Sunday School and no license. Sounds like real trouble. Wonder when the libs in America will want to enact this law. How many churches in America still teach pc heresy and need state help to correct the problem? From BosNewsLife.
Russia Closing Down Methodist Church
Sunday, 13 April 2008By BosNewsLife News Center in Budapest
MOSCOW/BUDAPEST (BosNewsLife)– Members of a United Methodist congregation in Russia were without a church Sunday, April 13, after authorities closed it for running a Sunday School without government permission, the latest in a series of police raids targeting Christian education, Christians said.
The congregation in the western city of Smolensk was closed down by a local court March 24, on charges of “educational activity in a Sunday school without a corresponding license,” the church’s Pastor Aleksandr Vtorov said in a statement released by the news service of religious rights group Forum 18.
Investigation into the congregation and the school, attended by some four children, started after a complaint from local Russian Orthodox bishop Ignati Punin.
The complaint originally focused on a planned missionary college, but later the Sunday School became the target of a police investigation.
CONGREGATION LIQUIDATION
In published remarks, C. Vladimir Ryakhovsky of the Moscow-based Slavic Centre for Law and Justice said he fears the Methodist congregation’s liquidation increases the threat to other religious education.
“Almost every religious organization has a Sunday School…”I don’t know of one that has a separate education license. Do they intend to liquidate them all?” Elsewhere in Russia, adult religious education without a license has already led to raids and enforced closures. Forum 18 said. Human right group
