Bishop Mar Awa Royel
As war and persecution in the Middle East threaten the existence of ancient Christian communities, a prominent church leader from the Assyrian Church of the East visited our nation’s capital this week to deliver an urgent plea for help.
Bishop Mar Awa Royel leads the Assyrian Church of the East Diocese of California. In Washington, D.C., he warned that immediate action must be taken to help Middle Eastern Christians before it’s too late.
“We have a systematic destruction of the ancient Assyrians, if you will, through the artifacts, and also the modern Assyrians, modern Assyrian Christians,” Bishop Royel said.
“And this leads us to believe that this is a plan that is very calculated, very systematic and I would add that, it could be defined as genocide,” he said.
Bishop Royel suggested that without strong, decisive action from the West, Assyrian Christians–one of the oldest Christian communities in the world–could face annihilation. He said what Middle East Christians are facing today is martyrdom truly defined.
“We are going back to the early Church, what we read about in the book of Acts, to the martyrdom of Saint Stephen who was the first martyr,” he warned.
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SOURCE: CBN News
Gary Lane
