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Pastoral Bible Institute News Financial Statement
Respectfully submitted by Len Griehs, Treasurer
PBI Annual Report for 2004-2005 That I may publish with the voice of
thanksgiving, Once again it has been a great pleasure for the directors of the PBI and the editors of The Herald magazine to publish the grand message of the kingdom of Christ and the good news it will bring to all who have ever lived. Circulation has remained steady and we have received several encouraging letters testifying to the blessings received from the bi-monthly visits of this journal. We appreciate this correspondence and rejoice in the privileges of the writing and preparation of the magazine. The Herald continues to be published in the Polish language. Seven issues have been produced and distributed in the last thirteen months and each one bears a cover similar to its English counterpart. The brethren in Poland decide which issues they wish to reproduce, and they translate all articles into their language. While partially subsidized by the PBI, the bulk of the cost is born by the Polish brethren. Prospects for the coming year include some major improvements to our web page to make it more interactive and user friendly. All of the issues of The Herald from the first issue in 1918 are accessible and searchable with the Google search engine. Click on the box for “search www.heraldmag.org” to limit an inquiry to The Herald page. Most of the material in the Bible Student Library CD ROM is also available on this site. The directors of the PBI have approved a special bonus edition of The Herald containing an assortment of hymns written by Bible Students. Any who know of such hymns are invited to send us a letter or e-mail suggesting them to us. At present we are trying to select thirty-two from over a hundred on hand, but do not want to omit any from consideration. During the year a number of financial gifts were received for which we are grateful, realizing the responsibilities involved with the use of these funds to the greater glory of God and his Son, Jesus Christ. We welcome Dan Wesol as a new director of the PBI and bid farewell with sincere appreciation for his past service to our departing board member, Francis Earl. As another year comes to a close, the editors and directors want to take this opportunity to express their thankfulness to our many readers and supporters. We offer our pledge to strive to the best of our ability to continue the publication of this journal and solicit an interest in your prayers to that end, Directors and Editors of the Pastoral Bible Institute
World News Religious Joseph Ratzinger, a renowned theologian and hard-line enforcer of Catholic Church doctrine for the last two decades, was chosen to succeed his friend and close ally Pope John Paul II. The new pope will lead a church in crisis, sharply divided after John Paul’s 26-year reign. Despite John Paul’s personal magnetism, many of the church’s one billion members are seriously disaffected [and] the faith is losing ground in many parts of the world to other religions. For the last 24 years, Ratzinger has headed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the successor to the Grand Inquisition of the Middle Ages. —Los Angeles Times, 4/20/2005 Marty Minto, 39, is a senior pastor at a church in New Castle, Pennsylvania, and was a host on an Evangelical Christian talk show on WORD-FM, of Pittsburgh. A caller phoned in asking whether Pope John Paul II is in heaven after his death. Minto told the caller that whether a person was born again was “between an individual and the Creator.” Minto was told that he was alienating listeners and was fired by the station. —The Toronto Star, 4/15/2005 Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, a bestseller in many sectors of the Muslim world, has become a best seller in Turkey—traditionally considered a moderate country. Tens of thousands of Arabic-language copies of Hitler’s book—the English title of which is “My Struggle”—have been snatched off the shelves ever since they were reprinted in Turkey several months ago. —Arutz 7, 3/22/2005 Dateline NBC broadcast a follow-up to an earlier episode which had examined Benny Hinn Ministries. They used documents obtained by employees of the ministries, hidden cameras at public meetings, interviews with employees, and interviews with people who claim to have been healed. They focused on the Ministry’s practice of not releasing financial statements to the public. The report showed that the ministry lacks documentation which supports healing claims. One day later, Benny Hinn filed a lawsuit against NBC and Dateline producer Meade Jorgensen. The three claims in the civil suit appear to be mainly related to unauthorized possession of ministry records. —World Healing Center Church, Inc. vs, The National Broadcasting Company, 2005-MAR-04 Social A suicide prevention conference in Portland, Oregon, featured warnings of the disastrous rate of self-inflicted death: At 29,000 suicides a year, 50% more people now die by their own hand than as victims of murder. Among young people ages 15-24, suicide counts as the third leading cause of death. —USA Today, 3/9/2005 Today many Americans are getting expensive elective surgery at a fraction of the U.S. cost in places like India and Thailand. Bangkok is one example, where more than 350,000 international patients are treated in Bumrungrad Hospital per year by doctors, many of them Western trained. A quintuple heart bypass operation in the United States costs $100,000. At Bumrungrad the price is $12,000. It’s often even cheaper in India, where many procedures cost just ten percent of what they cost in America. —60 Minutes, 4/24/2005 The national average cost for a traditional funeral is around $7,000. For a cremation, it’s about $1,500. The percentage of people who select cremation, which saves precious land, is already around 30% nationally. That figure is expected to rise above 50% within a generation or two. —Los Angeles Times, 4/4/2005 Only 3% of Americans lead a healthy lifestyle that includes regular exercise and eating five or more fruits and vegetables daily, according to a study led by a researcher at Michigan State University. Researchers found that 76% of Americans don’t smoke and that 40% maintain a healthy weight. But only 23% eat the minimum recommended amount of five daily servings of fruits and vegetables and only 22% exercise for at least 30 minutes five times a week. Taken together, only 3% hit all four indicators of a healthy lifestyle. The U.S. spends about $1.5 trillion annually in health-care costs. —Dow Jones Newswire, 4/25/2005 Accident victims taken to Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center might be treated with artificial blood. About 25 hospitals nationwide are participating. The substitute is called PolyHeme and is made from a protein extracted from red blood cells. Ambulances don’t carry blood because there are too many types and it takes about 45 minutes to determine what type a patient needs. Instead, patients who have lost a lot of blood receive salt water, which restores blood pressure but doesn’t deliver oxygen to the brain and organs. —The Patriot-News, 3/16/2005 Stamps.com Inc., the online postage seller, will resume a program allowing customers to turn personal photos or designs into valid stamps. The popular PhotoStamps service will resume May 16, with strict rules about what can and cannot grace a piece of postage. A sheet of 20 custom 37¢ stamps costs $16.99—a markup of nearly 130%. Customers upload images to the company’s website and receive stamps in the mail. —Los Angeles Times, 4/27/2005 Currently, more than 8 million people around the world die each year because they are too poor to stay alive. Every morning our newspapers could report, “More than 20,000 people perished yesterday of extreme poverty.” The poor die in hospital wards that lack drugs, in villages that lack anti-malarial bed nets, in houses that lack safe drinking water. In 2002 the U.S. gave $3 per sub-Saharan African. Taking out [what was spent] for U.S. consultants and technical cooperation, food and other emergency aid, administrative costs and debt relief, the aid per African came to the grand total of perhaps 6¢. Spin as we might in the U.S. about our generosity, the poor countries are fully aware of what we are not doing. —Excerpt from The End of
Poverty There were an estimated 515 million cases of the deadliest form of malaria in 2002, according to a new study in Nature—50% more than earlier estimates. Malaria kills at least a million people a year, mostly children. —TIME, 3/21/2005 Leprosy is still prevalent in many parts of the world. More than half a million new cases were detected in 2003—that’s over 1,400 every day. It is neither hereditary nor flesh eating and can be cured with multi-drug therapy. It is difficult to catch and cannot be caught by a handshake. Over 95% of people are immune. Leprosy is a disease of poverty and tends to spread in areas of malnutrition. —LeprosyMission.org.uk web site Political More than 1,600 tons of America’s stockpiled mustard agent has been destroyed to meet the terms of a chemical weapons treaty. The mustard agent was the last batch stored at the Aberdeen Proving Ground, 35 miles northeast of Baltimore, and represented about 5 percent of the nation’s total stockpile, said Jeff Lindblad, a spokesman for the chemical disposal facility at the Army base. The banned, carcinogenic liquid that blisters the eyes, skin and lungs, had been stockpiled at Aberdeen since World War II. The mustard agent was destroyed to help to meet the 2012 Chemical Weapons Convention Treaty deadline for destroying chemical weapons. Nerve gas and mustard agent are still stockpiled at seven depots in the country. —Associated Press, 3/11/2005 Following popular revolts in Georgia and Ukraine, a third ex-Soviet republic is in turmoil after a disputed election. President Askar Akayev of Kyrgyzstan ordered a partial review of the results of parliamentary elections after protesters seized control of public buildings. “If the authorities and opposition fail to reach an accord and things break out of control, the nightmare of civil war becomes realistic,” said Alexei Malashenko of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Moscow. —Financial Times, 3/22/2005 Residents of three Siberian regions voted to merge into one province in what is likely to be a trend toward fewer autonomous regions within Russia. Evenki and Taimyr were broken off from Krasnoyarsk after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union to give the ethnic minorities there more autonomy. The restored Krasnoyarsk will be a single, resource-rich province of Russia, larger than all of Western Europe. The move was cited as a first step toward the eventual consolidation of Russia's 89 regions down to around 40. —The Week, 4/29/2005 Financial $518 billion: Approximate sum that will be paid out of Social Security to almost 48 million Americans this year. —Newsweek, 4/18/2005 Electronic payments, including debit and credit cards, surpassed checks for the first time ever last year, according to the Federal Reserve. Last year, more than 3 billion (debit card) transactions were for under $5. —Reuters, 3/13/2005 An American worker costs [General Motors, Ford and Daimler-Chrysler] more than $6,500 in health care per year. In Canada, which has a government-funded health-care system, the cost to the employer per worker is just $800. This year General Motors will pay about $5.2 billion in medical and insurance bills for its active and retired workers. That adds $1,500 to the cost of every GM car. For Toyota, whose products are manufactured in many countries abroad, these costs add just $186 per car. —Newsweek, 4/18/2005 Rapidly rising pension and healthcare spending will reduce the debt status of the world’s richest industrialized countries to junk within 30 years unless their governments move quickly to balance budgets and reduce outgoings, a report warns. Standard & Poor’s, the credit rating agency, says if fiscal trends prevail, the cost of ageing populations will fuel downgrades of France, the US, Germany and the UK from investment grade to speculative, or junk, category—France by the early 2020s, the US and Germany before 2030, and the UK before 2035. —Financial Times, 3/21/2005 The biggest impediment to [Afghanistan’s] development is the country’s dependence on opium. Last year’s opium proceeds equaled 61 percent of 2003 gross domestic product of $4.6 billion, making Afghanistan the world’s most drug-dependent economy, according to the Vienna-based United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Poppy cultivation has spread to every province, soaring 64 percent in 2004 and pouring $2.8 billion into the pockets of warlords, traffickers and farmers, the UN agency says. —Bloomberg Markets, May 2005 Israel Canada does not recognize the sovereignty of Israel in Jerusalem and has recalled the passports of Canadians who have “Jerusalem, Israel” written in their documents in order to erase the name of the Jewish State from alongside its capital. The B’nai Brith has been fighting a legal battle with Canada’s Ministry of the Interior in order to prevent the move, which is seemingly an emulation of the United States’ policy regarding not writing “Jerusalem, Israel” in passports. —Arutz-7, 3/11/2005 Researchers from Haifa’s Technion University have developed a miniature robot that can navigate a flexible needle in the human body. The new needle will allow a surgeon to bypass obstacles in the needle’s path and safely reach its objective within the body, solving the problem of maneuvering around blood vessels, skin and muscles that prevent exactness in obtaining biopsies. —Arutz 7, 4/19/2005 Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics released its latest population figures.
Israel’s population increased by 114,000 people, the lowest increase since 1990. About 20,000 people immigrated: 18 percent of the new immigrants came from Ethiopia; 10 percent from France; and 9 percent from the United States. — Israel My Glory, March/April, 2005 A number of foreign consortia, consisting mostly of U.S. investors, recently contacted Israeli government agencies and government company Petroleum and Energy Infrastructures with proposals to renew the oil pipeline to Iraq. The pipeline runs from Iraq through Jordan to Haifa Bay. Former Minister of Energy Adv. Moshe Shahal heads one of the consortia. The pipeline is designed to transport oil from Iraq to the Zarqa oil refinery in Jordan and from there to the oil refinery in Haifa Bay. The pipeline will eliminate the need to use the Suez Canal. In the initial stage, ten million tons of oil can be transported from Iraq to Israel through the new pipeline. —Globes, 3/2/2005 Figures released by the Central Bureau of Statistics reveal that Israel’s agricultural sector is thriving and growing [in spite of] water shortages and steep water price hikes. The value of agricultural production in Israel jumped by 28.7% in the period from 1999 to 2004. Agricultural exports have also been climbing. Exports in 2004 were up by 31.1% over 2003, despite a 1.2% overall decline in price. An old food staple, the potato, registered the biggest rise in agricultural exports. Almost twice as many Israeli potatoes were exported in 2004 compared to 2003, thanks to bad weather in Europe. —Arutz 7, 4/4/2005 In 2004, 1.59 million people in the U.S. filed for personal bankruptcy, up from 780,000 a decade earlier. At least $40 billion in debt is wiped out annually through personal bankruptcy, according to an industry-sponsored study in 1998 by the WEFA Group, now part of Global Insight, a Cambridge, Mass. consulting firm. More than 70% of the filings fall under Chapter 7 of the bankruptcy code. The provision allows consumers to erase credit-card, medical and many other debts. Todd Zywicki, a George Mason University law professor says reneging on debts has lost much of its stigma. —Wall Street Journal, 4/6/2005 International health officials [are] fighting a deadly outbreak of Marburg fever in Angola. Marburg, named for the German city where it was discovered in 1967, kills about 90% of victims within 10 days. The virus is one of the most deadly pathogens and can be passed along by contact with any bodily fluid, including sweat. No vaccine or cure exists for the disease, which is similar to Ebola. The current Marburg outbreak began in October and has claimed more victims than any previous episode, killing most of the 214 people infected, according to WHO. —Los Angeles Times, 4/13/2005 |
