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Pastoral Bible Institute News Financial
Statement of the Pastoral Bible Institute, Inc.
Analysis
of Net Worth
Net Gain for Fiscal Year $2,368
Respectfully
submitted by Len Griehs, Treasurer
PBI
Annual Report for 2002-2003
The people had a mind to work.—Nehemiah 4:6 We pause at
the conclusion of 86 years of the ministry of the Pastoral Bible Institute to
thank the many willing ones who have made all this possible. Some have served as
proofreaders, others in recording each issue of The Herald, still others in the
printing and distribution of the journal. One brother provides the beautiful
color separations for our covers. Others have assisted in maintaining our web
site and in providing an electronic archive of the eight and a half decades over
which we have published. During the past decade alone over 50 authors have given
countless hours in research and writing the articles which appear in this
magazine. The Herald
magazine continues to be our main endeavor. Our circulation has risen slightly
to 1,300 copies going to subscribers in 46 countries plus the United States. In
addition, there are 20 ecclesias in India and Africa who receive 850 copies of
each issue for their class use. We also provide 170 copies to various brethren
in the United States for their witnessing efforts. The PBI is happy to furnish
copies to any of the brethren who feel they can profitably use them in this
manner. Another
branch of our work is making audiocassettes for those who wish to listen to the
magazine rather than read it. Of the 12 cassettes made of each issue, four are
furnished free to the blind. The PBI also
provides a wide array of booklets on a variety of subjects free of charge. While
the Institute does not publish all of these booklets, we make them available to
promote the spread of the truth. Demand for
the Bible Student Library CD ROM continues. The next version is now available at
the same cost: $25. It contains a greatly expanded fully-searchable database in
the popular Adobe Acrobat format, and is on three CDs. The entire archive of The
Herald from its inception in 1918 is included. Also included are 16 Bible
translations, 16 children’s books, 44 commentaries, 27 devotionals, 118
booklets, 30 doctrinal treatises, the archived contents of 7 journals, 22
reference works, the complete works of Charles T. Russell, and 223 treatises on
Scriptural subjects by 63 brethren. Our web site—www.heraldmag.org—now
contains all The Herald magazines ever published. The site is fully searchable
using the tool found there. The number of visitors to our site is growing. Last
March we had 23,525 visitors from 95 countries viewing a total of 90,610 files.
We are presently advertising our site on Google.com and have attracted 2,246 new
visitors in the first 14 weeks. The recent
election of PBI Directors returned the seven incumbents for another year. We are
glad to report a harmonious relationship between them and are looking forward to
another year in the service of the Lord. Directors and
Editors of the Pastoral Bible Institute World
News Religious The sexual
abuse scandals that have engulfed the Archdiocese of Boston and the Roman
Catholic church have become a powerful threat to religious liberty, said several
legal scholars. “These cases will profoundly alter the nature of organized
religion,” said professor Patrick Schlitz, of the University of St. Thomas
School of law in Minneapolis. “This litigation has the potential to do to
churches what many a tyrannical government could not.” Mark E. Chopko, the
general counsel of the bishops’ conference, said that the economics of
litigation after a $120 million jury award in Dallas in 1997 compelled dioceses
to take aggressive legal positions. “The pursuit of zero incidents is a
mistake and an illusion,” said one professor. “You won’t have a priesthood
left if you do that.” —New
York Times, 4/6/2003 Swastikas,
slogans and physical assaults against Jews in Europe have reached a frequency
not seen since the 1930s when Fascism was on the rise. But in the vast majority
of the cases today, the assailants are young Muslims of North African heritage
whose parents emigrated to Europe in the 1960s and 1970s. The greatest number
and most violent attacks have come in France, which, with an estimated six
million Muslims and 650,000 Jews in the country, has Europe’s largest Jewish
and largest Muslim populations. According to Israeli government figures, 2,556
French Jews emigrated to Israel in 2002, double the number a year earlier and
the most since the 1967 Six-Day War. —New
York Times, 3/22/2003 About 10% of
Americans say they have no religion, and compared with other Americans, they
tend to be younger, more liberal and more likely to live on the West Coast,
according to the Gallup Organization. Only about 1% of Americans describe
themselves as atheists who have no belief in God, or agnostics who aren't sure
about the existence of God, according to the Gallup study. —Los
Angeles Times, 5/3/2003 Social The number of
unmarried couples in the U.S. surged in the last decade, to 5.5 million from 3.2
million in 1990, newly released Census reports show. “There is a very
significant increase in the number of unmarried-couple households,” said
Martin O’Connell, chief of the branch on fertility and family statistics at
the Census Bureau. The finding distressed advocates of traditional marriage. “It’s
continuing a trend that has been growing,” said Allan Carlson, a distinguished
fellow at the Family Research Council. “It’s not a healthy thing. The
commitments that go with cohabitation are not as firm or strong as marriage.” —New
York Times, 3/13/2003 With fewer
than 300 known SARS deaths so far, the worldwide toll is tiny compared with,
say, the 3 million people who died of AIDS last year. But if SARS continues to
spread, its numbers could skyrocket. Its overall death rate of about 6% is far
lower than that of AIDS, Ebola, or malaria, but if enough people catch the
illness, even a low rate could cause a catastrophe. The Spanish flu epidemic of
1918-19 had a death rate of less than 3%, but so many people became infected
that it killed more than 20 million people in just 18 months. —TIME, 5/5/2003 Ask American
women what disease they’re most scared of, and the vast majority will answer
without hesitation: breast cancer. They may even cite the ominous statistic that
1 in 8 women will develop breast cancer at some point in her life. But what most
women don’t realize is that they actually have far more to fear from heart
disease, which will strike 1 out of every 3. More than 500,000 women die in the
U.S. each year of cardiovascular disease, making it, not breast cancer (40,000
deaths annually), their No. 1 killer. —TIME, 4/28/2003 A wave of
obesity is sweeping through Asia as its population shifts into vast new cities
where the food is faster and fattier and the lifestyle more sedentary. Obesity
is bringing with it a range of ailments led by cardiovascular disease. Once
uncommon in Asia, diseases of the heart and cardiovascular system are now the
continent’s leading killers. Obesity is spreading among children, bringing a
severe form of diabetes and putting them at risk for years to come. Known in
Chinese as “xiao pangzi” or “little fatties” these roly-poly children
seem to be everywhere, the pampered victims of cultures that prize them as
emblems of affluence and well-being. The World Health Organization now reports
that 6 out of 10 deaths in China are linked to obesity. It is the direct cause
of two-thirds of diabetes cases and one-fifth of all heart disease in the area.
The public health challenge is compounded by the fact that most Asian nations
are still dealing with the opposite problem—food shortages in much of the
population. “More than any other region in the world, Asia faces two quite
different diet-related health problems: under-nutrition and over-nutrition,”
said the Asia Food Information Center, a private group. —New
York Times, 3/13/2003 Civil The
Democratic Republic of Congo’s civil war has taken more lives than any
conflict since World War II, and most victims died from malnutrition and
treatable diseases, the International Rescue Committee (IRC) said. As many as
3.3 million people died during the more than four years of the conflict, which
involved as many as six countries fighting in the mineral-rich central African
nation of 50.5 million people. The New York-based refugee agency said the war
was the worst ever documented in Africa’s history. About 85 percent of the
deaths were caused by nutritional deficiencies and diseases such as malaria,
cholera, measles and diarrheal ailments, conditions exacerbated by the collapse
of the country’s health care system and economy. IRC researchers said in three
of the ten zones visited in the war-ravaged east of the country, more than half
of the children were killed before two years of age. The war pitted Rwanda,
Uganda and Burundi against Zimbabwe, Namibia and Angola. The United Nations
alleged the plunder of Congo’s diamonds, gold, copper, cobalt … was a prime
motivation for national armies fighting in the country and also helped finance
and extend the warfare. The former Zaire possesses the world’s second-largest
reserve of industrial diamonds and 65 percent of the globe’s cobalt. Even with
its mineral riches, the country’s war wracked economy generates less than 50
cents a day in output per person, according to World Bank data. Congo is poorer
than at its independence from Belgium four decades ago. —Bloomberg
News, 4/8/2003 At several
[Nigerian] polling places, many children were allowed to cast ballots after
presenting voter registration cards. At other sites, party agents stuffed ballot
boxes with already thumb-printed forms as election monitors looked on
helplessly. ... Local and foreign election monitors began to present what they
described as serious irregularities and what one called “many observed
instances of obvious premeditated electoral manipulation.” President Olusegun
Obasanjo appeared to be surging to victory with about 65% of the votes tallied.
Officials of [his nearest rival’s party] called the results “a joke.” They
said ... in Rivers state, where observers reported that little balloting had
taken place, Obasanjo received about 99% of the vote. U.S. officials and other
world leaders have hoped that Africa’s most populous nation would set a good
example for other troubled countries on the continent. [But] if Nigerians feel
that the poll lacked legitimacy, opposition parties could unleash the wrath of
their supporters. Since 1999 about 10,000 Nigerians have been killed in ethnic
and religious violence. —Los
Angeles Times, 4/22/2003 Financial The
government ran up a deficit of $252.6 billion in the first six months of the
2003 budget year, nearly twice the total for the same period a year earlier,
the Treasury Department reported Friday. Record deficits are forecast this year
and next as the government’s financial situation continues to deteriorate.
Federal spending for the six months totaled $1.08 trillion, a 6.6% increase
from the corresponding period in fiscal 2002. Revenues were down 6.1% for the
period. —Los Angeles
Times, 4/19/2003 Consumer
debt in the United States hovers near record levels. As a share of disposable
income, household debt service rose steadily in the ’90s, peaking at just over
14%. A study by the Levy Institute concluded that the upward trend in consumer
debt seen over the last decade is unsustainable and that sooner or later the
U.S. will see a retrenchment. Rich Yamarone, chief economist with Argus
Research in New York, said, “If labor market conditions continue on their
troubled path, then the warnings signs of yellow turn to red. Then the consumer
will have to scramble to find the appropriate funds for whatever they have to
pay.” —Investors
Business Daily, 4/25/2003 Europe’s
population soon will begin to shrink, according to a recent report in the
journal Science. A shrinking population, without an offsetting surge in
productivity, normally devastates an economy. It pushes down investment,
strangles government revenues, leaves companies without profits and kills off
innovation and entrepreneurship, all the while building up mountains of debt.
Europe’s women are having just 1.5 children, 0.56 below the average necessary
to sustain population. If the trend continues, Europe’s population could shrink
by 88 million people over the next century from the current 375 million. That
will put serious strains on the European Union’s already-overburdened health
care, welfare and retirement systems. Right now, there are about four workers
per retiree in Europe; that will fall to about two by the middle of the
century. No old-age welfare and pension system as lavish and generous as the
one the EU has can continue with so few workers supporting it. —Investors
Business Daily, 4/3/2003 Following …
the devastation of campaign Iraqi Freedom, Iraq is in shambles. One of the
biggest questions is the size of the Iraqi debt, estimates of which range
between $60 billion and $120 billion. The U.S. Treasury had to learn the
addresses of the Baghdad branches of the Bank for Iraq, the central bank, from
the CIA. Treasury officials then lobbied the Pentagon to exclude the banks from
its target list because Treasury fretted that without those records, it might
be impossible to figure out the actual size of Iraq’s gargantuan foreign debt. —Wall Street
Journal, 4/9/2003 The effects
of SARS are now so widespread that many analysts believe it will be more
damaging to East Asia’s economies than the war in Iraq. Standard & Poor’s,
a credit-rating agency, reckons the disease’s impact could cut Hong Kong’s GDP
by 0.6%-1.5% this year, Singapore’s by 0.4%-2%, and China’s by 0.5%. Some
investment banks are starting to suggest that China’s economy could shrink in
the current quarter. The United Nations reckons that the combined effect of
SARS and the war would cut almost half a percentage point off economic growth
throughout Asia this year. More than 4,270 cases of SARS have now been reported
worldwide. The decline in travel has been particularly noticeable for economies
like Hong Kong and Singapore, where visitor arrivals collapsed by 61% in the
first half of April. Retail sales also fell over that period, by between 10%
and 50% depending on the type of business, the Singapore government said last
week. —The
Economist, 4/23/2003 Israel In the five
decades since the Jewish state was formed, its economy has never been so sick.
Analysts blame the nearly 31-month-old intifada, or Palestinian uprising, for
the money troubles that haunt every nook of Israeli society. All over Israel
wages are falling, unemployment is wide-spread, and shops are closing. Israel
hasn’t faced the harsh degree of poverty pervading the Palestinian territories
after months of occupation, raids, and curfews. A quarter of the nation’s
children live below the poverty line and 100,000 more are likely to tumble into
neediness if the government proceeds with expected budget cuts. —Los Angeles Times, 4/8/2003 More than
one-quarter of French Jews have considered emigrating because of anti-Semitism,
a new poll finds. The survey, by pollster Stan Greenberg for The Israel
Project, found that 26 percent of French Jews have strongly considered
immigrating to Israel or the United States due to rising anti-Semitism, with 13%
of them “very seriously” eyeing emigration. Of those most seriously considering
leaving France, 64% say that they have been the targets of anti-Semitic
incidents. Overall, 82 percent of French Jews say anti-Semitism is a serious
problem. —JTA,
3/25/2003 There was
shock and disbelief in the West Bank and Gaza Strip as Palestinians gathered
around TV sets to watch US Marines and Iraqi residents knock down a giant
statue of Saddam Hussein in Tahrir Square in central Baghdad. Many Palestinians
said Saddam was the only Arab leader who sided with them both morally and
financially in their confrontation with Israel. Since the beginning of the
Intifada more than two years ago, Saddam has paid about US$35 million to
families of Palestinian victims of the violence, including suicide bombers who
blew themselves up in Israel. The money was channeled through the pro-Iraqi
Arab Liberation Front, a tiny Palestinian faction operating in the West Bank
and Gaza Strip. Older Palestinians said the events in Iraq are reminiscent of
the Six-Day War, when Arab radio stations and leaders told their audiences that
Israel was on the verge of defeat. Said Abed al-Zamel, a 70-year-old retired
schoolteacher from Silwad village near Ramallah, “Once again the Arabs have
fallen victim to the lies of their leaders and media. We never learn from our
mistakes. When the war erupted, I warned my sons not to watch Arab TV stations
so they would not be disappointed and depressed when the truth eventually comes
out.” —The Jerusalem Post, 4/9/2003 |
