Ethiopia’s northern Tigray State is considering adopting a new law that would restrict Christian activities to within official church compounds, rendering illegalthe activities of smaller churches that do not own their own buildings and gather in houses.
The law, if passed, would most affect Christians from outside the Ethiopian Orthodox Church because any church that wanted to have its own land would need to prove that it had at least 6,000 members – a greater number than the totalpopulation of non-Orthodox Christians in the state.
The lawwould also ban Christians from evangelising outside of church compounds. Localchurch leaders have raised their concerns about the lawwith the state government but have yet to receive a reply. A similar lawwas recently ratified in neighbouring Amhara State which, togetherwith Tigray, is home to most members of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, and localchurch leaders fear other states willcopy the move.
Over the past decade Ethiopia’s religious map has changed considerably. For centuries Ethiopia, which some argue was the first nation in the world to accept Christianity, consisted of an Ethiopian Orthodox Christian core, a Sunni Muslim zone in the east, and an animist/indigenous-faith area in the south and the lowland reaches of the farwest. In the last 10 years, indigenous faiths have diminished, in most cases yielding to Protestant Christianity, which is said to be the fastest-growing religious group in Ethiopia. This is making the country home to “one of the fastest growing evangelical churches in the world”, wrote theologian Allan Anderson in 2014.
Some former members of the Orthodox Church have also become Protestants, creating tension between the two communities.
While Ethiopia’s increasingly controlling government seeks to further restrict religious institutions, to prevent dissent, Christians also face oppression from family members and the localcommunity in other parts of the country, for instance in the Afar and Somaliregions where ethnicity and Islam are interconnected. (World Watch Monitor)
For more news follow us at www.lifeandwork.org