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Library on a CD
Wycliffe Bible Translators has compiled LinguaLinks Library of around 100 online books. Topics include anthropology, language learning, linguistics, literacy, sociolinguistics, consulting, Scripture use, and translation. Also included are cookbooks, advice for when there is no doctor or dentist, and how to use solar power. The set is available through Mission Training International. Browse at www.mti.org. E-mail: [email protected]

Blessing those who curse them
Richard Howell, general secretary of the Evangelical Fellowship of India, shared at the General Assembly of the World Evangelical Fellowship in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, that since January’s massive earthquake, persecuted believers have come to the aid of their tormentors. Advocates International reports that Howell said a Christian group came from Dang to Kutch, where the earthquake hit, to serve them and say, “‘Look, you came and persecuted us, but we are here to help you, to show the love of Christ…. We don’t hate you.’ That’s what Christ has taught us, and that’s what we are doing over here. That, I believe, is a very powerful witness of the church.”

CEF releases the Wonder Devotional Book
The newest addition to Child Evangelism Fellowship’s Wonder Book series of children’s discipleship materials is a collection of 365 daily adventures with God for children age 8 and up, written by a team of writers, editors, theologians and designers. The devotions move the child from the study of God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, to victory, God’s Word and witnessing. From there the focus turns to worshiping, obeying, living for and trusting God. The reader finishes with studies on taking a stand and foundational beliefs. The book invites its readers to join the CEF Mailbox Club by sending in correspondence review activities for each chapter. For more information, e-mail [email protected].

More prisoners in Europe
Some 120 prison chaplains meeting for the International Prison Chaplains Association’s pan-European conference in Holland this May were alarmed at the growth of prison populations in many European countries, reports ENI. “The chaplains … called on European governments to prioritize prisoner resettlement schemes, which provide advice, training and support to prepare offenders for their return to the community after release from prison.”

Bringing the Church to Europeans
Greater Europe Mission aims to plant a church in every community in greater Europe by 2020, reports Mission Network News. GEM President Tedd Noble says prayer, research and people are key to reaching the goal. “We desperately need people to have that passion on their heart to come work alongside of us, both from North America and from Europe,” he tells MNN.

India: a hot mission field
In northern India, May temperatures soared to June levels, an indigenous missionary told Christian Aid Mission, fueling fears that the heat will be as bad as it was there in 1999 when the mercury hit 121 and 2,000 people died in one Indian state. The missionary said that summer is the best time to share the gospel in remote villages and hold open-air meetings. That’s because monsoons hit after summer ends, making road travel difficult and crossing rivers impossible, let alone staging outdoor gatherings. Still, the heat makes it difficult for missionaries to endure, especially in houses that don’t have fans to fight the heat-and the mosquitos.

Healing families in Taiwan
The divorce rate in this tiny island nation is six times what it was 30 years ago, reports Taiwan Church News. Annually, more than 50,000 couples split. To foment healthy marriages, the Taipei Christian Academy and seven Presbyterian churches in Northeast Taiwan are conducting a marital communications workshop. This promotes re-acquaintance between husbands and wives, practical communications skills, cooperation and revived marriages. “Many people lack the ability to know and select what is best,” says academy director Chang Kun-ti. “In marriage there is a basic need for mutuality.”

AIDS, Africa and African-American believers
The US Agency for International Development predicts that the world will have 40 million AIDS orphans by 2010. In Africa alone, AIDS kills more than 6,000 people daily. Some 11,000 others contract it daily. Some 25 million in Sub-Saharan Africa have the disease and last year almost 2.5 million died of the disease, which has orphaned at least 10 million children. The medical relief agency Doctors Without Borders reports that treating the killer illness costs from $10,000 to $15,000 per patient per year in the United States. Most Africans earn less than $2 a day. Charisma magazine reports that Boston pastor Eugene Rivers, founder of the Pan African Charismatic Evangelical Congress, is urging Western churches, especially African American Christians, to do more to fight AIDS. “We were sold into slavery,” he says. “Now God’s calling us to go back and save those who sold us.” Goals of Rivers’ organization include lobbying for more funding, building homes for the millions of AIDS orphans and joining groups working in Africa, such as Detroit’s Great Faith Ministries, which leads a network of 200 African pastors being trained to fight AIDS with resources and pastoral counseling. Rivers says that Africans want to partner with African Americans. “They said, ‘Look, you black American churches have access and influence. Please use it to plead the cause of the orphan and the widow.'”

Youth crime wave
Young people in 2000 committed a tenth of all crimes in Russia-around 178,000 crimes- says the country’s prosecutor general’s office. Crime was up especially in prostitution and pornography, reports InSight. The reasons the office cited: more unsupervised children and more children abandoned by parents. Sexual exploitation of children is rampant in Russia, where the age of consent is 14. “This means many young people are subject to sexual predators and the authorities can seldom bring charges,” InSight reports.

Islam spreads in Austria
While Austria’s public school classrooms still must have a crucifix hanging on a wall, many children in the nation’s schools are Muslim, reports the New York Times. Austrians see their own culture threatened by this wave of immigrants who aren’t Catholic. Anti-immigrant political parties are gaining popularity among native Austrians. “Pressed as to what their culture is, many conservative European politicians invoke Christianity, but Muslims are an ever-larger presence,” the Times reports. “The question then is: can Europe’s self-image evident in that class crucifix accommodate Islam? With the economic approaches of left and right converging at the center, such debate about national culture has increasingly come to define the divide between conservative and liberal thinking in Europe.”

Costa Rica’s in vitro controversy
After Costa Rica’s supreme court ruling that outlawed in vitro fertilization-the only country in the world to do so- six infertile couples plan to appeal to the Inter-American Human Rights Court, reports the Tico Times. The couples’ attorney claims the ruling violates the American Human Rights Convention. “The court argues that in vitro fertilization violates human life because the technique which involves combining egg and sperm in a petri dish to literally bring about fertilization ‘in the glass’ creates embryos with little chance of survival. The ruling was fundamentally grounded in the principle that life begins at conception,” the newspaper reports. The couples’ lawyer tells the Tico Times, “Of course an embryo has rights, but it is not a ‘super person’ whose rights supersede the rights of the parents. The right to life is not absolute; it is relative. The [court’s] ruling harms people’s right to reproduce, to produce life,” he says. As for whether life begins at conception or at 14 days, which the newspaper said many doctors believe, the lawyer says “that issue is not relevant” because of the other fundamental human-rights issues at stake.

Christians targeted in Laos
Laos is a prime example of aggressive, active persecution by the government, reports the World Evangelical Fellowship’s Religious Liberty Commission. In the last several years, Protestants in Laos have been targeted with particular severity. In 1999, the secretive communist regime declared Christianity “the number one enemy of the state.” The Laotian government appears to believe that Protestant Christianity is an “imperialist foreign religion” that is backed by political interests in the West, particularly the United States. In August 2000, WEF obtained several copies of the official form being used by Lao Communist authorities to force Christian converts to renounce Christianity and swear allegiance to the state. The penalty for refusal is an indeterminate time of harsh imprisonment under extremely difficult and squalid conditions. Last year there were about 60 Christian prisoners in Laos; the current confirmed number is 31. While this is an improvement in numbers, it is not an improvement in the condition of the believers or their relationship to the government, as the report details.

Officials told the believers that being a Christian is illegal because “Christianity is a lying religion; it violates Lao custom and the Bible teaches deception.” They also accused Christians of being enemies of the state and warned them that it was a serious violation of the law if they did not sign forms recanting their faith. When Christians asked about the guarantee of religious freedom in the constitution they were told that such protection only applied to Lao religions, i.e. Buddhism and Phi (animism).

Christians in Luang Prabang province have said that they cannot visit friends or travel freely because the secret police often follow them. “Even when we are in our homes, they are trying to find something against us. If they see us traveling around anywhere, they will arrest us,” one man said. According to WEF’s correspondent, a substantial minority of Laos’ Hmong hill people are Christian.

TB still kills
The World Health Organization says that about 8.4 million people in the world developed tuberculosis in 1999. The hardest hit of the world’s nations were in Sub-Saharan Africa, where AIDS weakens people and makes them more subject to contracting the disease. Without treatment, 70 percent of those who come down with TB die, but DOTS, a treatment that uses two cheap antibiotics for up to eight months, has proven cost-effective in fighting the illness. “The entire populations of Cambodia, Kenya, Peru, Tanzania and Uganda have access to DOTS,” The Economist reports. In March, the WHO started The Global TB Drug Facility to help poor countries buy needed medicines to fight it.

Haiti’s horrible prisons
Haitian jails provide prisoners no shelter from the elements. When the head of the prison system there asked officials to spend $4.5 million to put tin roofs on cells, he was laughed at, reports the Miami Herald. “They said to me, ‘You want to spend $4 million on prisoners and we can’t even feed our people,'” the prison head tells the Herald. “Here prisoners are trash. You don’t look at trash, you don’t care about trash.” Inmates are routinely beaten and often spend months or years without knowing what the charges against them are. Children share prison space with adults. Haiti has no bail system. That’s why only about a quarter of the 3,000 men in Haiti’s jails have been convicted of crimes. Only 23 of the 167 women imprisoned and 14 of 79 minors in detention have been convicted. “Like other prisons around the country, it is a place to put people until they either die or finally see a judge,” the Herald reports.

“That can sometimes take years because of a lack of judges and lawyers and because the administrative system is so lax that files often are lost. There is no attempt to rehabilitate prisoners. It is not uncommon for an inmate to spend five years in jail because there is no such thing as bail. The offense for which the inmate is jailed might ultimately merit only a 30-day sentence.” Male prisoners who are too sick to treat are put out in the prison’s courtyard to die, often alone. An inmate told the Herald, “This is not hell. This is the sewers of hell.” In 1999, the International Justice Mission, a Christian international human rights organization, sent a legal team to Haiti to gain release of around a dozen prisoners who had been illegally detained.

Peruvians need work
Many working-class people in Peru eke out livings farming small land parcels or selling items such as popcorn and peanuts because there’s not enough work for unskilled laborers who clean houses, wash clothes or do other menial tasks. After scandals forced Alberto Fujimori from the presidency, Peru’s congress placed Valentín Paniagua at the helm of the government until Peru’s next leader, Alejandro Toledo, elected in June, takes office. Toledo, an indigenous economist, had been a shoe-shiner before getting his education, ultimately graduating from Stanford University with a Ph.D. Half the country’s 25 million people are poor, and 75 percent of working-age Peruvians are underemployed, meaning that they work part-time for meager wages, reports the Associated Press. Peru’s economy has been stagnant for more than three years, and it has worsened since November when high-level government officials were implicated in a videotaped corruption scandal.

Praying to win
Liberia’s president is pulling out the stops to ensure that his country goes to the 2002 World Cup soccer tournament in Korea and Japan. To vanquish rival Nigeria, Charles Taylor invoked the Almighty, P.M. News of Lagos reports. He ordered his government religious adviser to organize daily prayer sessions. To counter their opponent’s efforts, Nigeria’s Football Supporters Club organized prayer sessions as well.

Persecution watch: Sweden
A proposed law in Sweden may make it illegal to speak out against homosexuality, and Pentecostal church leaders are fighting it, reports Charisma News Service. While defamatory speech against gays already is prosecutable in Sweden, gay-rights advocates are seeking to define gays as a group that needs special protection from discrimination. Jews, gypsies and women already have that status. “According to one government legal expert, the bill could criminalize the reading of certain Bible verses in public,” Charisma reports. “The target of the proposal is Swedish-Nazi smear campaigns against homosexuals, but its broader effect could open the door to criminalizing the religious views of Christian, Jews and Muslims.” A Swedish Pentecostal pastor says that while the bill probably won’t get enough votes in Parliament to pass, its defeat is not a given because the gay lobby is very influential. “The country’s three largest denominations – Lutheran, Roman Catholic and Congregationalist – have expressed support for the bill, along with ‘gay Christian’ pressure groups,” Charisma reports.

Medical Missionaries Needed
Between AIDS, cholera and other diseases, hospitals and their staff in Zambia are having a hard time meeting the needs of suffering people, reports Mission Network News. An SIM missionary nurse told the network that while doctors are in short supply, nurses are even more desperately needed. The mission hospital in Mukinge serves tribal people in rural areas. MNN reports that more than 20 percent of all Zambians are HIV-positive, and every third child is an AIDS orphan. There are 1.7 million HIV orphans in Zambia. More than half of all hospital patients in Zambia are HIV-positive.

Ghana’s Ga Want Quiet During the Harvest
The churches in Ghana have clashed with the traditional council of the Gas, an animist ethnic group in Ghana that makes up 10 percent of its 20 million people, reports ChristianityToday.com’s Weblog. In late spring the council imposes a month-long ban on drumming, loud music and noise-making to prepare for a festival to usher in a bumper harvest and good catch for fishermen. “This has resulted in clashes between the churches and the council who are determined to enforce the ban, and they have attacked churches that play instruments during their worship services, resulting in injury and damage to church property,” reports Advocates International. “Some churches have defied the ban stating that it is a violation of their constitutional right of freedom of worship.” An AI-affiliated lawyer witnessed one such traditionalist attack of a church in late May while driving to church. “The fighting spilled over on to a main road with the church members having defended themselves,” the lawyer tells AI. Police arrested some traditionalist attackers and took them into custody. “The particular church that was attacked was barely a minute’s drive from the police station.” His church decided not to play instruments during the festival to avoid attacks. “There has been extensive damage to a particular church, and the vehicles of members.” Weblog quotes a Ghana Charismatic Churches Association leader: “We will not be intimidated by the threat from the Ga Traditional Council. We have the right to worship and we would go ahead. It is up to the security authorities to ensure that a group of people under the name of tradition do not infringe our constitutional right to worship freely.”

July 6, 2001