Pastoral Bible Institute News
Financial
Statement Statement of Net Worth -- April 30, 2001 [unaudited]
Analysis of Net Worth
Respectfully Submitted by Len Griehs, Treasurer PBI Annual Report for 2000-2001 “And this I pray, that your love may abound yet more and more in knowledge and in all judgment; That ye may approve things that are excellent; that ye may be sincere and without offence till the day of Christ.”—Philippians 1:9,10 During the past 83 years, the work of the Pastoral Bible Institute has undergone many changes. Through times of prosperity and through difficult days, the directors of the Institute have sought to adapt their efforts to meet the needs of the brotherhood. In turn, the members and friends of the Institute have freely given prayers, encouragement, and assistance, both spiritually and temporally. We greatly appreciate this support and want to express our appreciation to the brethren for their interest and involvement in the work of the Institute. It is not only the financial contributions which enable us to carry on our activities, but countless hours of volunteer labor in the preparation, production, and mailing of our magazine and booklets. For all of this, we sincerely say “Thank You.” We began the year 2001 with a new look to the cover of The Herald. Each issue bears a full color illustration appropriate to the theme of that particular edition. This is not only to enhance the appearance of the journal, but also to make it easier to distinguish between each individual issue. This would not be possible without the freely contributed work of preparing the color separations by one of the brethren, to whom we owe a special debt of gratitude. The circulation of The Herald has been roughly doubled this year due to a decision by the directors to supply free copies to ecclesias in economically depressed countries where English is widely read. We presently mail 265 copies to four ecclesias in India, 90 copies to two classes in Ghana, and 415 copies to eight ecclesias in Nigeria. In an endeavor to encourage the use of the magazine for public witness, the directors have approved a plan to offer 100 copies free for ecclesias to use in such a manner. They also authorized any class to offer a six-month free subscription to any of the interested public. Some ecclesias have been using The Herald as an attractive offer in fair booths, flea markets, or in shopping malls. We have had one inquiry about providing copies for a distribution rack, similar to those used for daily newspapers. We continue to stock a wide selection of free booklets, periodically inserting copies in The Herald magazine to encourage their use by our readers. Two new reprints of existing booklets are presently in production with full-color covers and tear-off postcards for responses. The Herald web page continues to grow and we receive a steady response to it. There are presently over 700 items on the site and we are installing a search engine to make the material more readily usable for research. During the coming year we plan to place more of our booklets “on line” with a button allowing the fast down-loading of the booklets by a web user. One of the members of the PBI has developed a page, accessible through our home page, where scores of Bible study helps, including all the writings of Pastor C. T. Russell, are available for download in the format of the popular On-Line Bible software. Currently this material is available for download only. Once again, we would like to express our appreciation to all the brethren who have made the continuation of this work possible. It is our continued prayer that the activities of the PBI be always carried out with the ultimate objective of glorifying the name of our heavenly Father and as a service to those who love and serve his cause. The Directors, Pastoral Bible Institute World News Religious Taliban soldiers allegedly rounded up more than 500 boys and men ranging in age from early teenage to the elderly in Yakawlang—a town in central Afghanistan. Their hands were tied behind their backs; they were allegedly taken to a compound where each was shot in the head. Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar has denied that this took place. However, he banned journalists from visiting the area. The victims were members of Hazaras, a Shiite Muslim religious group. The Taliban are generally Pustun-speaking Sunni Muslims. —Reuters, 2/19/2001 In North America, there are laws at the state, provincial and federal levels which prevent discrimination in employment, on the basis of gender, race, religion, etc. But religious groups are generally given an exemption from these laws; they can discriminate against any group on any basis. According to The Orlando Sentinel, The Holy Land Experience in Orlando, FL, requires prospective employees to sign a Christian “doctrinal statement” of belief. Not only does this discriminate against non-Christians, it also appears to exclude Charismatic, Pentecostal and liberal Christians from applying for employment to work at the $16 million, 15-acre “living biblical museum.” Founder Marvin Rosenthal, and Independent Baptist pastor, is quoted as saying: “We are not charismatics. We love them. We appreciate them. But we would not offer them a job.” —Strang Publications, 3/11/2001 Pope John Paul II, in a sweeping statement of regret aimed at healing Christianity’s east-west divide, begged God’s forgiveness Friday for sins committed by Roman Catholics “against their Orthodox brothers and sisters,” including the plunder of the Byzantine capital by 13th century Crusaders. His powerful and unexpected gesture came during the first visit by apope to Greece, an Eastern Orthodox stronghold, since the schism of 1054. It drew warm applause from Orthodox clerics who until two months ago had demonized the pope and refused to welcome him. It was a papal act of mea culpa diplomacy on a par withthe visit last year to Jerusalem’s Western Wall, where John Paul sought pardon for centuries of Catholic torment of the Jewish people. That historic pilgrimage solidified the Vatican’s relationship with Israel, furthering the pope’s goal of building bridges to other faiths. —Los Angeles Times, 5/5/2001 Social Census data released by China and India confirm the remarkable fact that the two Asian neighbors account for more than a third of all humanity. China boasts a population of 1.27 billion while India has 1.03 billion, official figures say. Each country has more people within its borders than existed on the entire planet about the time American revolutionaries met to sign the Declaration of Independence. Together, the two Asian giants added about 300 million people—more than live in the U.S.—to the world tally in the last 10 years. “It’s unprecedented in human history, the kind of population growth that we’ve seen during the 20th century,” said Gary Gardner, director of research at the Worldwatch Institute in Washington. —Los Angeles Times, 3/29/2001 343,000 is 1) the amount by which the population of all European Union countries combined grew in 2000; and 2) the amount by which India’s population grew in the first week of 2001. —Time, 3/12/2001 More than 3 million people in Sudan are threatened by famine, and thousands could die, the U.N. World Food Program warned Thursday. A severe drought has added to the misery caused by an 18-year civil war and previous famines that have left 2 million people dead and more than 4 million displaced, said Massoud Hyder, the WFP‘s representative in Sudan. “We have a critical situation in Sudan—the WFP is running out of food at a time when we are supporting 3 million people there,” Hyder said at a news conference in London. “If you went to Sudan today, you would not see dead bodies. But it will be a lot different by July—devastatingly different.” —Los Angeles Times, 3/30/2001 Financial The World Bank and International Monetary Fund could easily cancel the debts owed to them by the world’s most heavily indebted poor countries without touching their financial health, according to an accountants’ report. The campaigning group commissioned the report from Chantrey Vellacott, the City of London accountancy firm. It suggested that the two organizations could immediately reduce debts of the 26 so-called Highly-Indebted Poor Countries by some $3 billion, and after that generate a further $1 billion a year that would retire debt and pay interest as they came due. This would allow the cancellation of the debt over the next quarter century. —Financial Times, 4/11/2001 [Some] Poles suspect their rich German neighbors of disdaining them as the great unwashed. During the protracted negotiations to admit as many as ten countries, mostly in Central Europe, into the European Union, the applicants’ suspicion that West Europeans want to keep them at arm’s length has flared up from time to time. So it was no surprise that Poles and others reacted angrily this month to the news that the European Commission, the EU’s bureaucracy, would propose restrictions on the free movement of labor, even after they join the EU. The commission’s proposal is close to one made by Gerhard Schröder, the German chancellor. The idea is that the new members’ citizens will not be allowed complete access to the western countries’ job markets for up to seven years after they join the EU. The basis for West European wariness is clear, if flawed. There is an enormous wage gap between the EU’s current 15 members and the would-be members—some of which are likely to join the EU as soon as 2004 or 2005. In nominal terms, average wages in the ten Central European applicants are only 14% of the average in the EU 15; even adjusted for purchasing power, the gap is stark, with Central European wages less than 40% of those paid in the EU 15. This gap has led to fears among the EU’s present members of a flood of cheap labor from the east, dragging down the wages and social standards of the west. —The Economist, 4/19/2001 Civil Congo’s 32-month war with its neighbors has killed about three million people, according to a survey by the International Rescue Committee (IRC). Only a few hundred thousand deaths were directly attributable to the battles fought by the Congolese army, the paper said. The majority were the result of starvation, disease and deprivation in Congo and neighboring states. A further two million people were made homeless by the conflict. The estimated number of deaths are one-third higher than the death toll in 18 years of conflict in Sudan, and three times higher than the accepted estimate of 1 million deaths for the Biafran civil war in the 1960s. Congo was formerly Zaire, and has a population of about 50 million. “Things are a little worse than the picture we painted last year,” said Les Roberts, an epidemiologist formerly with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who conducted last year’s IRC survey. “And last year’s estimate turns out to have been low.” —Washington Post, 4/30/2001 More than 1 billion people have no access to clean water and 3.4 million die every year of diseases that could easily be remedied by better supplies and sanitation, the World Health Organization (WHO) said Wednesday. The world’s poor pay more than the rich for worse water—up to 20% of household incomes—and face a greater risk of waterborne illnesses, the WHO said during a news conference to mark World Water Day today. “In 1990, 1.1 billion people were without access to improved water—even just a covered well. In 2000, the number was the same,” said Jamie Bartram, the WHO‘s water, sanitation and health coordinator. He said that 2.4 billion people had no basic sanitation in 1990 and that the situation was the same in 2000. —Los Angeles Times, 3/22/2001 Russia is aiming to regain its position as the leader in world arms sales in order to recapture influence in the Middle East, North Africa and East Asia. Under President Vladimir Putin, Moscow is attempting to reclaim arms markets that withered as Russia’s military-industrial complex declined after the USSR collapsed. More than 70 percent of Russia’s arms sales are to India and China, both places where the Kremlin wants to counter U.S. influence. Most of Russia’s other top customers are former Soviet clients, including Algeria, Vietnam and Syria. In recent weeks, Moscow has signaled its intention to seek lucrative deals with Iran and Libya, both of which have terrorist ties, regional ambitions, and hostility toward the United States. —Knight Ridder News Service, 3/6/2001 Living conditions for as many as 70,000 Afghan refugees crowded into a Pakistani border camp have deteriorated due to torrential rains and winds. The rains destroyed more than 3,150 shelters and flooded areas of the camp, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees said in an assessment issued from Geneva. Children are bearing the brunt of the unhealthy conditions, and refugees at the camp are dying every day, the UN said. Afghans have fled drought, civil war and the threat of famine, UN official Kenzo Oshima told reporters in February. The humanitarian situation inside Afghanistan is “desperate” and aid workers say conditions are worse now than at any time during the decade-long civil war, the UN relief agency said. The drought has destroyed almost all the rain-fed crops that are vital to the subsistence way of life of 85 percent of Afghanistan’s 25 million people, according to UN World Food Program officials. “Grain production has fallen in half, people have eaten their seed, sold their livestock and watched their fruit trees and vineyards die,” said John Wall, the World Bank’s country director for Pakistan and Afghanistan. —Bloomberg News, 4/3/2001 Israel Some 60,000 immigrants arrived in Israel in 2000, a 17 percent drop from 1999, according to the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS). Although the former Soviet Union remains the main source of immigrants to Israel, the 2000 figures showed a 40 percent drop from the previous year. Some 20 percent of the 2000 immigrants were children up to the age of 14, and some 9.4 percent were over the age of 65. According to the CBS, the least popular region for settlement by Russian immigrants is Jerusalem, with only 8 percent going to the capital, while 15 percent, a plurality, choose Haifa as their home. Some 30 percent of western immigrants choose Jerusalem. —Ha’aretz, 4/3/2001 Israel’s first sea-water desalination plant will begin partial operations some two years from now, reaching full commercial capacity, 50 million cubic meters annually, only in 2004, said Water Commissioner Shimon Tal in the most recent report on the implementation of government decisions on Israel’s water economy made less than a year ago. The plant will be built on land belonging to the Eilat-Ashkelon Pipeline Company in Ashkelon and the preparation of a detailed project outline is underway. —IMRA, 4/2/2001 Israel is the leading exporter of flowers to Europe. This year, some 1.5 billion flowers were shipped to Europe, some 30% of the entire stock of flower imports to the continent. Kenya is in second place, providing some 20% of Europe’s flower needs. —Arutz 7, 4/3/2001 For the first time in 2,000 years, visitors to Jerusalem can ascend to the Second Temple as it stood before its destruction by the Romans in 70 CE, thanks to a virtual reconstruction opening to the public today. The project, the Ethan and Miriam Davidson Exhibition and Virtual Reconstruction Center, which links ancient stones uncovered by archaeologists with state of the art hi-tech, is located in the cellars of an Umayyad palace complex near the Dung Gate in the Old City of Jerusalem. The project was constructed by the Antiquities Authority and the East Jerusalem Development Corporation. As the visitors descend into the center, they experience the sharp contrast of ancient stones and modern building materials. A short video presentation takes them on a tour of the area leading up to the Temple, flashing back and forth between a guide in modern dress and the same guide dressed as a pilgrim in ancient times. However, the jewel of the center is an interactive computer presentation in which visitors can “go up” to the Temple, graphically walking up the steps to the Hulda Gate and actually walking into the Temple Mount precinct, where they can “walk” in the royal stoa, the one area of the Temple from which there is archaeological evidence. For those who want to visit the project from their homes, there is an Internet site: www.archpark.org.il. —The Jerusalem Post, 4/18/2001 |
