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U.S. is last hope for persecuted Mayflower Church

U.S. is last hope for persecuted Mayflower Church


U.S. is last hope for persecuted Mayflower Church

A last-minute rescue effort is underway for a group of Christians that fled China and is on the edge of being returned to the government that drove it away.

As AFN has reported, the 63-member Mayflower Church fled China to South Korea in 2019, but they were not allowed to stay there. So lately, the church members have been secretly housed in Thailand, where roughly 20 police officers recently came and arrested them.

Jonathan Dingler of ChinaAid says they were required to pay a small fine before being loaded up again.

"At that point, we were under the understanding that they would just go back to where they were staying. But unfortunately, that was not true," he laments. "After they got their passports, they were taken to Bangkok, and on the way there, there were fears that they would be repatriated, that they would be sent back to China at the Bangkok International Airport."

Currently, the church members are being held in the Bangkok immigration prison and could possibly be shipped back into the hands of China's communist government.

"They will most certainly be charged with crimes that do not apply," Dingler predicts. "They will be probably tortured; their kids will be separated from them. It's a very bleak outcome for them if they return to China."

So ChinaAid and several members of the U.S. Congress are working to make sure that they get humanitarian parole and that they get sent to the U.S. Dingler says time is of the essence.