
In practice that would mean one in five church members not merely attending services, but investing: sitting with someone over a meal or a cup of tea, opening Scripture together, walking through life, refusing to let that person stay where they are until they too are walking alongside someone else.
He closed with a prayer echoing the prophet Habakkuk, that God would revive His work through the Church today, so that this generation might not pass without a movement of disciples shaping the continent for Jesus Christ.
From event-based church to disciple-making church
Dr. Bambang Budijanto, General Secretary and CEO of the Asia Evangelical Alliance, reminded delegates about the longer arc of the movement — a ten-year journey that has now reached a decisive inflection point.

Budijanto pointed to 2016, when the AEA's general assembly in Bandung, Indonesia first turned its focused attention to the discipleship crisis. Around that time, research by the Barna Group had been published examining the state of the Great Commission in American churches. The findings were stark: only 20 percent of American Christians were engaged in any kind of discipleship activity.
Budijanto recalled speaking with a researcher afterward who suggested that globally, the figure of those genuinely obeying the Great Commission and making disciples might be even lower — perhaps below 5 percent.
What troubled him most was not the statistic itself, but the institutional non-response. "Four out of five Christians were disregarding the last command of Jesus Christ," he said. "But what was worse was that leaders knew about this and carried on with business as usual — as if nothing had happened. We celebrated Easter, we celebrated Christmas, we celebrated anniversaries, as if everything was fine."
That wake-up moment in 2016 set the AEA on its present course. The Mongolia gathering and the South Korea forum, he noted, addressed definition, concept, and theory. "Disciple or Die 1.0 and 2.0 — they're finished, they're done," he said. Manila is for action.
The concrete goal Budijanto set before the room: by 2033, 20 percent of all evangelical churches represented by AEA member alliances across Asia will become disciple-making churches — defined as congregations where at least 20 percent of members are actively discipling others, not merely attending small groups or seeking their own spiritual formation, but investing in others.
Budijanto noted that the prevailing model of church in most Asian cities is what he calls the "weekly event-based church" — where congregations spend as much as 70 percent of their resources and energy preparing for Sunday services. "How to move from event-based into a movement of disciple-making community," he said, "that's the task." He used the image of a bridge displayed throughout the conference's materials: churches on one side are slowly decaying; the other side is dynamic disciple-making. The responsibility of every leader present, he said, is to help their church cross it.
The final day of the conference, he noted, would bring together the visiting delegates alongside an estimated 1,000 Filipino pastors for a joint intensive day on intentional disciple-making.
The role of the Church as instruments of the gospel
The welcome address on behalf of the hosts was delivered by Bishop Dr. Noel Pantoja, National Director and CEO of the Philippine Council of Evangelical Churches (PCEC). While expressing his appreciation for the privilege of hosting the event in the Philippines, he first highlighted the 7.8-magnitude earthquake that struck the country the previous day.

Pantoja asked delegates to pause and pray — noting that as of the opening session, more than 40 people had been confirmed dead, with hundreds still missing. He reported that the PCEC's Philippine Relief and Development Services was already on the ground conducting rapid assessments, and he called on churches, denominations, and international partners to mobilize in response.
Against that backdrop, Pantoja then pointed to the broader issues the Church faces in the nation.
"As we come together amidst the challenges we are experiencing in the Philippines — not only the disasters, but the social, economic, political, and cultural difficulties — we are reminded of our role as the church of the Lord Jesus Christ in Asia: as instruments of the gospel, advancing God's mission through faithful obedience to our Lord's mandate to make disciples of all nations," he said.
Pantoja spoke to the urgency embedded in the conference's theme. In the PCEC's own journey, he noted, 2025 had brought a deliberate declaration: "This is not business as usual for the church." It requires what they came to call a "discipleship revolution." Now, in Manila, that urgency intensifies under the banner "Disciple or Die."
"If we miss the Lord's design and purpose for the Church," he warned, "we risk losing hope for the world."]]></content:encoded>
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                <title><![CDATA[A judge called them cockroaches. India’s Gen Z took it as a compliment.]]></title>
                <link>https://www.christiandaily.com/news/a-judge-called-them-cockroaches-indias-gen-z-took-it-as-a-compliment</link>
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                                                            <dc:creator><![CDATA[Surinder Kaur]]></dc:creator>
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                            <media:title><![CDATA[A supporter of the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) holds placards featuring the groups logo and calling for the resignation of the Education Minister during a protest against alleged examination paper leaks on June 06, 2026 in New Delhi, India]]></media:title>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Ritesh Shukla/Getty Images ]]>
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                                    <![CDATA[ NEW DELHI, INDIA - JUNE 06: A supporter of the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) holds placards featuring the group's logo and calling for the resignation of the Education Minister during a protest against alleged examination paper leaks on June 06, 2026 in New Delhi, India. The Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) is a viral, Gen Z-led parody movement founded by political communications strategist Abhijeet Dipke, which uses a cockroach as its mascot to mock political dysfunction. ]]>
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                            <media:title><![CDATA[Supporters of the Cockroach Janta Party gather at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi on June 6, 2026]]></media:title>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Surinder Kaur for Christian Daily International ]]>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Supporters of the Cockroach Janta Party gather at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi on June 6, 2026. ]]>
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                                                                            <pubDate>Sun, 07 Jun 2026 11:06:00 -0400</pubDate>
                <description><![CDATA[They arrived waving Indian flags and clutching schoolbooks. Many wore cockroach masks. The placards were satirical; the anger was not. On June 6, crowds gathered at Jantar Mantar as what many commentators are calling India’s first Gen Z political uprising moved from smartphone screens onto a street. Jantan Mantar is New Delhi’s designated public protest zone, historically the gathering point for the country’s largest anti-corruption and farmers’ demonstrations.]]></description>
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They arrived waving Indian flags and clutching schoolbooks. Many wore cockroach masks. The placards were satirical; the anger was not. On June 6, crowds gathered at Jantar Mantar as what many commentators are calling India’s first Gen Z political uprising moved from smartphone screens onto a street. Jantan Mantar is New Delhi’s designated public protest zone, historically the gathering point for the country’s largest anti-corruption and farmers’ demonstrations.
The protest had been organized by the Cockroach Janta Party, a social media movement that did not exist three weeks ago. Delhi Police deployed more than 1,000 personnel across the capital and granted permission for the demonstration from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Six protesters were detained during the day. A police contingent stood outside the home of the movement’s founder in the western state of Maharashtra.
None of that dampened the crowd, which chanted “Dharmendra Pradhan Istifa Do,” Hindi for “step down,” directed at India’s Union Education Minister, a senior BJP leader under whose watch a medical entrance exam paper was leaked and a new school-leaving exam system collapsed in full public view. Another chant expressed a generation’s frustration: “We asked for ‘Make in India,’ you gave us ‘Leak in India.’“
In under three weeks, the Cockroach Janta Party had grown into the largest political movement by Instagram following in India. June 6 was its first test of whether that following would show up in person.

How it started 
The story begins at the Supreme Court on May 15. Remarks attributed to Chief Justice of India Surya Kant, who was presiding over a contempt petition related to fraudulent professional credentials in the legal profession, spread rapidly through Indian social media within hours of the hearing. According to court proceedings cited by The Wire, Al Jazeera, and multiple other outlets, he said: “There are already parasites of society who attack the system and you want to join hands with them? There are youngsters like cockroaches, they don’t get any employment, they don’t have any place in profession. Some of them become media, some of them become social media, some of them become RTI activists [RTI refers to India’s Right to Information law, a citizen’s tool for demanding government records], some of them become other activists, and they start attacking everyone.”
Kant issued a clarification the very next day. He said sections of the media had misquoted him, and that his remarks were aimed solely at individuals entering professions like law using fake or fraudulent degrees, not at unemployed youth generally. “It is totally baseless to suggest that I criticised the youth of our nation,” he said. Young Indians had, by then, already heard enough.
The remarks followed Kant to Britain. On June 4, a student at Birkbeck, University of London, tried to raise them during a lecture the chief justice was delivering. The moderator shut the question off as off topic. Another attendee pressed the point, raising what she called widespread concern among legal observers about the suppression of dissent in India. Videos circulated online. India’s High Commission in London issued a statement condemning the disruption.
A party named after an insult
The day after Kant’s court appearance, Abhijeet Dipke, a 30-year-old political communications strategist from Maharashtra and a recent public relations graduate of Boston University in the United States, posted a question online: What if all the cockroaches come together? Before leaving for Boston, he had worked as a volunteer with the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), a Delhi-based anti-corruption opposition party, reportedly running meme-based digital campaigns during the 2020 state elections.
Thousands responded within hours. Dipke set up a Google form. Within days, more than 350,000 people had signed up. He launched the Cockroach Janta Party, or CJP, on May 16.
The name is a direct satirical echo of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, the BJP. In Hindi, “Bharatiya” means Indian and “Janta” means people, making the BJP the “Indian People’s Party,” the party of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government. The CJP swaps “Indian” for “Cockroach,” producing the “Cockroach People’s Party.” It is not a subtle joke.
Dipke used artificial intelligence to generate a cartoon insect mascot and built a website under the tagline “Voice of the Lazy and Unemployed.” The membership criteria were designed to be absurd: to join the CJP, one needed to be unemployed, lazy, chronically online, and able to “rant professionally.”
Dipke is Dalit, a member of communities historically placed at the lowest rung of India’s caste hierarchy and subjected to centuries of discrimination. When he revealed his identity on social media during the controversy, he faced an immediate wave of casteist abuse online.
A social media following bigger than the party it mocks
The CJP’s Instagram account crossed 10 million followers in under five days, overtaking the BJP’s 9 million on that platform. It has since grown to more than 22 million, surpassing both the BJP and the main opposition Indian National Congress, which has 13 million Instagram followers. The BJP has existed for over 40 years.
Those numbers have a context. India produces more than eight million graduates a year, yet the unemployment rate among them stands at 29 percent, nine times higher than for those who never attended school. More than a quarter of India’s population belongs to Gen Z. Many young Indians felt they had been dismissed as “cockroaches” by the country’s top judge.
The CJP’s original X account was withheld inside India. According to a senior government official quoted by The Indian Express, the move was attributed to the Intelligence Bureau raising national security concerns. The party launched a replacement account called @Cockroachisback. Dipke claimed the government had also taken down the CJP’s website, on which 600,000 people had signed a petition demanding Pradhan’s resignation. Dipke said his Instagram account had been hacked and that Meta had removed the CJP’s backup account.
“Why is the government so scared of cockroaches?” Dipke posted. “You can’t get rid of us that easily.”
The personal cost became visible quickly. Dipke shared screenshots of WhatsApp messages threatening to have him killed in the United States if he did not close the CJP down. One video message showed an unidentified man claiming to know the locations of his family members and demanding he join the BJP instead. Media also reported him receiving a separate message offering money to shut the account, or face death. His parents told reporters they feared for their son’s safety.
For every account disabled, new ones emerged across states. As The Print observed, the party behaved like the ‘mythical Hydra’: cut one head, two appeared. BJP leaders then shifted approach, describing the movement as anti-national activity, according to The Week, with some attempting to link its followers to Pakistan. Dipke released account analytics showing 94.7 percent of followers were from India, most aged 17 to 28. The data, he acknowledged, was the party’s own and could not be independently verified.
The exam system that broke a generation’s trust
Behind the cockroach humor is a specific, documented crisis.
The National Eligibility cum Entrance Test, known as NEET, is the single nationwide gateway to medical colleges. This year’s exam, held on May 3 for 2.27 million students, was cancelled on May 12 after investigators found the physics paper had been leaked beforehand. The Central Bureau of Investigation arrested the headmistress of a Pune school who had recalled the physics questions from memory, shared them with a student, and then burned her handwritten notes. The exam has been rescheduled to June 21. Reports of student suicides followed news of the leak.
India’s Central Board of Secondary Education added a second crisis. It introduced a new digital evaluation system this year, called On-Screen Marking (OSM), for its school-leaving examinations, and simultaneously abolished post-result verification of marks. What unraveled afterward was documented not by regulators or journalists, but by three teenagers.
Vedant Shrivastava, 17, applied for a re-evaluated copy of his physics answer sheet and received a stranger’s paper. He posted the evidence on X and faced a coordinated smear campaign of accounts calling him a “Pakistani”. The board eventually provided his correct sheet.
Nisarga Adhikary, 19, an ethical hacker who had sat the same board exams, found a hardcoded master password sitting in the OSM portal’s publicly accessible code in February, reported it to India’s Computer Emergency Response Team without satisfactory response, and published his findings in May.
Sarthak Sidhant, 18, audited the CBSE tender and found 15 alleged discrepancies suggesting the contract favored a specific vendor. He published his analysis, then testified before the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Education. Two senior CBSE officials were subsequently transferred. Opposition leader Rahul Gandhi met Sidhant publicly and posted the photograph on social media.
The national pass rate this year fell to 85.20 percent, the lowest in seven years. Dharmendra Pradhan presided over all of it.
The CJP’s stated demand for June 6 was Pradhan’s resignation. The party’s wider manifesto goes further. It demands 50 percent women’s representation in Parliament and Cabinet, greater independence for India’s media, and a ban on a practice that draws particular attention given the events that started this movement: the custom of rewarding retiring Supreme Court judges with appointed seats in India’s upper house of Parliament, a patronage arrangement critics say compromises judicial independence.
Building toward the street
As Dipke prepared to return from Boston, the CJP announced three spokespersons on June 3: investigative journalist Saurav Das as chief spokesperson, political researcher and filmmaker Vijeta Dahiya, and Ashutosh Ranka, a former McKinsey consultant and graduate of IIT Kanpur and the London School of Economics.
“There has to be accountability in the system,” Das told a press conference in New Delhi. “The system has collected so much rot. The people have been very vocal.”
Sonam Wangchuk, the Ladakh activist and Ramon Magsaysay Award winner who spent six months in detention in 2025 after protests demanding regional autonomy turned deadly, had already declared himself an “honorary cockroach” and pledged to join the June 6 demonstration. At Jantar Mantar, crowds chanted that he should replace Pradhan. Wangchuk called the minister’s resignation “only the beginning.”
Before flying home, Dipke posted: “My friends and family are scared that I could get arrested at the airport. But how long can I fear jail? This country belongs not just to one party, but to all of us.” He walked through New Delhi arrivals carrying a copy of the autobiography of B.R. Ambedkar, himself Dalit and the jurist who drafted India’s Constitution. He was not arrested. Delhi Police handed him a written permission order for the protest.
At Jantar Mantar he addressed the crowd directly: “Let us tell them we will no longer be afraid of their politics of fear. Stop the politics of religion! Stop the politics of ‘Hindu-Muslim’!” He also spoke of his mother: “In this country, every mother feels this fear when their child raises their voice against this government.”
When the demonstration ended, CJP spokesperson Ashutosh Ranka told reporters the government had seven days: Pradhan resigns, or protests spread across India. Rohit Pawar of the Nationalist Congress Party (Sharadchandra Pawar), a regional opposition grouping, and Sagarika Ghose of the Trinamool Congress, which governs West Bengal and sits in the national opposition, have both backed the campaign.
A generation tired of watching
South Asia has recent precedent. Gen Z uprisings overturned governments in Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Bangladesh in recent years. India, home to more young people than any country on earth, has watched those from a distance.
“We have to understand that five years ago nobody was ready to speak up against Modi or the government. The times are changing,” Dipke told the Associated Press.
What June 6 demonstrated is that a generation that formed around memes and satirical posts can also organize enough to occupy a street.]]></content:encoded>
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                <title><![CDATA[‘Cow vigilantes’ get Catholics in prayer arrested in India]]></title>
                <link>https://www.christiandaily.com/news/cow-vigilantes-get-catholics-in-prayer-arrested-in-india</link>
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                                                            <dc:creator><![CDATA[Morning Star News]]></dc:creator>
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                            <media:title><![CDATA[Hindu nationalists disrupt prayer service at grotto in Kalinjara village, Rajasthan, India.]]></media:title>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Morning Star News screenshot from video ]]>
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                                    <![CDATA[ Hindu nationalists disrupt prayer service at grotto in Kalinjara village, Rajasthan, India. ]]>
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                                                                            <pubDate>Thu, 04 Jun 2026 12:21:00 -0400</pubDate>
                <description><![CDATA[Catholics in India arrested in May under Rajasthan’s new “anti-conversion law” are still trying to obtain bail from the state High Court after lower courts denied their petitions, sources said.]]></description>
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Catholics in India arrested in May under Rajasthan’s new “anti-conversion law” are still trying to obtain bail from the state High Court after lower courts denied their petitions, sources said.
Their arrests followed a disruption of their Mass by “cow vigilantes” – self-styled protectors of cows regarded as sacred in Hinduism – in Kalinjara village, Kushalgarh Sub-Division, Banswara District on May 1. About a dozen vigilantes disrupted and filmed 80 Catholics gathered at a Marian grotto on private property for the traditional nine days of prayer at about 5:30 p.m.
“The vigilantes said we had gathered to perform mass conversion and blamed us for possessing beef [cow meat],” said Reetu Rawat, whose husband and father-in-law were among 14 Catholics named in a First Information Report (FIR). A Protestant Christian was also charged for a total of 15 named persons, and the FIR was registered against 100 unnamed people.
Six of the nine Catholics arrested under Rajasthan state's new “anti-conversion law” are awaiting a bail decision from the state High Court after subsequent denials from the lower courts, while 11 others named in the FIR but yet not arrested are in hiding and seeking interim bail, sources said.
“This is a real bad news for Christians,” said Mukesh Rawat, a Protestant Christian in the nearby village of Kushalgarh. “People in the village are living in constant fear, as they too can be arrested anytime of the day or night, and their names can be placed under the 100 unnamed list in the FIR.”
The 15 named and the 100 unnamed persons on May 2 were charged under the anti-conversion law and other laws with various crimes, including attempted murder.
“There were women and children besides men attending the celebration of the Eucharist, and they [the intruders] started to film by walking all over the place and disrupting the service,” Reetu Rawat told Morning Star News.
Kalinjara is a majority-Catholic, tribal village where Catholicism has been practiced for more than a century. Besides some Protestant families, the remaining villagers follow tribal religion.
Those attending the prayer service questioned the vigilantes, demanding an explanation for the disruption. The vigilantes accused them of “converting people” – which is not a crime in India – and later in the FIR charged them with “allurement.” Rajasthan’s “anti-conversion law” criminalizes “force, allurement or fraudulent” conversion.
A video on social media shows the Catholics, in response to allegations of forced conversions, telling the vigilantes to ask those present if any of them is not a Catholic or “if anybody is coaxed to attend the service.” The vigilantes continue to record video and admit that “we will film you and frame you.”
When the worshippers request the vigilantes to report their grievances and doubts to police, the intruders respond that it was the police that sent them, the video shows.
As the argument went on for about half an hour, one of the Catholics noticed a vigilante hiding a black dagger in the folds of his garment.
“When he confronted the vigilante, the vigilante slapped him,” Reetu Rawat said.
The Rev. Balveer Rana, district president of Masih Sewa Samiti, a Christian community service and welfare committee of Banswara, said those attending the Mass defended themselves in the ensuing altercation.
“Fearing he might use the dagger to attack the community, they restrained the vigilantes from attacking them,” Rana told Morning Star News. “There was a scuffle between the two groups. The vigilante began to hit the Catholics, and in self-defense they too retaliated.”
Reetu Rawat said there was a little blood on the forehead of the vigilante.
The vigilantes immediately fled, and police arrived within a few minutes.
“It was quite evident that the police were stationed somewhere nearby, and if the vigilantes are to be believed, they confessed that they had come with the full knowledge of the police,” the Rev. Arvind Amliyar, priest of Bandaria Parish in Kushalgarh told Morning Star News. “Kalinjara does not have a parish building, and so the congregants attend Mass with the Bandaria Parish in Kushalgarh and on some occasions gather at the grotto in the village for special prayers.”
Mukesh Rawat, who lives four miles from Kalinjara, said his Catholic mother, father, relatives and friend were visiting him that day for the inauguration of his house that had undergone renovation. It was a full day program from 9 in the morning till 6 in the evening. About 150 people were invited. 
His father, brother and sister-in-law left early to join the 6 p.m. Mass in the village, while his mother stayed back. 
While Mukesh Rawat was in his own house when the scuffle between the Hindu nationalist cow vigilantes and the Catholics broke out, his father Anil Rawat, his brother and sister-in-law were at the grotto at the time. 
Police arriving during the altercation immediately arrested Mukesh Rawat’s 67-year-old father, who is a retired school principal, and Catholics identified only as Aatish, Devchand and Nilesh and took them to the Kalinjara Police Station.
“Though they were arrested around 6 in the evening,” Mukesh Rawat said, “an FIR was registered after midnight 12:17 a.m. on May 2 against 14 named Catholics, me – a Protestant – and 100 unnamed people.”
They were charged under FIR No. 154 under the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita [BNSS] 2023 for general rioting, punishable by up to two years in prison, a fine or both; involvement of weapons, punishable by up to five years in prison; wrongful restraint, punishable by up to one month in prison, a fine or both; attempted murder, punishable by up to 10 years in prison and a fine; intentional insult and provoking to breach peace; and unlawful assembly. Under the Rajasthan Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion of Religion Act, 2025, Section 3, which prohibits attempting to convert through force, coercion, undue influence, misrepresentation, allurement, fraudulent means, or marriage; and under Section 5, which requires mandatory advance declarations for religious conversion.
“We were all gathered for the Mass, how can they book us for carrying weapons?” said Reetu Rawat, whose husband is named in the FIR.
Amliyar added, “We did not breach peace, but it was the cow vigilantes who breached our peace and cause havoc.”
Besides Mukesh Rawat, who was not even near the scene but in his own house four miles away, also named in the FIR was Premchand, who was in the Civil Hospital Banswada donating blood at the time and has documentation to prove it. A person identified in the FIR only as Kishor, son of Josaf – the owner of the property where the grotto is built – is deaf and mute. Another identified only as Rajesh was also named, though he is a non-Christian tribal who was a mere bystander.
“I have documents to prove that I had a huge program in my house, with several guests as witnesses to the event,” Mukesh Rawat said. “The tent house and the caterers who fed the guests are all evidences to my absence at the grotto.”
Police returned on the night of May 3-4 and arrested five others under the “unnamed” category: Nitesh, 30, son of Premchand; Dilip Haliya, 34; Vardesh Babu, 26; Praveen Shamji, 33; and Pankaj Damore, 27.
“Police came in the night at 2 a.m. and barged into homes, picked people who were fast asleep with their families and arrested them,” said a source who requested anonymity.
He also said that police got two men on May 2 around 6 p.m. and made them stand near the grotto to video record their testimony. Witnessed by several bystanders, the two men were recorded falsely saying that they were offered money to convert to Christianity.
Reetu Rawat said the two men were not present on the day of incident.
“The several videos shot of May 1 clearly show the vigilantes and all of us present there,” Reetu Rawat told Morning Star News. “The videos also show the kind of conversations both the sides had.”
The nine Catholics arrested were sent to jail and have remained there. Of the 15 “named people” in the FIR, 11 have been in hiding since May 2.
Police are searching for the others in and around the village to arrest them.
“For fear of getting arrested, some are spending their nights on trees, others in the forest amidst the threat of being attacked by wild animals,” said Mukesh Rawat. “It has become very, very difficult for us to stay away from home each day, and it seems that this torture is not coming to an end.”
Catholic leaders applied for bail for six of the people.
“We thought on the basis of the bail orders of these six, we will apply for the other three and an interim bail for those who are on the run for the fear of being arrested,” said Amliyar.
Their bail, however, was rejected in the District Court and then in the Sessions Court and is now pending in the High Court.
“With every hearing, the date is being extended,” Amliyar said. “Their last hearing was on May 26, but a next date of June 8 has been given to them.”
A source informed Morning Star News that police presented the same video they recorded as testimony of “allurement” near the grotto as evidence, and thus the judge did not grant them bail. The attorney then requested the further date.
Hindu groups called for a complete shutdown of the entire Kushalgarh block on May 4 and carried out a protest rally shouting slogans and demanding that all the Catholics be arrested for butchering a cow and carrying out forced conversion.
Rajasthan Chief Minister Bhajanlal Sharma visited the Kushalgarh area on May 20, and Christians fear his visit was designed to pressure authorities to strictly prosecute those attending the Mass.
Tribals have had cordial relationships with each other, said social activist Varji Rawat, who lives a mile away from Kalinjara village.
“Two in a family are Christ followers, two in the same family are Shiva followers, and another two are animists. Yet they live peacefully under the same roof,” Varji Rawat told Morning Star News. “It is a tribals’ choice to have faith on whom ever he/she wants to. It’s a personal choice, like some tribals choose to worship Hindu gods [though they are not Hindus], they are not stopped from putting their faith in Hinduism.”
He objected to villagers questioning worshippers’ faith.
“These people have been practicing Catholicism for more than 100 years; some of them are fourth-generation Catholics, but they are being treated as if they are recent converts,” he said.
India ranked 12th on Open Doors’ 2026 World Watch List of the countries where it is most difficult to be a Christian, up from 31st in 2013 before Prime Minister Narendra Modi came to power.
(Story modified on June 5 to reflect corrected information from sources.)]]></content:encoded>
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                <title><![CDATA[Philippine evangelical leaders sign covenant of  unity amid political divisions]]></title>
                <link>https://www.christiandaily.com/news/philippine-evangelical-leaders-sign-covenant-of-unity-amid-political-divisions</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.christiandaily.com/news/philippine-evangelical-leaders-sign-covenant-of-unity-amid-political-divisions</guid>
                                                            <dc:creator><![CDATA[Ellen Gabisay]]></dc:creator>
                                                                                                                            <media:content  url="https://www.christiandaily.com/media/original/img/0/47/4704.png">
                            <media:title><![CDATA[Philippine evangelical leaders sign covenant of  unity amid political divisions]]></media:title>
                                                            <media:credit role="author" scheme="urn:ebu">
                                    <![CDATA[ PCEC Facebook Post ]]>
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                                                                                        <media:description type="plain">
                                    <![CDATA[ Philippine Council of Evangelical Churches (PCEC) Board of Trustees. ]]>
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                                                                            <pubDate>Wed, 03 Jun 2026 05:49:00 -0400</pubDate>
                <description><![CDATA[Evangelical leaders in the Philippines have signed a “Covenant of Unity,” pledging to prioritize Christ-centered discipleship, avoid partisan divisions and maintain unity despite differing political views.]]></description>
                <content:encoded><![CDATA[
Evangelical leaders in the Philippines have signed a “Covenant of Unity,” pledging to prioritize Christ-centered discipleship, avoid partisan divisions and maintain unity despite differing political views.
The covenant, released by the Philippine Council of Evangelical Churches (PCEC), commits pastors, church leaders and affiliated organizations to keep discipleship at the center of ministry decisions, partnerships and public communications rather than partisan political engagement.
In a statement accompanying the covenant, church leaders said political disagreements can become sources of division and distraction if not approached with wisdom, humility and a commitment to biblical unity.
Signatories also affirmed that Christian unity does not require uniformity of opinion. The document states that believers should continue to honor one another despite political disagreements and maintain Christian fellowship. 
The covenant calls on church leaders to avoid slander, divisive speech, misrepresentation and assumptions about the motives of others. Instead, it encourages humility, grace, respectful dialogue and charitable engagement rooted in biblical principles.
Another provision states that sermons, official church statements and institutional communications should remain focused on Scripture, discipleship and the Gospel rather than partisan endorsements, attacks or political campaigning.
While acknowledging that church leaders may hold personal political views, the covenant clarifies that such opinions should be identified as personal and not presented as official positions of the PCEC or the churches and organizations they represent.
The agreement also encourages churches to create respectful and pastoral spaces for political discussions, pursue collaborative ministry efforts across congregations and regions, and strengthen accountability through honesty, transparency, reconciliation and restoration.
According to the PCEC, the covenant reflects a broader effort to preserve unity within the evangelical community while advancing its mission of discipling the nation and bearing witness to the Gospel amid political differences.
The covenant emphasizes that the church’s primary calling is to make disciples of the Filipino nation in obedience to the Great Commission and cites Jesus’ prayer in John 17:21 that believers “may all be one” so that the world may believe.
The document was shared publicly through the PCEC’s official Facebook page as a declaration of the organization’s commitment to Christ-centered unity and cooperative ministry among evangelical churches in the Philippines.]]></content:encoded>
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                <title><![CDATA[Korean churches unite in prayer for reunification of North and South, release of detained missionaries]]></title>
                <link>https://www.christiandaily.com/news/korean-churches-unite-in-prayer-for-reunification-of-north-and-south-release-of-detained-missionaries</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.christiandaily.com/news/korean-churches-unite-in-prayer-for-reunification-of-north-and-south-release-of-detained-missionaries</guid>
                                                            <dc:creator><![CDATA[CDI Staff]]></dc:creator>
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                            <media:title><![CDATA[(From left) Rev. Yeom Eui-seop (Jinkwang Church); Rev. Kang Hyun-joong, missionary with Jesus Disciples Mission, Indonesia; Dr. Heo Moon-young, standing representative of Peace Korea; Missionary Kim Hak-song, Peace Korea associate missionary; and Kim Jeon]]></media:title>
                                                            <media:credit role="author" scheme="urn:ebu">
                                    <![CDATA[ Peace Korea ]]>
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                                    <![CDATA[ (From left) Rev. Yeom Eui-seop (Jinkwang Church); Rev. Kang Hyun-joong, missionary with Jesus Disciples Mission, Indonesia; Dr. Heo Moon-young, standing representative of Peace Korea; Missionary Kim Hak-song, Peace Korea associate missionary; and Kim Jeong-sam, family representative of detained Missionary Kim Jeong-wook. ]]>
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                                                    </media:content>
                                                                            <pubDate>Wed, 03 Jun 2026 02:26:00 -0400</pubDate>
                <description><![CDATA[Dozens of churches and Christian organizations across South Korea and several countries will join a 21-day prayer campaign beginning June 5, focusing on the release of three missionaries held in North Korea and what organizers call "Gospel reunification" of the Korean Peninsula, according to Christian Daily Korea.]]></description>
                <content:encoded><![CDATA[
Dozens of churches and Christian organizations across South Korea and several countries will join a 21-day prayer campaign beginning June 5, focusing on the release of three missionaries held in North Korea and what organizers call "Gospel reunification" of the Korean Peninsula.
The 20th Seire Peace Prayer Meeting, organized by Peace Korea, will run through June 25 and include 48 participating churches and organizations from South Korea as well as congregations in Germany, Russia, France, the United States and Indonesia, according to Christian Daily Korea.
Three missionaries — Kim Jeong-wook, Kim Guk-gi and Choi Chun-gil — remain detained in North Korea. Organizers told Christian Daily Korea that churches have prayed continuously for their release for a decade. Since the gathering began interceding for detained missionaries in 2017, five individuals have been released, according to Peace Korea.
At a press briefing in Seoul, organizers were joined by Missionary Kim Moses, who was previously detained in North Korea and has since been repatriated, and by Kim Jeong-sam, a family representative of Missionary Kim Jeong-wook, who remains held.
This year's meeting carries the theme "See, I Am Doing a New Thing," drawn from Isaiah 43:19.
The Seire gathering, which began in 2007, is modeled on the Old Testament account of Daniel praying for his people over 21 days. Organizers describe it as a cross-denominational Korean church prayer movement. Over the years, it has marked a series of significant anniversaries connected to Korean church and national history, including the 70th anniversary of the Korean War in 2020 and the 70th anniversary of the armistice agreement in 2023.
"We hope that the Korean church will point the world toward the Gospel, and that the Korean Peninsula will become one within the Gospel," organizers said, according to Christian Daily Korea.
A companion prayer book, structured around the 21-day format, includes devotionals from pastors of 21 churches alongside biographical columns exploring martyrdom and faith in biblical, Korean church and world church history. Special prayer topics include the return of the three detained missionaries, the unity of the Korean church and the restoration of Christian communities in North Korea.
Organizers said they hope to see "reconciliation and unity between the churches of South and North Korea," and called on Christians to pray for the roughly 25 million people of North Korea who, they said, remain without open access to the Gospel.
Daily worship recordings will be available via YouTube from June 5 through June 25. Further information is available through Peace Korea's website at peacekorea.org.]]></content:encoded>
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