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PBI News
Annual Report to Membership. The first issue of The Herald of Christ’s Kingdom was published in July 1918 and by the Lord’s grace, it continues some 84 years later. It is still edited by a committee of five brethren appointed annually by the directors of the Pastoral Bible Institute, the parent organization. Our mission remains: “This Journal stands firmly for the defense of the only true foundation of the Christian’s hope now being so generally repudiated — redemption through the precious blood of ‘the Man Christ Jesus, who gave himself a Ransom (a corresponding price, a substitute) for all’ (1 Peter 1:19, 1 Timothy 2:6).” While our main area of activity is the U.S., the Institute finances the printing in India of 500 copies of each issue and contributes toward the cost of producing the magazine in Poland. In the past few years, our readership has significantly increased in parts of Africa as well, where new ecclesias of Bible Students are being formed and The Herald is in high demand (see report in May/June 2012 issue). This year we mourned the passing of our long-time Director, Secretary and Editor, Michael Nekora. Br. Nekora’s focus on continuous improvement, his fine attention to detail, and his organizational skills, can never be replaced. We are all grateful for his commitment to the PBI for so many years. We are also grateful for the many members of the PBI who volunteered to take the work necessary to continue the rigorous schedule of production and other activity. Our efforts are directed toward the spiritual needs of the Lord’s people. The theme-based message of our issues is meant to bring encouragement to all those of the household of faith. We proclaim the heart of the Gospel Message,the good Word of the Kingdom, to all who have ears to hear, to all who hunger for the Truth, for all those of honest heart. In the Master’s service, THE PUBLISHERS PBI Directors Elected. The members of the Pastoral Bible Institute have elected these seven individuals to serve as directors for the next twelve months — Todd Alexander, David Christiansen, Leonard Griehs, Ernest Kuenzli, Thomas Ruggirello, George Tabac, Timothy Thomassen. Date of Annual PBI Meeting. The annual meeting of PBI Members and Directors will be held on Friday, July 20, at the University of Pittsburgh, Johnstown, Pennsylvania. The General Convention of Bible Students will begin on Saturday, July 21, at the same location and end the evening of July 26. Those who are interested in the Pastoral Bible Institute, whether members or not, are welcome to attend this meeting. Contact the Institute’s secretary for accommodation details. ________________ Fiscal 2012 Financial Statement of the Pastoral Bible Institute, Inc. STATEMENT OF NET WORTH (unaudited)
Religious Church foreclosures nationwide are surging with 270 bank sales of church properties since 2010 compared with just a handful in earlier years. That’s a small fraction of the nation’s 335,000 churches, but real estate service CoStar described it as a historic high. — San Francisco Chronicle, 3/25/2012 In 2010, Christians were estimated [as] 33 percent of the world’s population. A Pew Forum study found that Christians were harassed in more countries -130 -than any other faith group. Muslims, harassed in 117 countries, were second. And although Jews make up only about one percent of the world’s population, they are fourth on the list, harassed in 75 countries. — Vancouver Sun, 5/2/2012 An unexpected rise in the numbers of Muslims and Mormons in the US has puzzled researchers. They are the two fastest-growing groups, while mainline churches lose adherents, the Census of American Religious Congregations unveiled. It reveals the number of Muslim adherents rose by 66.7 per cent between 2000 and 2010, reaching slightly over 2.6 million, compared to over 1 million in 2000. The rise is believed to be fueled by both immigration and conversions. For the first time, American Muslims outnumbered Jews in most of the country’s Midwest and parts of the South. They were even more numerous than Mormons during the given period. The number of Mormons grew by 45 per cent to 6.1 million in 2010. — RT, 5/2/2012 The vast majority of Americans may be Christians, but fewer than half join a congregation. The once-a-decade census found that while upward of 80 percent of Americans claim to be Christians, only about 49 percent are affiliated with a congregation. — Salt Lake Tribune, 5/1/2012 A generational exchange and the churches’ inability to address young people are behind the plummeting number of church-goers as recorded in the 2011 population census, Prague Archbishop Cardinal Dominik Duka said. In the previous 2001 census, a church was claimed by almost 3.3 million Czech, but the figure fell to a mere 1.5 million in the 2011 census. Over 700,000 Czechs believe “in something,” but do not claim any church according to the census. — Prague Monitor, 4/11/2012 Anti-Semitism in Hungary has increased since the anti-Israel Jobbik movement entered Parliament two years ago as the country’s third largest party. Outbursts in Parliament, in local councils and in the media have demolished taboos and increasingly serve to legitimize hate speech in both private conversation and public discourse. With a two-thirds majority in Parliament, Prime Minister Victor Orban and his government rewrote the constitution and pushed through controversial new laws that regulate the media, change how judges are appointed and reduce the number of officially recognized religious bodies. In a recent incident, addressing Parliament just before Passover, a Jobbik lawmaker went so far as to advance the blood libel — the accusation that Jews kill Christian children and use their blood for ritual purposes. — JTA, 5/13/2012 Social In Mexico, there are at least 47 criminal networks engaged in human trafficking, according to a new report by the Attorney General’s Office. — Vanguardia, 3/21/2012 Over the past decade the average number of miles driven by people younger than 35 fell by almost 25 percent, according to survey data compiled by the U.S. Transportation Department. Government data showed one in four young people has no driver’s license, up from one in five. The same cohort walked, biked and rode transit more. — Arizona Public Interest Research Group, 4/13/2012 Scientists have experimented with stimulating the brain and curing illnesses through electricity for many decades. While the results have been mixed, new research has continued to produce fresh insights around how the brain works. A group of college students hopes to create the first low-cost, commercial brain charger, which is a headband with a pair of electrodes dangling off the side. The GoFlow will cost $99 and come with a 60-pack of disposable electrodes, a placement map and a 5-mililamps safety fuse. The hope is that the device will stimulate the “flow state” of artists, athletes and others enter during periods of intense concentration. — Bloomberg Businessweek, 3/25/2012 Extraordinarily old, bizarrely low-key bacteria have been found in sediments 100 feet below the sea floor of the Pacific Ocean, far removed from sunlight, fresh nutrients and what humans would consider anything interesting to do. Some of these organisms, scientists say, could be at least 1,000 years old. Or 20 maybe millions of years. Such buried bacteria have been found before, but a new study, published by the journal Science, has provided the clearest look at their glacial pace of existence. The conclusion, in short, is that microbes can putter along at extremely low rates of oxygen respiration, their numbers limited only by the paucity of energy available in the buried sediment. Most of Earth life, measured by numbers, is not rambunctious and charismatic like life in the sunshine, nor is it akin to the microbes that grow quickly in a laboratory Petri dish. Rather, it’s kind of boring - living out of sight, below the surface, in total darkness, using energy slowly and efficiently. — Washington Post, 5/17/2012 Imagine a selection of foods that were delicious, nutritious and good for you -i.e. they reduced your risk of developing diseases. According to several different surveys and sources in North America and Western Europe, the ten foods that are generally considered to be the healthiest are: apples, almonds, broccoli, blueberries, oily fish, leafy green vegetables, sweet potatoes, wheat germ, avocadoes, and oatmeal. — Medical News Today, 5/10/2012 Nearly three in 10 American adults say they have sleepwalked at least once, with nearly 4 percent, or roughly 8.4 million people, saying they’ve done so in the past year alone, according to a new study. Researchers at Stanford University found that those who suffer from severe depression, alcoholism, or OCD showed higher rates of what researchers called “nocturnal wandering.” Like others, the study also linked antidepressants and sleeping pills to sleepwalking, but said users’ underlying conditions may be responsible in those cases. — Neurology, 5/15/2012 Political The Communist government of China has shut down 16 websites for “fabricating or spreading” on-line rumors of a coup. The government’s actions have increased as it wrestles with the difficulty of maintaining its traditional secrecy while Internet usage in China has exploded. — USA Today, 4/2/2012 The UK government is preparing a nationwide electronic surveillance network that could keep track of every message sent by any Briton to anyone at any time, an industry official briefed on the government’s move said. There is no indication of how such a system, proposed and abandoned in 2008, would work or to what degree of judicial oversight would be involved. A Home Office spokesman insisted that any new surveillance ... would not involve prying into the content of emails or voice conversations. — AP, 4/2/2012 North Korea’s launch of a satellite failed after about 90 seconds. This was the third time the country attempted to blast a satellite into orbit. The North has long touted its satellite program as a key element of its plan to reach first-world-nation status. — Washington Post, 4/16/2012 China is using its growing economic strength to extend its military’s influence by taking on new missions and investing in more advanced weaponry. The Pentagon report listed an array of weapons systems that China has been buying as part of its effort to take on new roles and missions in the world. The Pentagon said it believes China spent as much as $180 billion on its military buildup last year, significantly higher than the $106 billion that it said it plans to spend this year. — Washington Post, 5/19/2012 Financial An Israeli company called SnapKeys has introduced an invisible keyboard that is based on letter shapes rather than frequency of letter use, frees up screen space and lets a smart phone user communicate better. Unlike the latest laser-based keyboards or hand-movement controlled keyboards, the SnapKeys system is a whole new way of using the alphabet to type. This new approach is based on primary shapes. — Israel21c, 4/4/ 2012 Applied Clean Tech has refined the process of turning the cellulose in sludge -toilet paper, fecal matter and washing machine lint - into new paper. The finished product has no odor and poses no biological hazard. This is material that if not reclaimed would literally go down the drain and eventually biodegrade. — Israel 21c, 4/9/2012 Facebook and its early investors raised $16 billion in its initial public offering (IPO), valuing the company at $104 billion. That makes Facebook the most valuable U.S. company to ever go public. Now, the stock market will assign a dollar value to Facebook that will rise and fall with investor whims. It will be subject to broad economic forces as well as how much profit it earns from one quarter to the next. But Facebook is one of the rare companies whose IPO transcends Wall Street’s money lust to become a cultural touchstone for the way technology is reshaping our lives. — AP, 5/18/2012 The Obama administration ordered tariffs of 31% up to 250% on solar panels imported from China, escalating a simmering trade dispute with China over a case that has sharply divided American interests in the growing clean-energy industry. The widely anticipated ruling is expected to have significant implications for both the global production of solar cells, now largely in China, and the growth of the solar energy industry in the U.S., which employs about 100,000 people in manufacturing, installation and services. In just a few years, China has grabbed about half the U.S. market for solar panels. U.S. imports of Chinese solar cells — the primary component in solar panels — were valued at about $3.1 billion last year, up from $640 million in 2009, according to the Commerce Department. — LA Times, 5/18/2012 Israel Reflecting the unusual, but welcome, heavy rains this winter, Jerusalem was, for a short time, turned into a snow-covered winter wonderland as the temperature dropped. This winter has seen one of the most bounteous amounts of rain falling over the country for many years. The significant rainfall has dramatically affected the level of the Kinneret (Sea of Galilee). At the beginning of the winter rain season, there was thought to be little chance of making up the water deficit. By October 2008 the level was more than a meter below the Lower Red Line. It is unlikely to make up the almost four meter shortfall this winter, but with the continuing rain and melting snow on the Golan the water authority expect a big improvement in the lake’s water level in the next few months. There is cautious optimism that the water level of the lake will never be allowed to reach the danger levels of the past four years. This is because less fresh water will be taken from the Kinneret in future years due to the rapid increase in the desalination of sea water. — Isranet, 3/2/2012 History documents that the Land of Israel was the cradle of Jewish identity 2,000 years before the appearance of Islam, and that the tangible connection between the Jewish People and the Jewish Homeland has been sustained since then. On the other hand, Palestinian Arabs have not been in the area west of the Jordan River from time immemorial; no Palestinian state has ever existed, no Palestinian People was ever robbed of its land, and there is no basis for the Palestinian “claim of return.” Most Palestinian Arabs are descendants of 1845-1947 Muslim migrants from the Sudan, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, as well as from Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Yemen, Libya, Morocco, Bosnia, the Caucasus, Turkmenistan, Kurdistan, India, Afghanistan and Balochistan. Arab migrant workers were imported by the Ottoman Empire and by the British Mandate (after 1917) to work on infrastructure projects. — The Ettinger Report, 5/11/2012 Prof. Yosef Garfinkel at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, announced the discovery of objects that for the first time shed light on how Jewish worship was organized in Judah at the time of King David. At Khirbet Qeiyafa, a fortified city in Judah adjacent to the Valley of Elah ... [they] uncovered rich assemblages of pottery, stone and metal tools, and many art and religious objects. — Hebrew University press release, 5/8/2012 Israel is preparing to export 20 billion cubic meters of liquefied natural gas starting in five years. The volume is larger if including gas discovered in adjacent Eastern Mediterranean fields in Cypriot waters, according to Houston’s Noble Energy, which is doing the drilling in both countries. This is not the scale of gas that creates petro-states. But it will provide a tidy sum for Israel and Cyprus, and much of the gas that Europe is pursuing. The finds are part of the Levant Basin, which, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, contains 122 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and 1.7 billion barrels of oil underneath the waters of four countries — Cyprus, Israel, Lebanon and Syria. — Foreign Policy, 5/10/2012 An archaeological dig near Goliath’s biblical hometown has yielded evidence of Judean religious practices 3,000 years ago, pointing up fresh historical connections to the stories of King David and King Solomon. “We have a city with a population relating to the Kingdom of Judah,” Yosef Garfinkel, an archaeologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said. The site, known today as Khirbet Qeiyafa, is about 20 miles (30 kilometers) southwest of Jerusalem, on top of a hill overlooking the Valley of Elah. For the past five years, Garfinkel and his colleagues have been excavating the ruins of a fortified city there, situated across from what was once the Philistine city of Gath. — MSNBC, 5/9/2012 |
