May edition of The Voice of the Martyrs Newsletter to focus on religious liberty issues in Canada

This week the Erin, Adele, and I were putting the final touches on our May edition of The Voice of the Martyrs Newsletter and I have to say that I am very excited about it.  We still have a few things to polish up on Monday, but we are almost ready to send it to the designer.  Working on our monthly magazine is one of the favourite parts of my job.  I love to see how it all comes together each month, even though there are inevitably glitches and moments of panic, especially when I invariably want to make some last minute changes. This month has been no different.  If anything, it’s been more of a challenge than usual as we will be doing something a little different from what we normally do. In May, we are focusing on religious freedom issues in Canada, something we have only done once before in the history of our ministry.  Over the past couple of years, though, a number of issues have come up that cause us concern and so we felt that we needed to address them. This is not to equate Canadian religious freedom issues with those facing Christians in places like Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, or India.  But we do Canadian Christians no favour either by ignoring these domestic concerns and failing to equip them to deal with them in a biblical fashion, drawing upon the experience of our family in restricted and hostile nations.

I am very pleased that my friend Janet Epp Buckingham agreed to write the feature article.  I respect her immensely.  She has taught me a lot over the years I have known her and her article is insightful.  Also included is my monthly biblical study, this time focusing on Philippians 2 entitled “Rights: Real but not grasped” in which I try to bring a biblical perspective to how we are to view our personal rights as Christians.   We are making a couple of new exciting resources available to our readers for the first time in May including Ezra Levant’s new bestselling book Shakedown: How Our Government is Undermining Democracy in the Name of Human Rights and Thomas Johnson’s Human Rights: A Christian Primer. We’ll also be giving away up to 10 copies (upon request) of the helpful booklet, Christians and Civil Disobedience to anyone who makes a book order through our newsletter in May.   For the past few years, VOMC has also been supporting a number of pensioners in Ukraine who were imprisoned and exiled for their faith during the Soviet regime.  Many are desperately poor and sick in their old age because of what they went through. We will be publishing a number of thank you letters that they have written expressing their gratitude for how Canadian Christians continue to remember and honour their sacrifice for Christ through this support.

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