Associated Baptist Press
December 8, 2008 · (08-120)
David Wilkinson, Executive Director
Robert Marus, Acting Managing Editor/Washington Bureau Chief
Bob Allen, Senior Writer
In this issue
Christian leaders urge Obama to make Israeli-Palestinian peace top priority (547 words)
Studies show rise in greenhouse gases in 2007 (764 words)
Richard Land compares President Bush to Harry Truman (305 words)
WMU WorldCrafts program birngs income to impoverished, gifts to U.S. (750 words)
Russian Baptists mourn death of Orthodox leader (349 words)
Guest opinion: The caboose of Christianity (773 words)
Christian leaders urge Obama to make Israeli-Palestinian peace top priority
By Bob Allen (547 words)
WASHINGTON (ABP) -- A group of Christian leaders in the United States has called on President-elect Barack Obama to make the Israeli-Palestinian peace process an immediate priority during his first year in office.
Leaders from a broad spectrum of American Christianity -- Catholic, Orthodox, mainline Protestant, evangelical and historic African-American denominations -- signed an open letter Dec. 1 urging "vigorous U.S. diplomatic efforts" to secure peace in the Middle East.
"As Christians of the Catholic, Evangelical, Orthodox and Protestant traditions, we are united by a biblical call to be peacemakers and a commitment to the two peoples of the Holy Land who yearn for a just peace," the letter said.
Sent to the president-elect as well as key members of his transition and national-security teams, the letter is a project of Christians for Middle East Peace, a coalition of 22 public-policy offices of national churches and agencies that supports a "two-state" solution consisting of both a viable Palestinian state and a secure Israel.
"The conflict between Israelis and Palestinians has gone on too long," the letter says. "It has caused untold suffering for both sides, created economic hardships, and provided a rallying cry for extremists. As people of faith and hope, we believe peace is possible."
Original signatories include Roy Medley, general secretary of American Baptist Churches USA.
"It doesn't take a prophet to see that without strong international support and encouragement to both parties for a negotiated settlement that honors the rights of both, the Middle East will continue to boil and engulf the world in its conflict, with the faithful Christian community of the Middle East being further decimated by the violence of the rivalry," Medley said.
The letter challenges the Obama administration to "provide sustained, high-level diplomatic leadership toward the clear goal of a final-status agreement" and to "encourage Israeli and Palestinian leaders to make historic compromises necessary for peace."
The leaders said a two-state solution would help strengthen U.S. security and improve stability and relationships throughout the Middle East. They also said failure to achieve resolution would negatively affect Christians in the Holy Land, whose numbers are steadily declining.
Mideast observers hope Obama's election will prompt a new round of Israeli-Palestinian talks, which have stalled since the Bush administration convened a conference aimed at reviving the peace process in November 2007 in Annapolis, Md.
Medley, one of three signatories identified as a Baptist -- along with Stan Hastey of the Alliance of Baptists and Tyrone Pitts of the Progressive National Baptist Convention, Inc. -- said the ABC-USA General Board has supported a two-state solution as far back as December 1980.
"The tragic irony of the situation is that two peoples, Jews and Palestinian Arabs, who have both profoundly experienced 'homelessness,' have not been able to agree to grant each other the right to a secure homeland," Medley said. "Unfortunately, as has been repeatedly pointed out by Palestinian Baptists, the situation has been further compounded by the fact that many American evangelicals, influenced by Christian Zionists, have dismissed out-of-hand the just concerns of Palestinian Arabs."
The letter is being followed by a campaign inviting church members to add their names to it at the campaign website. The final letter, signed by both Christian leaders and congregants, will be delivered to Obama during his inauguration.
Bob Allen is senior writer for Associated Baptist Press.
Studies show rise in greenhouse gases in 2007
By Bob Allen (764 words)
ATLANTA (ABP) -- Greenhouse-gas emissions continued to rise in 2007, according to two new studies. But Southern Baptists are still divided over what, if anything, to do about it.
The World Meteorological Organisation said Nov. 26 that concentrations of carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide reached new highs in 2007, and methane had its largest annual increase in a decade.
The gases are thought to contribute to the "greenhouse effect" that the vast majority of climatological scientists believe is causing a gradual warming of the planet.
A government study released Dec. 3 showed that, despite increased public awareness about global warming and numerous policy changes, 2007 greenhouse-gas emissions in the United States increased 1.4 percent over the 2006 total.
The WMO report found that levels of carbon dioxide (CO2), the single most important gas thought to affect global temperatures, increased 0.5 percent from 2006 to 2007. That growth rate is consistent with recent years.
Methane, another gas created by both natural and human activities, increased last year at the highest rate since 1998.
A third gas, nitrous oxide, also reached record levels in 2007.
The study says Earth's greenhouse-gas levels were fairly consistent for 10,000 years until the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Atmospheric carbon dioxide, which accounts for 63 percent of greenhouse gases, has increased 37 percent since the late 1700s, primarily due to emissions from fossil fuels and, to a lesser degree, because of deforestation.
According to Reuters, WMO expert Geir Braathen told a news briefing in Switzerland there is no sign that carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide are leveling off, and it is too early to tell if methane would keep rising.
Scientists warn that the gradual warming of Earth's atmosphere caused by greenhouse gases will lead to rising sea levels, more damaging severe weather and increased heat waves and droughts.
The current international pact curbing greenhouse-gas emissions, the Kyoto Protocol, expires in 2012. World leaders hope the United States, which did not ratify the accord, will sign on to a new treaty, and that developing nations like China and India will commit to emissions targets.
The Energy Information Administration study blamed increased U.S. carbon-dioxide emissions on two factors: unfavorable weather conditions -- which increased demand for heating and cooling in buildings -- and a drop in hydropower availability that led to greater reliance on coal and natural gas for generating electricity.
In the United States, evangelicals remain divided over how seriously to regard rising levels of atmospheric gases linked to climate change.
Jonathan Merritt, spokesperson for the Southern Baptist Environment and Climate Initiative, said the new data is significant not only from a climatological standpoint, but for theological reasons.
"As Southern Baptists, we believe in the truth of God's word, which includes the command to keep and tend the Earth and see it flourish," Merritt said. "Regardless of one's stance on climate change, everyone can agree that pumping record levels of gas into our atmosphere isn't a good idea and certainly wouldn't be consistent with the idea of stewardship."
A number of prominent Southern Baptists, including current Southern Baptist Convention President Johnny Hunt, signed a declaration in March urging increased action to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. So far, more than 500 individuals have endorsed "A Southern Baptist Declaration on the Environment and Climate Change."
Those signers don't include the denomination's official representative for moral and public-policy concerns, who maintains the globe is actually getting colder instead of warmer.
Richard Land, head of the SBC Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, called global warming a "hoax" and a "scam" on his weekly radio program Nov. 22.
Land attributed fluctuations in global temperature to "cycles of nature that God has allowed in the cosmos" and labeled human activity "a minor contribution to global warming."
"The sunspots have faded, the solar cycle has peaked, the sun is going into a quiescent period and everybody but [former Vice President and anti-global warming activist] Al Gore is cooling off," Land said.
But Merritt said people who selectively quote data to support a contrarian view on the evidence for global warming "are driven more by an ideology than a theology."
Merritt said he has spoken to Southern Baptist missionaries around the world who thanked him for speaking out on the issue.
"They say that they use the creation as a starting point for sharing the gospel," he said. "Furthermore, they say that the Western world's witness is hurt by our wasteful and consumptive habits. When we speak with a unified moral voice and put feet to our faith, the gospel is stronger both at home and around the world."
Bob Allen is senior writer for Associated Baptist Press.
Richard Land compares President Bush to Harry Truman
By Bob Allen (305 words)
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (ABP) -- A prominent Southern Baptist leader has compared George W. Bush to Harry Truman, another president whose approval ratings dropped to the 20s in his final months in office but is now considered one of the greatest American presidents of the 20th century.
"Just remember that you heard it here from me," Richard Land, head of the Southern Baptist Convention Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, said Dec. 6 on his weekly radio program. "He will be the Harry Truman of our time."
Commenting on reports of a debate about whether Bush would go down as one of the worst presidents in the last 50 years, Land predicted that, like Truman's, Bush's legacy will be vindicated by the long scope of history.
That includes the president's least popular decision, the 2003 invasion of Iraq. While acknowledging the entry into war was handled poorly, Land said, the 2007 troop surge has placed the U.S.-led coalition on the cusp of victory of Iraq.
In addition to making America safer, Land applauded Bush for blunting "the metastasizing of abortion" by opposing late-term abortions and research using embryonic stem cells.
Land quoted a paragraph from Allen Guelzo in the National Post saying: "Like Dostoyevsky's Raskolnikov, one act of killing requires more acts of killing to legitimize itself. This has been the real agenda behind the enigmatic enthusiasm for stem-cell research and the furious criticism of bans on late-term, or 'partial-birth,' abortion. It was an act of singular political courage for Bush to see this agenda for what it was, expose it publicly for what it is, and obstruct it for as long as he has."
"Well, I can only say 'amen' to that," Land said, noting that judges appointed by Bush during the last eight years represent sitting majorities on 10 out of 13 federal appeals courts.
Bob Allen is senior writer for Associated Baptist Press.
WMU WorldCrafts program brings income to impoverished, gifts to U.S.
By Bob Allen (750 words)
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (ABP) -- Paulina Navichoc lives in San Pedro, a remote village high in the mountains surrounding Lake Atitlan in western Guatemala. This Christmas her family has food, clothes and medicine they might otherwise have gone without if it weren't for WorldCrafts, a non-profit ministry of Woman's Missionary Union.
Paulina and her mother, a pastor's wife who became a widow last year, work together to make hand-beaded Christmas ornaments that WorldCrafts sells for $19.99.
Andrea Mullins, director of WMU's product-development center, said people often ask why WorldCrafts products are more expensive than other similar products on the market.
The answer, Mullins said, is because the ministry's aim is not to make a profit, but to improve the lives of women like Paulina who live in extreme poverty in nations all over the world.
"One of the interesting facts about WorldCrafts is that we are a fair-trade organization," Mullins recently told a group of Baptist state convention executive directors and editors visiting the Birmingham, Ala., headquarters of the Southern Baptist Convention-related auxiliary organization.
That means WorldCrafts buys products only from businesses that abide by Fair Trade Federation guidelines, which include paying fair wages and practicing environmental sustainability.
"We in the United States are a free-trade society," Mullins said. "We've seen what free trade can do -- both positive and negative -- over the last few months. Fair trade gives people who are very poor a place at the table."
Beyond helping the working woman's immediate family, Mullins said, WorldCrafts partnerships help communities by bringing new jobs and income into local economies.
"We're not after them to get the cheapest price that they can give us," Mullins said. "We work with them so they are getting a fair price and also help them to invest back into the community."
The program also establishes credibility for Baptist missionaries. All artisans involved with WorldCrafts are also in contact with mission personnel. Often, helping local businesses is a core part of the missionary's ministry.
"Many of our missionaries work in high-security places, and they couldn't go in and work with the people they work with if they didn't have some sort of a business platform to go into that country," Mullins said. "We do that."
If a missionary leaves, however, the business continues. "Our objective is, in the long term, to bring sustainable transformation to people who are living in poverty," Mullins said.
Started in 1996 with one artisan group --Thai Country Trim in Thailand -- Mullins said WorldCrafts now works in 38 countries with 66 artisan groups ranging in size from a few people to hundreds of workers.
WorldCrafts imports more than 300 different items of indigenous artistry from Asia, Africa, Europe, Latin America and the Middle East. Items offered at the WMU online store range alphabetically from backpacks, baskets, Bible covers and bookmarks to stationery and tablecloths. Prices start at 79 cents for a key ring to a Mount Ararat Rug that sells for $199.99.
Mullins acknowledged that some of the items would cost less if they were mass produced in a factory, but those profits might go to the owners of a sweatshop instead of people who need the income to live a better life.
Compared to items of similar quality, however, Mullins said WorldCrafts' prices are often quite comparable to those charged by for-profit businesses. That is especially true when the value of an item is gauged by the amount of work it took to produce.
Making a single hand-beaded Ki'che Christmas Ball takes a Mayan woman in Guatemala a full day, but the sale of that ornament will feed the artisan's family for a week in an area so poor that only about two children in five reach preschool age due to malnutrition.
Another new product, the $29.99 King's Garden Bracelet, is made by women in Afghanistan -- many of them widows due to that country's decades of war. Featuring more than 1,000 beads applied by hand, the product would have no access to market if not for contact with WMU.
WorldCrafts products are not sold in stores. They can be purchased online at http://www.worldcraftsvillage.com/ or ordered from a catalogue. One popular way to purchase the items is at WorldCrafts parties. They can be planned as a small home gathering, an existing group or a large event such as at a church.
One added benefit of the parties, Mullins said, is they provide an opportunity to educate women about undiscovered talents of other women from around the world.
Bob Allen is senior writer for Associated Baptist Press.
Russian Baptists mourn death of Orthodox leader
By ABP staff (349 words)
MOSCOW (ABP) -- A Russian Baptist leader praised Patriarch Alexey II of the Russian Orthodox Church, who died Dec. 5, as a creator of "peace and consensus" during the post-communist and post-Soviet years in Russia.
The Russian Union of Evangelical Christians-Baptists posted a letter of condolence on its website within hours of the 79-year-old patriarch's death.
Yuri Sipko, the union's president, praised Alexey for his "massive, unifying role in the creation of peace and consensus during the travail of Russian society in the 1990s."
"In those days, the voice of the Russian Orthodox Church was a voice of reconciliation and hope," Sipko wrote. "We prize highly the courage and resolution which Partriarch Alexey II demonstrated during the formation of the New Russia."
Vitaly Vlasenko, the RUECB's director of external church relations, met with Alexey on numerous occasions. He praised his late colleague's efforts to further inter-confessional dialogue. Alexey was instrumental in fostering Orthodox-Baptist dialogue, which included two theological consultations in 2006 and 2007.
"The patriarch had a very elegant and warm style," Vlasenko said. "He always spoke to us kindly and remembered us Baptists very well. We felt like the Christian wisdom of the ages emanated from him. We hope very much that his successor will continue down the road of understanding between our two churches -- the route which Alexey himself had embarked upon."
During a visit to Russia and Georgia in June, Neville Callam, general secretary of the Baptist World Alliance, also met with the patriarch, who called for continued consultation between the two groups on common moral values.
"We look forward to strong ties of friendship between you and the Baptists of this great country as we seek faithfulness in God in the face of the monster of secularism and the terror of sin," Callam told the Orthodox leader. "We are committed to spreading the good news of Jesus Christ, the hope of the world."
News reports did not indicate the cause of Alexey's death. His funeral, scheduled for Dec. 9, will be attended by Russian dignitaries including President Dimitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
Guest opinion: The caboose of Christianity
By John Pierce (773 words)
We all have our blind spots. Clarity often comes only from the perspective of hindsight.
That's what leaders of Bob Jones University confessed in apologizing for the independent, fundamentalist Christian school's past racist policies.
A statement on the school's website reads, in part: "For almost two centuries American Christianity, including BJU in its early stages, was characterized by the segregationist ethos of American culture. Consequently, for far too long, we allowed institutional policies regarding race to be shaped more directly by that ethos than by the principles and precepts of the Scriptures. We conformed to the culture rather than provide a clear Christian counterpoint to it. In so doing, we failed to accurately represent the Lord and to fulfill the commandment to love others as ourselves. For these failures we are profoundly sorry."
African-American students were not permitted to attend Bob Jones until 1971 -- some 17 years after the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that public-school segregation was unconstitutional. Only within the last decade has BJU dropped its policy forbidding interracial dating.
In other words: the secular court interpreting a secular Constitution reached the right conclusion about God-given human equality well before these devout Christians interpreting the Bible they hold as divine truth.
The most significant aspect of this confession is found in the words: "We conformed to the culture rather than provide a clear Christian counterpoint to it."
The continuing tragedy of fundamentalist American Christianity is the unwillingness to learn from mistakes. Past failures do not seem to bring any humility that would recognize the possibility of misinterpretations of the biblical revelation in the present or future.
It brings to mind a question I have raised before: When will the evangelical Christian church become the engine rather than the caboose concerning societal change regarding the basic biblical issues of justice, equality and compassion?
When land was taken from Native Americans and thousands died during forced, inhumane relocation, where was the Christian outcry?
When Baptists of the North questioned Baptists of the South on the issue of owning -- for economic benefit -- precious human beings of African decent created in the image of God, Southern Baptists just formed their own group.
When the secular government enforced public-school desegregation, white conservative Christians just started their own schools.
Yet the unfailing fundamentalist mantra is that they alone stay true to Scripture while all others head down the path of cultural accommodation. (The opposite of what Bob Jones leaders admitted concerning their racist past.)
Just this fall, when the Georgia Baptist Convention pompously brushed aside the First Baptist Church of Decatur, Ga., for calling a female pastor, the charge was that the congregation had violated biblical truth and embraced secular social patterns. In a letter to the GBC newspaper, The Christian Index, pastor Bobby Braswell Jr. of Guyton, Ga., wrote that the convention's action is "not a popular position in today's cultural climate, but we are following the dictates of Scripture, not culture."
Brother Bobby, so said the Baptist slaveholders; so said the good Christians who forced "savages" off the land they wanted; so said the earlier leaders of Bob Jones University in forbidding African-American students from studying at their "Christian" school -- and on and on.
It is amazing how fundamentalist Christians -- many decades after societal change occurs due to the motivation provided by secular forces and more-attuned Christians and those of other faith traditions -- can confess that they "conformed to the culture" at the expense of biblical truth. Yet they cannot -- in the present tense -- humbly allow for even the remotest possibility that any current blind spots might exist.
If so, at the very least the self-righteous Georgia Baptist leadership would have left the Decatur congregation alone to suffer in their "error." But, no, they had to straighten them out.
Why? Because fundamentalists don't think Paul's admission that we all see through dark glass applies to them. Because they do not learn from their own tragic history.
Or, more specifically, it is because that is the nature of fundamentalism. It is marked by a resistance to change, a proclivity toward propping up one's predetermined belief system with isolated biblical texts, and an attitude of condemnation toward those (even other Christians) who would dare hold a different viewpoint.
Fundamentalist Christians are always denouncing "secular" society. But thank God for a secular court and a secular Constitution -- and open-minded, compassionate religious peoples of varied traditions -- that lead us to truth pertaining to basic (biblical) concerns of human justice.
But never fear ... somewhere way, way, way back there, the caboose will be coming.
-- John Pierce is executive editor of Baptists Today, a national news journal based in Macon, Ga. This column originally appeared as a Nov. 25 post on his blog.
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