Police in a northern Indian state have booked two people for allegedly trying to sell off a more than a century-old Protestant church by posing as its office bearers. Police said Jordan Masih and Mary Wilson were arrested after they tried to sell the 129-year-old Golaknath Memorial Church in Punjab state’s Jalandhar city, posing as the treasurer and member of the church.Sanwar Bhatti, president of the United Church of Northern India Trust Association, which claims to hold a power of attorney for the church, told UCA News on Sept. 10 that they learnt about the fraud last week and complained to the police. Jalandhar police said the duo struck a deal with a prospective buyer and collected a token amount of 500,000 rupees (some $5,000) in June. “The duo is absconding, and police are trying to trace them,” Bhatti said. Pastor Nanook Bhatti, a Jalandhar-based Christian leader, told UCA News that media reports of the incident have shocked the local Christian community. “It is a very unfortunate thing to happen. But it is also a lesson to all Christians that they must be very alert about their church properties,” he said. Church sources said the church, located in the Mission Compound in Jalandhar city, is spread over 0.5 hectares of land and is valued at 1.5 billion Indian rupees (some US$19 million). The church also has historic significance as it is named after Golaknath Chatterjee, a Bengali Hindu convert to Christianity who renounced his home and became the first Indian missionary in the Punjab around 1830. Before him, the region was served by foreign missionaries. Pastor Amit Prakash, secretary of the Chandigarh diocese of the Church of North India (CNI), thanked the police for timely action as Masih was trying to register the deal at the land records office. Jordan Masih “is not a member of the CNI Church. He has a history of fraudulently selling church properties,” Prakash said. He said several people, like Masih, are targeting the properties owned by the CNI. “They pretend to be members and try to forge documents to make fraudulent deals,” the pastor added. Punjab is a Sikh-majority state where the rate of conversion to Christianity has been on the rise in recent decades, causing concern among the state’s Sikhs. Sikh preachers allege that Christians now constitute 10 percent of the northern state’s 28 million people.