Articles on Other Religious Topics

According to Baptist Press, a Christian couple in Azoue'-Cada, a village in the west African country, found two pythons in their bed twice in one week. Each time they released the snakes unharmed. But when the pythons were found a third consecutive day, the couple called Francois, the church leader, for advice.

The snakes, each about three feet long, weren't large enough to crush an adult. But the couple suspected local fetish priests, angered by the Christians refusal to join others in worshiping pythons as gods, had another target in mind: Their newborn child.

Francois killed both pythons and threw them outside.

"If he had secretly buried them, the fetishists wouldn't have gotten so upset," said Southern Baptist missionary Jeff Hale, who lives in the nearby town of Allada. "But then we wouldn't have seen the power of God at work, either."

Enraged fetishists tore down the sign at Azoue'-Cada Baptist Church and publicly demanded that Francois reimburse them for the snakes. Failure to do so would mean his death and destruction of the church building, they threatened.

Christians reported the incident to the local police, who replied that they would convene a meeting if the issue couldn't be settled at the village level. Members of the Baptist Church spent an entire day at the Azoue'-Cada chief's house waiting to negotiate, but the fetishists never came. So the police scheduled a joint session in the government office in November. Government officials told the fetishists they had no right to do the things they had been doing to the Christians or say the things they had been saying. They were ordered to return the church sign and warned any additional trouble would result in police coming to the village to enforce the ruling.

Upon their return to their village, the Christians went to the mayor's office for authorization to publicly show Christian films. The mayor, who had in the past favored the fetishists, told them to write an authorization and that he would sign it.

More than 250 people showed up Nov. 20 in the remote village, located in the bush more than four miles from the nearest road. After screening "The Return of Jesus to Nazareth," the group were halfway through "Le Combat," a film about a confrontation between fetishism and Christianity in Ivory Coast, when the generator broke down.

Another screening was scheduled.

As the church celebrated what God had done during 1994, they noted that that the congregation had more than doubled, and interest in the gospel was so great that requests were made for more gospel materials to be sent to the village.