(Worthy News) - A Christian family was driven into the jungle by tribal animists in India last week after Hindu nationalists instigated local animists against a pastor and destroyed his home.
Pastor Lalu Kirade of Bilood village in Madhya Pradesh state was accosted on March 9 by a drunken man referred to only as Laxman, who interrogated him for his faith and for not participating in the Hindu festivities of Holi.
“My next-door neighbor, his wife, his three sons, other men from the village who knew me since my birth, joined hands with Laxman and broke my house and demanded that I be excommunicated,” Kirade explained to Morning Star News.
After beating the pastor's elderly parents and small children and demolishing and looting their home, the Christians fled into the jungle, where they made a makeshift shelter in which they are currently trying to eke out a living with support from the Evangelical Fellowship of India (EFI).
“Laxman told me that he is willing to help me build my house and restore everything back to normal, but I must renounce Christ and stop praying to Jesus,” Kirade said. “I told him that you broke my house because it was a worship place of the living God, but what you do not know is that wherever I build my house, God’s worship place will be established there. So, I told him that I will not renounce Christ.”
Pastor Kirade said that he wept before the Lord for hours on behalf of his children, whom he worries will catch a cold in the rugged environment.
India is number 10 on Open Doors USA's World Watch List for the persecution of Christians under Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party, whose religious nationalist agenda has set loose mobs of Hindu zealots that harass Christians with impunity.