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Pastoral Bible Institute News PBI Directors Elected The
members of the Pastoral Bible Institute have elected these seven individuals to
serve as directors for the next 12 months:
World
News Religious India’s
Gujarat state is bringing in a new law to stop the practice of religious
conversion. Other states in the election cycle are seeing the nationalist
movement growing stronger. Dave DeGroot is with Mission India of Grand Rapids.
“We’re watching the elections very carefully. There is a very strong
nationalist Hindu movement that could possibility be moving from one state to
another. However, each state has its own complexion; each state is an entity to
itself. We have to just take it on a state-to-state basis.” —Mission
Network News, 2/28/2003 The
ongoing Mideast conflict has created an awkward partnership for American
Jewish groups, which are finding some of the staunchest pro-Israel support
in the US comes from a vocal group of evangelical Christians. Activists from
both communities say Jews and evangelicals are working together more closely
than ever with conservative Protestant groups raising funds, lobbying
Congress and organizing rallies in support of Israel—including an
increasing number of joint Jewish-Christian events. Some in the Jewish
community are uneasy about evangelicals who support Israel but not Judaism.
The Southern Baptist Convention, for example, one of Israel’s biggest
backers, has issued statements specifically targeting Jews for evangelism. —Associated
Press, 1/31/2003 The
bones of scores of villagers litter a “killing field” left in the wake
of an unprovoked attack by Sudan’s militant Islamic regime in which as
many as 3,000 unarmed civilians died, according to a team of fact-finders.
Dennis Bennett of the relief group Servant’s Heart returned from Upper
Nile Province where he and his colleagues heard local survivors tell of a
massive attack they believe killed between one-third and one-half of the
6,000 people who lived in the villages of Liang, Dengaji, Kawaji and Yawaji.
Bennett said the estimate of up to 3,000 dead was made in part by counting
survivors who have returned to the villages and those in refugee camps.
Backed by Muslim clerics, the National Islamic Front regime in the Arab and
Muslim north declared a jihad on the mostly Christian south in 1989. Since
1983, an estimated 2 million people have died from war and related famine.
About 5 million have become refugees. —WorldNetDaily,
2/14/2003 “Martyrdom
is a key concept in Islam and Muslims must ignore the enemies’ efforts to
urge against martyrdom,” Iran’s spiritual leader Seyed Ali Khamenei said
today. “Enemies of Islam today are trying to undermine jihad (holy war)
and the virtue of martyrdom,” the official Iranian news agency reported
Khamenei as saying in Boroujerd, Iran. The Supreme Leader, in his message to
the congress, also referred to martyrdom “as the most beautiful of human
values,” the IRNA agency reported. —The
Media Line, 2/18/2003 Social The
malaria upsurge in parts of Kenya is a result of drastic climate change,
according to experts. “Malaria has continued to kill and there is no magic
wand yet. The only thing we can do at the moment is to maintain sustainable
preventive campaigns and curative regimens,” says Ms. Tilson. Although
climatic forecasts can indicate possible outbreaks, it is difficult to
estimate the severity of the disease, explains Ms. Tilson. In recent years
the worst malaria cases have been reported in parts of the Rift Valley and
western Kenya, where each epidemic kills several hundreds. —Horizon
(Kenya), 2/27/2003 Jamaica,
the Bahamas and the Dominican Republic are major Caribbean transit routes
for South American drugs headed for the United States, while Haiti is a key
conduit plagued by corruption, according to the annual U.S. report on the
global drug trade released in March. The Caribbean is a major battlefield in
America’s drug war, along with the U.S.-Mexico border. A failing economy,
corruption, a weak police force, and faltering democratic institutions
combined to make politically troubled Haiti a key stop for drug runners
shipping cocaine to the United States, Canada, and Europe, the report said. —Reuters,
3/1/2003 Measles,
which afflicted most American children with red blotches just two
generations ago, is nearing extinction in the United States. Federal health
officials logged only 37 measles cases nationwide in 2002. [But] globally
measles remains the leading cause of vaccine-preventable deaths among
children younger than 5. Thirty million children world-wide contract the
virus annually, and 745,000 died from it in 2001—half of them in Africa. —Los
Angeles Times, 1/26/2003 The
smallest crimes have provoked the most violent deaths in countless villages
where the end of Guatemala’s 36-year civil war has brought neither law nor
order to remote regions most ravaged by the conflict. In January, a
screaming mob of 2,000 people grabbed two pickpocket suspects, tied their
hands, dragged them to the outskirts of town, drenched them in gasoline and
burned them alive. Police officers responding to the violence barely escaped
with their lives. It was one of hundreds of lynchings since the peace
accords were signed in 1996, officially ending a conflict that claimed
200,000 lives. “We are living through anarchy,” said Bishop Alvar
Ramazzini of the diocese in San Marcos. “People do not believe in the
legal system. Instead, it is the law of the strongest.” —New
York Times, 3/8/2003 Civil Germany
and the country’s fast-growing Jewish community signed an agreement giving
the nation’s main Jewish organization the same legal status as the
country’s main churches. The accord came on the 58th anniversary of the
liberation of the Auschwitz death camp. Germany’s Jewish population has
grown from 15,000 after World War II to 100,000, boosted by immigrants from
the former Soviet Union. The accord triples the Central Council of Jews’
annual government funding to $3.2 million, which can be used to finance
institutions such as schools. —Los
Angeles Times, 1/28/2003 Complaining
that the military’s all-volunteer force has left the risks of combat
largely to minorities and the poor, who are more likely to join the military
for a better job, [Congressman Charles] Rungel [has joined with others] to
introduce a bill that would reinstate the draft, which ended 30 years ago.
An earlier Defense Department report acknowledges that new recruits come
“primarily” from middle- and lower-income families. Says Rungel: “All
Americans should be prepared to share the sacrifices of war—even the
affluent ones.” —TIME,
2/17/2003 President
Bush may soon face [a nuclear crisis] in Iran. On a visit last month to
Tehran, International Atomic Energy Agency director Mohamed ElBaradei
announced he had discovered that Iran was constructing a facility to enrich
uranium—a key component of advanced nuclear weapons—near Natanz. Iran
insists that its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes. Israel—which
destroyed an Iraqi nuclear plant in Osirak in a 1981 raid—is deeply
alarmed by the developments. Says an Israeli official, “Iran is a regime
that denies Israel's right to exist in any borders and is a principal
sponsor of Hezbollah. If that regime were able to achieve a nuclear
potential, it would be extremely dangerous.” —TIME,
3/17/2003 Electricity
is in such short supply in North Korea that few people can light their
homes. Of all the difficulties facing North Korea, the energy shortage is
perhaps the most critical. It underlies the crisis over nuclear development
and is one of the main factors contributing to chronic famines and the
overall dysfunction of the country. “Everything that North Korea has is
decrepit, and they don’t have the electricity to make spare parts to fix
it,” said Timothy Savage, who has worked on energy-assistance programs in
North Korea.
—Los
Angeles Times, 2/1/2003 North
Korea restarted a reactor at its main nuclear complex while China stayed
away from a United Nations Security Council meeting aimed at condemning
North Korea’s nuclear program. Tensions on the Korean peninsula rose after
the State Department said in October North Korea acknowledged it has a
nuclear weapons program. North Korea earlier this week test-fired a
short-range missile off its coast and said U.S.-South Korean military
exercises next month are aimed at mounting a pre-emptive strike against the
country. The U.S. government has said the issue should be solved only
through talks among many nations, including Russia, Japan, China, South
Korea, and the United Nations, and wants China to use its influence with the
North to push it to abandon its weapons program. —Bloomberg
News, 2/27/2003 Financial On
an icy evening in early February, communist-party officials in North Korea
issued warnings to local citizens not to try to cross the border into China
in search for food. “Don’t even think about it,” one widow recalls the
official telling them. “It’s better to die here.” The widow and other
refugees say life in North Korea, after a brief pickup from 1999 to 2002 is
getting grimmer. If food gets scarcer, people are increasingly likely to
risk their lives for a decent meal. No one knows how many North Koreans are
in China, but estimates by humanitarian groups range from 50,000 to 340,000.
“A lot of families are starving,” says a 26-year-old woman who crossed
the border in December. Reforms designed to revitalize a decrepit economy
have instead unleashed inflation that has boosted the price of staple foods
by as much as 400%, putting them even further out of reach of average North
Koreans. All this is prompting painful memories of the famine that is
thought to have killed more than two million people in the 1990s. According
to a Chinese official who deals frequently with North Korean bureaucrats,
the dire economic situation partly explains Kim Jong II’s willingness to
risk everything by threatening to build nuclear weapons, apparently hoping
to extract concessions from the outside world. —Wall
Street Journal, 2/27/2003 For
past injustices against people of the Niger Delta in the course of its
activities, the Shell Petroleum Development Corporation may have to pay a
sum of $1.5 billion. The Ijaw community in Bayelsa State, under the aegis of
Ijaw Aborigines, had last year petitioned the National Assembly over alleged
injustices meted to them by oil companies, especially Shell in the course of
their operations. In its report submitted to the deputy speaker of the House
of Representatives, Chibudom Nwuche, recommended that Shell should pay $1.5
billion compensation to the people. Expressing great concern over the level
of environmental degradation caused by activities of oil companies in the
Niger Delta, Nwuche said oil companies used standards different from those
employed in Europe and elsewhere in the world. —The
Guardian (Nigeria), 2/27/2003 The
Pentagon has begun telling the White House and Congress that defeating Iraq
and occupying the country for six months could cost as much as $85 billion,
according to sources—considerably more than what senior administration
officials have been saying in public. Combined with aid for regional allies
such as Turkey, the price tag for the conflict could top the $100-billion
mark. Analysts said the new war cost estimates are particularly troubling
because they come as the administration predicts that Washington will
continue to run high budget deficits even without the extra cost of a war
and at a time when the U.S. economy seems unable to snap back from
recession. America’s last war with Iraq in the early 1990s cost $61
billion. In that case, U.S. allies footed most of the bill. That almost
certainly will not happen this time. —Los
Angeles Times, 2/26/2003 Israel 6.6
million Israel’s
population (5.2 million Jews and 1.2
million Arabs) $16,000
Avg. annual per capita income 6.5%
Inflation (in 2002) 10.4%
Unemployment rate —Los
Angeles Times, 1/28/2003 The
Kinneret (Sea of Galilee) broke the 212-meter mark on February 26, only 11
days after passing the 213-meter mark. The country’s largest reservoir,
with the northern rivers flowing strongly into it, now stands at 211.91
meters below sea level—three meters below the optimum level. A Mekorot
Water Company spokesman told Arutz-7 today that though the rains are “very
considerable and welcome, Israel’s water situation has been suffering for
a number of years, and one rainy winter will not solve the problem.”
Strict conservation is still required to preserve the precious water. The
snow covering the Judean Mountains is expected to melt quickly today and
tomorrow, leading to possible flooding in the Judean Desert brooks. —Arutz
7, 2/27/2003 A
total of 862,300 visitors from abroad entered the country during 2002,
making it the worst year for tourism in 20 years. According to information
released by the Central Bureau of Statistics on Sunday, last year was the
first since 1982 in which fewer than a million visitors arrived. Last
year’s figures were 29% lower than those for 2001 and two-thirds lower
than those recorded in 2000. There were hardly any passengers [entering
Israel] from cruise ships with only 300 recorded during April and May,
compared to 22,800 cruise passengers during 2001 and 255,000 during 2000. —BridgesForPeace.com
2/7/2003 Israel,
which has led the world in developing pilotless drones for military use, is
now testing a new generation the size of credit cards. The miniature drones
will carry tiny cameras and are too small to be spotted by the eye or by
radar. Launched by hand, the planes are more versatile than existing larger
models. They are expected to be in use in about two years. —The
Media Line, 2/23/2003 Palestinian
Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat asked Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein for
continued help in fighting Israel, earlier this month. “Any kind of
support and assistance from you in these difficult times will enable us to
continue our persistence,” Arafat wrote to Saddam, in a letter several
weeks ago, according to, the Washington-based Middle East Media Research
Institute. “Hand in hand, Iraq and the Palestinians will march to
Jerusalem,” Arafat added. Iraq has continually provided substantial cash
rewards to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers and other
Palestinians who died during the Intifada. —MEMRI,
JTA, 2/28/2003 Book
Review The
Next Christendom, The Coming of Global Christianity, Philip Jenkins. Oxford
University Press, 2002. 270 pp. Many
Bible Students believe that the church nominal will rise to power prior to
the time of final deliverance of the true Church. This belief is based on
the interpretation of certain passages in Revelation as well as the studies
of types in the lives of Elijah, Elisha, and John the Baptist. The
difficulty with this view has been the seemingly diminishing power of the
Catholic and Protestant churches in the West. Secular movements such as
communism, feminism, and environmentalism would seem to have far more impact
on shaping the last days. Jenkins
questions this vi as he explores the much neglected explosive southward
expansion of Christianity in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. This explosion
barely registered on Western consciousness but Jenkins asserts that by the
year 2050 only one Christian in five will be a non-Latino white person. The
center of the Christian world will have shifted firmly to the southern
hemisphere. Within a few decades Kinshasa, Buenos Aires, Addis Ababa, and
Manila will replace Rome, Athens, Paris, London, and New York as the new
focal points in the Christian Church’s universality. The churches that
have grown most rapidly in the global south are far more traditional,
morally conservative, and apocalyptic than their northern counterparts.
Mysticism, Puritanism, belief in prophecy, faith-healing, exorcism, and
dream visions are basic to the new churches in the south. The effect on
global politics will be enormous as religious identification begins to take
precedence over allegiance to secular nation states.
As Christianity grows in regions where Islam is also expected to
increase—as recent conflicts in Indonesia, Nigeria, and the Philippines
show—we may see a return to the religious wars of the past, fought out
with renewed intensity and high-tech weapons far surpassing the swords and
spears of the Middle Ages. While
Western commentators have declared that Christianity is declining, Jenkins
has impeccably researched facts that show the opposite is true: Christianity
is on the rise again. One of Jenkins’ conclusions, based on this shift, is
of particular interest to those Bible students who see a greater role for
the papacy in the world prior to the time of the end: “We will be looking
at a world with an ever-greater imbalance between where the people are and
where the wealth is. It would not take a great speculative leap to see the
North-South economic divide as the key issue of the new century, and also
(given the demographics) to see the conflict being defined in religious
terms. … The militant political conservatism of Pope John Paul II might
represent a passing phase in the long history of the papacy, and we may yet
live to see a revival of the radicalization of the 1970s.”
—Len Griehs |
