Christian communities continue humanitarian aid and development programs in Pakistan despite attacks

It is Sunday morning. A group of Christians gather close to one of the big mosques in Peshawar, Pakistan. They are here to attend a service that is about to start at St. John’s Cathedral.

What sets this scene apart from so many other similar scenes all over the world on this Sunday morning is that more than twenty heavily armed police officers stand guard over the century-old church and its occupants.

A new set of rules has come into being here in Pakistan. Christians in this country now have to learn to cope with a new reality. The guards had been in place at churches all over the country even before an attack earlier this week (Sunday, October 28) on a group of worshippers. 17 members of a congregation who regularly worshipped together in the town of Bahawalpur in southern Punjab were killed in this attack when gunmen opened fire on the people inside the church.

The director of Church World Service (CWS) in Pakistan and Afghanistan, Marvin Parvez, says that although the area had experienced sectarian violence in the past, Christians had never been attacked in this way. He adds that Bahawalpur has a very small Christian population.

The attack has left the Christian community in a state of grief and fear. "We are perceived as westerners by some people", says Dennis Thomas, a Pakistani Catholic working for ACT member Church World Service (CWS) in the north of the country. Before Sunday's attack, people protesting the US-led strikes against Afghanistan had targeted Christians sporadically. In two separate incidents, a church in Karachi was attacked, as was a Christian community in Quetta when the residents' houses were pelted with stones. The situation had however calmed down and many Christians like Dennis Thomas had hoped that it would remain this way.

Yet, in spite of current tensions in Pakistan, Humphrey Peters, who is responsible for education in the Peshawar diocese of the Church of Pakistan, quietly states that Christians in Pakistan are now better off than in the past. He points out that the government respects the work of the church and even funded the much-needed renovation of St. John’s Cathedral in Peshawar.

Peters also points out that the church hospitals and the schools are considered by many to be among the best in Pakistan. The majority of the teachers and pupils are of the Muslim faith. 3000 Muslims and 2000 Christians attend the twenty educational church institutions in the North Western Frontier Province (NWFP) and education is one of the main focal points of the Church of Pakistan. Peters expresses his concern that an estimated 70 Percent of the population of Pakistan is illiterate -- a figure that is among the highest in the world. Many children only get to study the Koran and receive no other form of education.

Some 80 percent of the members of the Church of Pakistan in Peshawar, the second largest Protestant denomination in Pakistan after the Presbyterian Church, are desperately poor, living in the poorest parts of their villages and towns.

The diocese of Peshawar of the Church of Pakistan and the National Council of Churches (NCCP) have both participated in the support of refugees who have fled Afghanistan for Pakistan, as well as internally displaced people (IDPs) of Afghanistan.

NCCP has already donated 2000 blankets, which CWS is distributing. The Church of Pakistan is ready to take over the health care of 10,000 Afghan refugees in one of the new campsites being set up by UNHCR and NGOs at the border to Afghanistan in expectation of an influx of refugees.