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c. 2016 Religion News Service

(RNS) A church and mosque in a French camp for migrants and refugees have been destroyed, despite authorities’ reportedly promising not to demolish the places of worship.

Bulldozers moved into the camp in Calais, the departure point for ferries to Great Britain, on Monday (February 1) and tore down the mosque, which reportedly drew up to 300 worshippers each day, and St. Michael’s Church, a makeshift chapel serving mainly Orthodox Ethiopian Christians.

(The Christian Science Monitor) Two prominent Chinese Protestant pastors were arrested as part of what appears to be the toughest crackdown on civil society since Mao Zedong’s Cul­tural Revolution of the 1960s.

Gu Yuese, head of China’s largest evan­gelical congregation, the Chongyi Church in Hangzhou, and his wife, Zhou Lianmei, a Bible teacher, were detained in late January and held incommunicado. Zhou was later released, according to China Aid, a religious freedom advocacy organization.

Alongside its popular television shows, Netflix recently began offering series by four pastors.

“I believe if Jesus were on planet Earth today in the flesh, he’d be on Netflix,” said Ed Young, one of the pastors, who spearheaded the effort to get Christian talks into the online video streaming service. “We’re always working to try to market to the people who normally would not go to church.”