Compassion International is “weeks away from permanently withdrawing” from India, according to its testimony this week to a Congressional committee.“What we’re experiencing is an unprecedented, highly coordinated, deliberate and systematic attack intended to drive us out,” the Christian charity’s lead attorney Stephen Oakley told the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Tuesday.Compassion began working in 1968 in India, where today its 580 Indian-staffed development centers care for more than 145,000 children. That’s about 8 percent of the 1.9 million children assisted by Compassion worldwide, but also more than any other of the 25 countries where it works.“This is a huge turning point in Compassion’s history,” US communications director Tim Glenn told Mission Network News. “We’re looking at a clear 8 to 9 percent of our ministry possibly being shut down all at once.”Compassion sends about $50 million per year in humanitarian aid to India. That makes it the “single largest contributor of aid for children living in extreme poverty” in India, said committee chairman Ed Royce.Yet, he said, Compassion “could be shut down because of Indian government regulators” in mere weeks.The restrictions started in 2011, when India changed its Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA) so that it could regulate NGOs it disagrees with philosophically, according to the committee testimony. The move was seen by many as another step toward Hindu nationalism since 2014, when the country elected as its prime minister Narendra Modi—the only person once banned by the United States because of alleged religious freedom violations.Since then, attacks on Christians and Muslims have increased. India is now No. 17 on Open Doors’ list of countries where it’s hardest to be a Christian, up from No. 31 in 2013.from: http://www.christianitytoday.com/gleanings/2016/december/compassion-international-child-sponsorship-india-christmas.html
_________________SI Moderator - Greg Gordon
This is a misleading title. The real issue is Indian government regulations enacted back in 2011, not the children. The children may be effected but the regulations will effect all NGOs not philosophically aligned with the Hindu nationalist agenda. There are many other groups who have entered the country as NGOs that will get the boot, too.Isn't Compassion International the group that advertises on TV all the time? They take money from anyone. You see them everywhere. At the bottom of their homepage are the media outlets it has been featured on.- Forbes- Christianity Today- USA Today- The Christian Post- Yahoo! News- National Geographic- Focus on the Family- The Huffington PostI take that this is a call for action to pray for authentic works in India? Perhaps India will go through a closing to Western influence and experience revival like all the other countries where the Church had to go underground. It would be wonderful to see the Gospel preached with power and conviction by a people not afraid to suffer.Come Lord Jesus!
Brother,MOST larger indian mission groups run as NGO's on the outside. So this has actually affected the majority of missionaries in India. It is a big deal.Compassion seems to me as a legitimate Christian mission sharing the love of Jesus with children. Not sure what would make them un-authentic in your mind, they are doing the basic thing of loving the poor and giving food and the basic gospel to children.A good brother who works with missions movements amongst persecuted countries and underground house churches said to me that most of the money they have sent over the years had to be done illegally (in the standards of the countries they worked in) to get the money to underground workers in those countries. Some mission groups have done this in India in more sensitive works that have been towards unreached peoples in heavily hindu areas of India. Just thought to clarify and share a deeper persecutive.
The title is still misleading. The children would not lose sponsorship - the children will lose access to the individuals who transfer the wealth to them. The sponsorship will not disappear, the individuals will not automatically stop paying to support the children.An accurate title would be "Indian Law Threatens to Cut Off Christian Aid Work." I understand the issue of moving funds to Christians in persecuted countries and areas. I also understand the challenges of moving funds into highly corrupt countries. India is certainly the latter.The issue of inauthenticity comes from the fact that among other things they proudly align themselves with institutions that defame the name of Christ, deny the Word of God and teach people to hate God. There is a notable article similarly published by Christianity Today but dating back to 1998 which was written in response to an "expose" conducted by The Chicago Tribune titled "The Miracle Merchants: Myths of Child Sponsorship."From "Nonprofits: Myth of the Needy Child," (1998)
But the agencies that attempt to change their marketing are likely to have less money to work with overall. Ken Waters, former public relations director for World Vision, says that if a child-sponsorship organization would reposition itself as a development agency, it could "expect as much as a 50 percent loss of income over a two- or three-year period."
