Actress Roma Downey and producer Mark Burnett have launched a relief fund to aid Christians displaced by rampaging jihadists in the Middle East.
In partnership with Jordan’s King Abdullah, a Muslim, the husband and wife are raising money to help embattled Iraqi and Syrian Christians survive the coming winter,
reports Christianity Today.
They have established a "Cradle of Christianity Fund" with a goal of raising $25 million to help Christians and members of other minority groups targeted by ISIS, the terror group that now controls much of Syria and Iraq.
Burnett and Downey have donated $1 million to the fund, which will be administered by the Institute for Global Engagement, a Virginia-based group that works to educate people about religious freedom issues.
"Imagine that you have these people who have been driven from their homes, and managed to survive an impossibly difficult journey, only to die of exposure in the cold, as the severity of winter is about to arrive," Downey said in describing the urgency of the situation,
Breitbart reports.
United Nations officials recently estimated that in Iraq alone, close to 2.8 million people need food assistance and that another 800,000 urgently need emergency shelter.
Johnnie Moore, a former Liberty University chaplain who currently serves as chief of staff for Burnett and Downey, visited Iraqi Kurdistan last month.
"Having fled their home with nothing but the clothes on their backs, and having seen unspeakable things, these brothers and sisters in Christ are severely traumatized, mostly without shelter," Moore wrote.
He found displaced Christians "everywhere: on the streets, in abandoned buildings, in canvas tents that are not water-proof or winterized."
In addition to providing emergency food and shelter to the Islamists' victims, supporters of the project eventually hope to establish what they call a "Documentation of Truth" center to record the atrocities that have taken place.
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