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Dealing with root issues
Development does not happen in a vacuum, writes Jaisankar Sarma of World Vision in the relief organization’s journal of human development, Global Future. Communities have their worldviews, belief systems and values. Sarma writes that these, in turn, govern their actions, practices and responses to development work. “My experiences as a development practitioner tell me that I must agree,” he writes. “Working with local communities in countries across Southeast Asia quickly brought home to me the fact that development activity divorced from the transformational needs of people (changes that are intangible: values, attitudes, relationships, etc.) will not be effective in the long term. Sustainable changes to the practices or behavior patterns of people are not possible without addressing belief systems and worldviews underlying these practices.”

Kazak Scriptures now available
For the first time, Kazakstanis can read the New Testament and 16 Old Testament books in their own language. Demand for the holy book is great, says The Bible League’s director of ministries for the former Soviet Union. Religion Today reports that the project took 10 years to complete.

Pomp and circumstance
The Russian American Christian University, which opened in Moscow in 1995, has just graduated its first class in a bilingual commencement for 19 students, reports Religion Today. Graduates speak fluent English and are computer-literate. RACU’s vice president for academic affairs says graduates are trained in democratic and free-market values and are “morally and ethically grounded in Judeo-Christian tradition.” Student and faculty religions range from Orthodox to Baptist to Messianic Jew.

Grow or shrink
In England, evangelism is the difference between churches with dwindling attendance and those that grow, reports The Economist. London’s evangelism-oriented Anglican churches have upped their attendance by 18 percent and Baptists by 11 percent. The Alpha Course (www.alphana. org) has made its mark on church attendance there. In London alone, 7,000 Alpha attendees join a church every year. Course officials report about a quarter of the 1 million who have attended Alpha have become Christians.

Rescuing Hindu temple prostitutes
In India’s state of Karnataka, two Christian women are reaching thousands of deva-dasis, or temple prostitutes, reports Religion Today. Hindu parents often take their daughters who have come of age to Hindu temples where as a “religious duty” they serve as prostitutes for the priests and for males who worship a Hindu goddess. The women are vulnerable to AIDS, other diseases and starvation. The practice persists although it is illegal. A ministry called Rahab’s Trust ministers to devadasis through tracts, prayer and Bible studies, as well as education, health care, literacy and other areas.

Food for the Western Sahara
Stop Hunger Now, a Raleigh, NC-based international hunger relief organization, has been asked to respond to an impending hunger crisis in the Western Sahara desert, the organization reports in a press release. The World Food Program of the United Nations will no longer be able to provide the basic food allotment to Sahrawi refugees after the end of June. More than 180,000 are facing a life-threatening food shortage. The Sahrawi Red Crescent Society president’s appeal to Stop Hunger Now head Ray Buchanan states that aid is needed immediately. “There are almost 200,000 refugees in the middle of the Sahara desert that have no known source of food after the end of the month,” Buchanan said. “There is no way the world can stand by and let this happen. Every one of us has a responsibility to prevent a single Sahrawi child from starving.”

Spiritual food for kids
More than 38 million children in 35 countries will receive a copy of the four gospels this year, and most will bring it home to show their parents, brothers and sisters, reports Religion Today. The Ft. Lauderdale, Fla.-based Book of Hope uses gospel accounts to explain the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus. It aims to reach the world’s 2.5 billion unsaved people under 18. Government officials around the world are open to the ministry because it brings a positive moral influence, a Book of Hope official says. “Even countries that have been closed to the gospel are willing to let the ministry come because it presents an alternative to the loose morals communicated in the music and movies of Western youth culture,” Religion Today reports. Since 1987, the ministry has given away more than 45 million books in the former Soviet Union, 30 million in Latin America, 15 million in Europe, 10 million in Asia, 5 million in the Caribbean, and 3 million in Africa and the United States. www.bookof hope.net

Iraq’s long-suffering Christian community
Although overwhelmingly Muslim, Iraq officially recognizes 14 local Christian communities, reports Compass Direct. Since 1981, however, no new churches have been allowed to register. Iraq’s Christians represent less than three percent of the estimated 22 million population. Officially a secular state, Iraq legally protects the freedom of its Christian minority to worship “in churches of established denominations,” although the law forbids them to “proselytize or hold meetings outside church premises.” Meanwhile, Compass reports that an Iraqi Christian who fled to Jordan last year has been trying since last November to file for political and religious asylum with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Amman, Jordan. After escaping from Iraq, Yad Patrus obtained copies of court documents proving he had been sentenced to two years in jail by the Iraqi government. The Ninevah Criminal Court in Mosul convicted him on April 15, 1997, for writing and distributing leaflets containing Bible verses and the Apostles’ Creed to his Muslim friends and acquaintances on the University of Mosul campus. According to an Iraqi Christian who has lived in Amman for the past six years, only a handful of Iraqi Christian families have won official UN refugee status to be resettled abroad since the Gulf War.

Hindu nationalists seek to ‘Indianize’ Christians
In a fresh attack on Christians and Muslims, the Hindu nationalist Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) has joined the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) in demanding their Indianization, Open Doors reports. The groups claim they are not demanding conversion of Muslims and Christians into Hindus, but rather “for the sake of unity and integrity of the country” are demanding that Muslims and Christians should be “indigenized” and given Indian names. Last October, RSS chief K. S. Sudershan called on Christians and Muslims to cut their spiritual links with “foreign sources.” In a separate development, the VHP’s general secretary claimed that about 33,000 people had been converted to Christianity in the northern state of Sikkim in the last 25 years. He added that VHP workers touring villages, cautioning people against conversion, compiled the figure. Meanwhile the VHP says it is planning to revamp its image and highlight its “social work” component in the rural areas among the lower castes and tribals. According to VHP’s chief of social projects, the aim is to counter the influence of Christian missionaries.

A problem that will worsen
Most of today’s wars are within countries, not between them, The Economist reports, a trend likely to continue-and to produce more internally displaced people. “Especially in Africa, but also in the Balkans, Chech-nya, Sri Lanka and Afghanistan, civil wars have pitted civilian militias against government armies,” the magazine reports. “Rebel groups have forcibly recruited civilians to fight; and the populations of whole villages or towns have sometimes become hostages of one side or the other.”

Youth may live fewer years
Only 58 percent of 16-year-old Russian boys will make it to their 60th birthday if existing mortality trends continue there, InSight reports. Russian State Statistics Committee experts say this trend is almost as bad as mortality in the late 1800s. In addition, a recent Russian Red Cross conference about children claimed that a third of neglected children suffer from alcoholism.

UK’s Christian youth like to give
Young adult Christians give about four times as much to charity as their non-Christian peers, finds a survey of 700 Generation Xers ages 18 to 35 commissioned by Britain’s Evangelical Alliance. The average believing Xer gives about $75 per month; in contrast, non-churchgoers give around $21 per month, the alliance reports. They’re also more “community-minded,” as 46 percent of the Christians surveyed are involved in community service or social action, compared to just 17 percent of non-Christian Xers. But the survey also reveals that most respondents are from middle class and professional backgrounds with average household incomes of more than £28,000 ($42,000) a year.

Child abuse in Turkey
More children are seeking hospital attention for domestic violence and sexual abuse, Anatolia News Agency reports. A member of the Istanbul Chamber of Doctors’ and Children’s Rights Commission says that the increase in child abuse is because most there view the violence as a right of parents. The chamber and commission member stressed the importance for children to get psychological treatment to prevent greater problems when they get older.

Honduras celebrates first “Gay Pride”
Honduras had its first Gay, Bisexual and Lesbian Pride Parade on June 3, reported the San Pedro Sula newspaper, Tiempo. Planned activities included films, an art exhibition, a gay literature festival, and a dance night at the Museum of Anthropology and History. A gay leader said that the purpose for the week was to stress human rights for gay, lesbian and transgender people and to oppose discrimination against them, especially against transvestites.

Evangelical erotica?
A German Protestant church in the Rhineland presents a monthly series of “erotic sermons,” followed by X-rated movies and discussion afterward, claiming it’s a way of getting people to come to church, reports Idea Evangelical News Agency. When a Christian complained, a church official said the series had succeeded in attracting the unchurched. One French film the church screened had been banned in France. The discussions give visitors a chance “to voice and question their erotic desires without the fear of being moralized,” the official tells Idea, adding that the erotic sermons have an “evangelistic quality.”

Still radioactive 15 years later
Radiation from Chernobyl is a grim reality that people in Russia, Ukraine and hardest-hit Belarus will live with for decades to come, reports the Slavic Gospel Associa-tion’s magazine, InSight. As the 15th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster was recently marked, Russia’s Academy of Sciences released updated findings on the accident’s toll: Some 1.8 million people still live in contaminated areas, and thyroid cancer is more common among those who were children when the explosion took place. Other social problems have been linked to the accident. “It is truly heartbreaking to see the large numbers of children suffering chronic illness because of the ongoing radioactive bombardment of their weakened bodies,” InSight reports. SGA is helping evangelical churches in these countries to reach these children for Christ “and with much-needed humanitarian aid as the Lord provides.”

Russian ruralists suffering
Russian officials’ predictions of unemployment and other problems heavily hitting major cities haven’t come true, InSight reports. Instead, the weakest regions and population groups in non-urban areas have been hardest hit. Government economists say overall unemployment may rise to 15 percent in the next three years.

Filling the social service void in Russia
When the Soviet Union collapsed, so did a number of social service providers that citizens relied on to provide healthcare, take care of orphans, help the disabled and provide a host of other needs. Now, reports The Economist, some 100,000 Russian charities are filling that void. The state is partnering with private charities to provide services, which marks a big change. “Russian officials used to see charities either as meddlesome critics or competitors for jealously guarded power and influence,” The Economist states. About 1,000 delegates from Russian children’s charities attended a Kremlin-hosted conference organized by UNICEF at which the minister of social affairs gave an approving speech. “That would have been unheard of a few years ago,” the magazine states. But problems abound. Bureaucrats who enforce the state tax code forbid charitable groups from raising money by running businesses because it would be commercial activity. An American philanthropist has stopped a $1.5 million grant to help individuals because bureaucrats say the grants are wages and want to tax them by almost 36 percent. While the government says it’s willing to negotiate the tax issue, other problems abound. “Registration is tough, especially for charities dealing with such subjects as legal reform, the environment, or civil liberties,” The Economist reports. “A few years ago President Vladimir Putin himself said that environmental groups were fronts for spies.”

Will Russia create a new Council for Religious Affairs?
Speculation is mounting about whether Russia’s government will set up a successor to the Soviet-era anti-religious Council for Religious Affairs, reports Keston News Service. The CRA was abolished in 1990, and the Russian Orthodox Church opposes any successor. Those who want to see the council brought back see it as essential to curb what they see as too much Orthodox influence on government. But pro-CRA advocates can’t say how a CRA successor would resist the lure of religious organizations with money or influence looking for preferential treatment. They admit that the organ’s neutrality could not be guaranteed.

No place to call home
Two million Colombians-one of every 16-are now displaced by war, reports Compass Direct. Colombia ranks second in the world behind Sudan in the number of internal refugees-so-called “displaced persons.” According to government figures, 65 percent are agricultural workers who leave their farms and rural villages under threat of death. Over half the displaced are children. One in six have seen family members murdered at the hands of outlaw armies fighting the civil war. In many areas, Christians represent a large percentage of the refugee population. Reuters, however, reports that wealthy Colombians can still find safety and the high life in posh $20,000-a-year social clubs far removed from flying bullets and rebel-infested jungles. Half the population is poor, analysts say, and the rich must leave their havens and get involved in addressing Colombia’s problems if the country is to ever end the 37-year-long guerrilla war. “Colombia cannot continue to be divided into three countries, where one country kills, the other country dies and the third country hides its head and closes its eyes,” said President Andres Pastrana two years ago.

Bogota: Bigamy no crime
As of July 25, Colombian men and women who take a second spouse won’t be breaking the law, Reuters reports. The old law punished bigamy with one to four years in prison. Bigamy, however, will still be grounds for divorce. Colombia’s chief prosecutor, who helped write the new penal code, tells Reuters that the bigamy law is irrelevant because there have been no recent reports of it.

Not catching any flak
Last year, one entrepreneur’s sales in Colombia of bulletproof clothing for the fashion-conscious doubled to $1 million. Colombia’s homicide rate is 11 times that of the United States, reports the Associated Press, making Miguel Caballero Ltd.’s armored clothing line a hot item. The company now makes bulletproof jackets, vests, sweaters, T-shirts and raincoats, with prices ranging from $250 to $1,500. To stop bullets from weapons more powerful than handguns, the company recommends using up to four layers of his clothing. But, adds Caballero, “There’s nothing strong enough to withstand bursts from an assault rifle.” He has sold about 10,000 garments and says that eight clients survived gunshots while wearing his apparel.

July 20, 2001