Amid the myriad tragedies that continue in Haiti, the story of these Baptist missionaries from the New Life Children’s Refuge is a sick tragedy on it’s own. The Baptist church group went to Haiti to save the souls of children from the deeply Catholic country.

Kidnappers for Jesus? A group of Evangelical church folk from Idaho, led by personal shopper Laura Silsby, Executive Director and founder of New Life Children Refuge, descended upon the earthquake ravaged country of Haiti last week, to snatch and grab 100 orphans off of the streets and from orphanages. The evangelical do-gooders became alleged kidnappers and child traffickers when they loaded the Haitian “orphans” on a bus and attempted to take them across the border to the Dominican Republic to the New Life Refuge orphanage, with no documents from the Haitian government. Well, the so-called orphanage turns out to be a 45-room hotel at Cabarete, a beach resort in the Dominican Republic that the group was renting.

The “missionaries” believe that they were sent by God and that perhaps somehow their faith put them above the law: read on>>

Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive says the ten Americans, although they may have had good intentions, are “kidnappers.” “God is the one who called us to come here and we just really believed that this was his purpose,” said Carla Thompson, one of the group’s arrested members.

The misguided Baptist church group, with their proselytizing “Great Commission” to save the souls of children from a deeply Catholic country, has also exposed the controversial practices of evangelical missionaries, who seek to religiously convert the recipients of their charity. The two Idaho Baptist churches supporting the mission, Central Valley Baptist Church and the East Side Baptist Church, made their intentions clear. Read on…

I believe that every person on this planet should have the right to worship (or not) in any way they see fit, but the actions of these misguided people clearly illustrate the dangers of religious zealotry. I sourced this post from this article at Chattah Box and I highly recommend clicking through and reading the whole thing. It is well sourced and digs deep into just how this entire thing started and more background on the people involved — most notably, it’s leader Laura Silsby, who appears to have a long history of bad judgment.

This entry was posted on zaterdag, februari 6th, 2010 at 1:54 am and is filed under JdeW, American In The News, Misdaad, Religie, Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.