Associated Baptist Press - 10/27/2008

Associated Baptist Press
October 27, 2008 · (08-102)

David Wilkinson, Executive Director
Robert Marus, Acting Managing Editor/Washington Bureau Chief
Bob Allen, Senior Writer


In this issue
Carter: Next president should focus on human rights (868 words)
Georgia Baptist pastor resigns after another brush with law (435 words)
Newly deployed soldiers benefit from chaplain's experience in Iraq (488 words)
Opinion: Friendship as a gift from God (759 words)

Carter: Next president should focus on human rights
By Mark Vanderhoek (868 words)

MACON, Ga. (ABP) -- President Jimmy Carter called upon the next president -- whoever he is -- to focus on retoring human rights as a primary objective in American foreign policy in an Oct. 23 speech.

The 39th president -- now an international activist -- made his remarks during the second annual Mercer University President's Lecture Series, on the Georgia Baptist school's Macon campus.

Carter's speech touched on many of the themes in his best-selling book, Our Endangered Values: America's Moral Crisis. He chose one endangered value in particular -- human rights -- saying that there has been a deviation "from what Christ taught and what our national policies have become."

Recounting a question recently posed to him by a reporter from the British newspaper The Guardian, Carter said he was asked what the next president could do in his first 100 days in office to restore the standing of the United States abroad. Carter responded that the next administration could restore America's standing in just 10 minutes.

"I outlined the inaugural address that could be given this coming January," Carter said of his conversation with the reporter, saying that the next president should declare: "'While I am president there will never be another person tortured [in U.S. custody]. The United States will regain its position as the preeminent champion of human rights. We will abandon our policy of preemptive war. We will never attack another nation again unless our own security is threatened. That's been our policy since George Washington -- until six years ago.

"'America will be at the forefront of combating global warming, and will lead in meeting all challenges to the world's environment. Our tax policy will be designed to help the poor and working families, and not the few richest Americans. We will restore our recent rejection of every nuclear-arms-control agreement that has been negotiated since the time of Dwight Eisenhower. At this time, all those are in the waste can. And we will reduce our nuclear arsenal to zero. We will rebuild the Jeffersonian wall between church and state,'" Carter said, drawing a round of applause from the crowd of nearly 1,000 gathered in Mercer's Willingham Auditorium.

Pointing to his upbringing in the rural, segregated South and his time as president, when he pushed human rights to the forefront of his political agenda, Carter said that America still has a lot to do when it comes to human rights, but that the struggle has seen setbacks both at home and abroad since 9/11.

"America didn't invent human rights; human rights invented America," he said.

Since leaving office, Carter established the Carter Center, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that addresses national and international issues of public policy. Through his work with that organization to expand human rights through the United Nations, Carter said that two of his major initiatives -- establishment of a world criminal court and a U.N. high council on human rights -- have been resisted at the U.N. by the United States, particularly since Sept. 11, 2001.


"Since then, the U.S. government has abandoned its role as a champion of human rights, and has condoned or perpetrated terrible abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo prison," Carter lamented. "Our government has sent prisoners secretly to other nations where they knew they could be tortured. They denied the applicability of the Geneva Conventions, which were designed to help protect American prisoners. And we have severely restricted personal privacy, which was a time-honored civil liberty in their own country."

In addition to the U.S. government's failings, which which Carter said have emboldened human-rights abuses by governments around the world, he noted his work with the Carter Center has also shed light on another violation of basic human rights: discrimination against women.

"The foundation for this unequal treatment is within the major religions, which are almost impervious to either criticism or change," Carter said, noting that in parts of Africa, female circumcision is condoned by religious authorities and in America the Southern Baptist Convention encourages a subordinate role for women in churches and marriage.

"Despite many examples of progress, I would say that global acceptance and enforcement of the [U.N.] Universal Declaration of Human Rights has reached an all-time low," Carter said. "Global observance of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is worse now than it has been for the last 60 years. Under the current administration, the United States is a gross violator of key provisions of the declaration."

Citing numerous examples of the declaration's provisions that current U.S. policies violate, including the right of habeas corpus, right to trial, as well as freedom from torture, Carter concluded with a call to action, and for a new start when the next president takes office.

"These have been some extremely critical remarks, but I'm speaking as a former president of one of the world's great democracies, to show that all of us need to exert or renew our efforts to ensure that in the future we Americans will be able to celebrate and not apologize for our compliance with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights," Carter said. "Beginning in January, we need to set an unblemished example for the rest of the world to follow."

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-- Mark Vanderhoek is Mercer University's director of media affairs.


Georgia Baptist pastor resigns after another brush with law
By Bob Allen (435 words)

WARRENTON, Ga. (ABP) -- The pastor of a Southern Baptist church in Georgia has resigned his pulpit after being indicted on federal charges of tax evasion in Maryland.

It is not the first time that Otis Ray Hope has been in a highly publicized dispute over church-related business dealings.

Hope resigned Oct. 21 as pastor of First Baptist Church of Warrenton, Ga. According to the McDuffie Mirror, a newspaper based in nearby Thomson, Ga. Hope had been called as the church's permanent pastor four months ago, after serving as interim pastor.

A federal grand jury in Baltimore indicted Hope Aug. 14 on three counts of tax evasion and one count of subscribing to a false document. Prosecutors allege that Hope falsely set up a Christian camp he owned in Hagerstown, Md., as a 501(c)(3) corporation and failed to claim $843,410 in taxable income over a three-year period.

Hope told the Georgia paper he had done nothing wrong, and the Shiloh Conference and Retreat Center was a legitimate tax-exempt charity.

The government says Hope falsely told the IRS the non-profit was supported by donations, offerings and tithes, and its customers did not have to pay for benefits, services or products. The indictment charged that Shiloh Ministries raised revenue by charging customers for rent. The document also said the company claimed to offer worship services that were not actually conducted.

Prosecutors say Hope owes about $270,000 in unpaid taxes for the years 2001, 2002 and 2003. If convicted, Hope could face up to five years in prison in addition to fines.

It is not the pastor's first brush with the law. In 1991 he was one of several defendants named in a lawsuit filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission accused of seeking to defraud investors by selling $20 million in debt while promising return rates of up to 60 percent a year. Hope and the other defendants settled the lawsuit, without admitting guilt, in 2000.

In 2002, Hope resigned after a tumultuous six-and-a-half year pastorate at Montrose Baptist Church in Rockville, Md. Church leaders said Hope had a conflict of interest because he set up a company to recruit foreign students to attend Montrose Christian School. While not alleging any criminal wrongdoing, church officials said the company owed the church's school about $580,000.

Hope fired four senior staff members at the church who questioned his ties to the recruiting organization.

In 1997, Hope dismissed three Montrose Christian School employees who filed suit, claiming they were unfairly terminated because they were not church members. A judge ruled in their favor, but the ruling was overturned on appeal.
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Newly deployed soldiers benefit from chaplain's experience in Iraq
By Vicki Brown (488 words)

ATLANTA (ABP) -- "How do you plan to stay in touch with your family while you're deployed?" Army chaplain Jim Kirkendall frequently asks young soldiers.

It's one of the many topics Kirkendall addresses during personal visits with military personnel of the Army's 95th Division, based in Oklahoma City, in preparing them for deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan.

As one of about 600 Cooperative Baptist Fellowship-endorsed chaplains and pastoral counselors, Kirkendall extends the ministry of the Fellowship to members of the military and their families. Those ministries were recognized as part of Pastoral Care Week, Oct. 20-26.

Soldiers are required to attend mandatory briefings by many Army departments -- from the judge advocate general to family readiness. During these sessions, Kirkendall addresses the emotional impact of deployment and suicide prevention. He shares experiences from his own year-long deployment in Iraq.

From 2006 to 2007, Kirkendall was attached to the Logistics Support Area (LSA) Anaconda, in Balad, Iraq, where he counseled soldiers and visited the wounded and workers at the Air Force Theater Hospital and the Contingency Aeromedical Staging Facility.

Kirkendall saw suffering among both civilian and military personnel. While visiting soldiers and chaplains at the Air Force Theater Hospital, he heard, "Trauma code ER, trauma code ER." He and another chaplain arrived in the emergency room as medics rushed into the facility a 10-year-old boy who had been shot in the head.

"So there he was, a small 10-year-old with no family around him but with two Christian military chaplains, each holding onto his hands and praying as he died," Kirkendall said.

While in Iraq, he ministered to a mixture of American, Filipino, Indian, Pakistani, Turkish, Russian and Iraqi civilians and to soldiers from all branches of the U.S. military. He also conducted training sessions for 25 junior chaplains.

"At LSA Anaconda, suffering was demonstrated by being absent from our loved ones for a very long time, death of a comrade, frustration in the office due to overbearing supervisors, lack of communication with family, spouse deciding to start a relationship with someone else and leave the soldier in Iraq, injured soldiers with limbs violently removed from their bodies, civilians caught in the middle between scratching out a living and having a war exploding around them, to interpreters using false names so their identity would be concealed," he said. "And the list goes on. The bottom line is, God is still there."

Now, Kirkendall talks with Oklahoma-based soldiers about the challenges they are likely to face. He also serves as chaplian for the Oklahoma Office of Juvenile Affairs.

"I love being a chaplain because I have a unique ministry of going where others cannot go," said Kirkendall.

"The average pastor doesn't get to go behind the fence of the medium- and maximum-secured areas ... with 12- to 18-year-old adjudicated juvenile delinquents," he said, or "to serve in a combat zone and serve soldiers where life-and-death issues are addressed every day."

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Opinion: Friendship as a gift from God
By Beth Newman (759 words)

(ABP) -- The other day my son was talking to me about the playground antics of a little girl named Candace. It was obvious that Candace was quite a live wire and that he found her extremely amusing. As the stunts she pulled off grew more outrageous, I asked whether the teacher hadn't objected. "She's not in my class; she's on T.V." was his response. In his imagination, the cartoon world was as real as the world of the school yard.

Of course, imaginary friends are a typical phenomenon of childhood, but increasingly it seems a fixture of the adult world as well. For instance, the beaming faces that read the news or traffic reports on television appear as real to us as the people across the street. They even use the language of "community" to describe the relationship between themselves (as well as their sponsors) and us. Perhaps they seem more real.

This is not surprising. Stanley Hauerwas and Will Willimon observed some years ago that we live in a society where "we are kept detached, strangers to one another as we go about fulfilling our needs and asserting our rights."

This was brought home to me not long ago when our children wandered into a neighbor's yard, eager to jump on their trampoline. When I asked the mother if it was OK, she responded, "Promise you will not sue me."

Like this mother, all of us are easily caught up in cultural forces that tear us apart, detach us from commitments to persons and places and lead us to focus on "my rights" over yours. Our imaginations have become impoverished about what true friendship or neighborliness even looks like.

The church recognizes something of this. And it is common now to emphasize the "relational" nature of what the outsider/visitor/potential member will find within a particular congregation. And churches compete to proclaim themselves as more friendly or open or inviting than their competitors.

I wonder, though, whether we've done the hard work of discerning what true friendship means.

This is not a new challenge. The Greek philosopher Aristotle distinguished three kinds of friendship.

First, according to Aristotle, are friendships of usefulness. Persons are friends because of the "good they get out of it." Examples would be business partners or neighbors who owned dogs and were friends because they "dog-sat" for each other.

Second are friendships of pleasure where people are friends because of the pleasure they get out of it. Examples of this kind would be friends who get together because they enjoy the same movies or hobby.

Are these really friendships, when it sounds as if you're simply using the other for what you need or for pleasure? Aristotle's answer would be "yes," since these kinds of friendships do in fact bring people together. You know your neighbor, her name, the dog's name and probably a lot more. You do an activity with someone else versus sitting alone in front of your T.V. You're not strangers.

While counting these as friendship, Aristotle did say that "such friendships are easily dissolved ... the affection ceases as soon as one partner is no longer pleasant or useful to the other."

Therefore, Aristotle described a third, more binding friendship: a friendship of virtue where friends share a common vision of the good; the virtue each sees in the other brings friends together. Hence, Aristotle's familiar quotation: "a friend is another self." We choose friends based on what is most important.

Friendship is, of course, at the heart of Christian discipleship. In a well-known passage from John 15, Jesus says, "I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends...." Jesus continues, however, "You did not choose me but I chose you."

It is this later point that distinguishes Aristotle's Greek friendship from Christian friendship. As Augustine emphasized, we do not choose our friends, God does. It is not simply our virtue that draws us together. Rather, friends are brought together by God, a sign of God reaching into our lives and working on our behalf.

Augustine imagined ecclesial friendship as a school of Christian love. Such friendship is not turned inward. It is rather the place we learn the practices and virtues necessary to expand our lives, hearts and minds so that we can truly welcome the stranger.

In a world where we have increasingly become strangers to one another, let's imagine the difference between being "friendly" and practicing friendship as a gift from God.

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-- Beth Newman is professor of theology and ethics at Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond. bnewman@btsr.edu